Knowing Knowledge Highlights 41-45

During TV Turn Off week I was able to spend some quality time with Knowing Knowledge. The recent book by George Siemens.

Here are my highlights and thoughts:

Learning is mess and chaotic pg. 41

A great line that Brian Crosby from the Learning is Messy blog talks about constantly. Learning is messy, chaotic and spontaneous…that’s why I love it!

Too often, we bend our pedagogy to the tool. pg. 41

Determining the tool and approach…

• Intended outcome
• Nature of the learning task
• Match task with appropriate medium
• Consider profile and needs of learners
• Meta-learning elements required (are we trying to teach content or process?)
• Diverse tools/spaces/ecologies

pg. 41

I like this bulleted list. A great place to start when designing lessons that involve any tool, not just technology.

The entire ecology of learning is the accurate whole. pg. 42

It is not content in general that we want. We want content that is current, relevant, and contextually appropriate. pg. 42

…when we create connections between content-we create a network or aggregation of different ideas…which adds meaning (pattern recognition) to the individual voices. Connections change content. pg. 43

Connections change content….I like that. Through the connections we make between learning nodes content changes. Reading a blog from Iraq, from a U.S. solider stationed there, and a newspaper article, your content changes because of the connections you have with these information nodes. Each node is a source of learning. Each new connection allows you to create personal learning for yourself within that context.

Our relationship to content has to change when content creation accelerates. We can no longer consume all relevant content items. pg. 43

With my netvibes stating I have 707 unread items don’t I know this is the truth.

If content has a short lifespan (as new information is acquired), then it would logically imply that our education and training systems should not be about content in particular-they should specifically be about current content. pg. 43

What we need to know is more important then what is known today. By only using written, published text are we supplying our learners with the most current content? Textbooks can be a historical resource, but can not, specifically in the field of science, be used as an example to teach what is currently known about a subject today. As the half life of knowledge continues to accelerate so must the tools we allow students to use to access that information. A textbook can not help us access accelerated knowledge. Once printed it does not change, does not adapt. A living breathing textbook is needed. (Check out Wikibooks)

When we stop seeing knowledge as an entity that is possessed within a person and start to cast it as a function of elements distributed across a system, we notice a dramatic impact on the education process: the educator becomes a supporter (not the center), the content is not as critical as the connections, learners find value in their aggregated perspectives, learners become content creators, and learning is continuous, exploratory, and sustained (not controlled or filtered by only one agent). pg. 44

We need to separate the learner from the knowledge they hold. pg. 44

The underlying assumption of corporate training and higher education centers on the notion that the world has not really changed. pg. 44

Employees require the abiltiy to rapidly form connections with other specialized nodes (people of knowledge objects). pg. 44

How do we separate the learner from the knowledge? By focusing not on the content they need to know (content changes constantly and requires continual updating), but on the connections to nodes which continually filter and update content. pg. 44

To be adaptive is to be perpetually current. pg. 45

Siemens, G (2006). Knowing Knowledge. Lulu.com.

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