The idea of the knowledge broker had never occurred to me before. The broker creates a relationship between groups. When I think of how brokering and sharing happen, sharing happens first. Sharing involves collecting, curating, and constructing information to be made available. This is the more laborious process, and some of what we have been doing (i.e., the tagging exercise). The knowledge broker then connects groups to use the same shared information.
I think back to classes where I have shared curated stacks of information from a previous class. I would not have considered that brokering, but I now understand that it is. I think there is a fine line in the interpretations of these terms. For instance, do you think it’s brokering when I share curated POGIL activities with colleagues? Is it sharing or brokering when I share new technologies with my former business partner? We often learn about new technologies or exciting and new ways to approach programming problems from our work and share. Is the difference whether or not you are the curator of the knowledge? Can you curate and broker at the same time?