The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the Open University to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU's very nature:

Cognitive and Learning Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Technologies, and Multimedia. We chose to call this convergence knowledge media.

Knowledge Media is about the processes of generating, understanding and sharing knowledge using several different media, as well as understanding how the use of different media shape these processes.

KMi operates with reference to a number of basic tenets, which define the context in which we formulate and pursue our research objectives:

Strategic Threads

Our research is aligned with a number of broad strategic threads, currently Narrative Hypermedia, Knowledge Management, Social Software, New Media Systems, Semantic Web and Knowledge Services and Multimedia Information Systems.

Learning

In keeping with a lifelong learning perspective, our research agenda takes a broad definition of learning, embracing distance learning, learning in the classroom, and learning in the workplace.