Business organizations worldwide are implementing techniques and technologies to better manage their knowledge. Their objective is to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations by helping them to make sense of the context within which the organization exists; to take responsibility, cooperate, and share what they know and learn; and to effectively challenge, negotiate, and learn from others. We consider how the concepts, tools, and techniques of organizational knowledge management can be applied to the professional practices and development of teachers. We describe a framework for knowledge management support for teachers where the sharing of concrete knowledge scaffolds the attainment of more abstract levels of knowledge sharing. We describe the development of a knowledge management support system emphasizing long-term participatory design relationships between technologists and teachers, regional cooperation among teachers in adjacent school divisions, the integration of communication and practice, synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and multiple metaphors for organizing knowledge resources and activities.

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Research on teacher thinking and teacher planning conducted over the past few years suggests that teachers rarely proceed in a "systematic" fashion when planning or carrying out instruction. What happens when teachers become designers of instructional materials? In a series of studies of teachers and novice instructional designers, data were collected on: the form taken by initial ideas for materials; elements involved in initial thinking; constraints perceived; the train of the design process; and reflections on the design after completing it. Results showed that prescriptive models of how instructional design should proceed frequently do not match the reality of instructional design in practice. Several changes in instructional design procedures might take these differences into account: designers might engage in "synectics" sessions, for example, rather than focusing immediately on objectives. And incompleteness in a design appears to have particular fascination for instructors. Finally, the studies point out the need for more careful and comprehensive treatments of what "design" is, and of why some are more successful at it than others.

This paper explores reasons why the use of technology in education may be so attractive to so many people. Two emerging perspectives-memetics, and the social history of technology-are explored, and a typology of technology-ascultural-tool is presented. Finally, implications of these ideas for educational change are considered. IntroductionHow technology, schools, teachers and students might interact to facilitate learning has been a long and perplexing puzzle for educators. Beginning in the early years of the 20th century, when contemporary media (ie, film and sound recordings) first came into wide use and continued through the advent of television and computers, many people have shared the assumption that there is something unique, valuable and powerful about enlisting these new media of communication in the process of education.

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