Information vs Knowledge, Bookmarking vs Memorising
This post started off as a reply to Christian's comment on my Burning the Libraries - Bombing the Data Centres post. But it wanted more space.
When I was growing up, I learned what I knew from these main sources:
- people teaching me things they knew (like how to tie your shoelaces, where to get the sweetest blackberries in Autumn
- a limited number of books (purchased in bookstores, or borrowed from libraries)
- TV (both educational and entertainment)
- newspapers
- school
I read a book a day as a child. I read anything I could get my hands on, mostly because the supply was so limited. And I learned what I could where I could.
But now the Internet gives us 24/7/365 access to almost any information in a bewildering array of formats. And Christian has asked said that the challenge is not now in getting information to people, but rather in making sure information is "being continuously accessed and kept alive in the minds of individuals...to create the conditions which sustain a dimension of human capital which results in the data being continually accessed and "embedded" in living humans."
I don't think that this is a new problem...we've had this problem for centuries. We've always had information...but have we always embedded it, shared it and used it?
And I feel this issue now compounded by new problems. Our digital information formats haven't been around long - we're still learning how best to use them. We have to figure out how to get people to read and understand our digital information. And once they've read it, how do we get them to remember it?
The way I work now, when I read any information, I make a decision about whether or not I need to store the fact. If it's something I know I can access on the Internet via mobile or my laptop, I often make a decision not to remember the information. If it's something I've read in a book, I often make digital notes so I can quickly access the information later on my trusty laptop, rather than trying to find the book. But this information is just data. It stays on my PC. I can come back and find it, but it doesn't feel like part of the knowledge I carry in my head.
However, some information is so amazing, so sticky, so exciting or so interesting it just embeds itself in my head. I don't get a choice. And this then becomes part of my knowledge.
I agree with Christian - Libraries or the Internet can contain infinite amounts of information. But it's how we use that information, the connections and deductions we make, that create knowledge. I guess data/information are like building blocks. But knowledge is what enables us draw up the architect's plans.
Labels: bookmarking, data, information vs knowledge, memorising
posted by Michelle Gallen at
11:19 AM
2 Comments:
Hey, thanks for the great reply! :)
I think you're right in pointing out that this is not really a new problem. What I suspect, though, is that we may have new ways of addressing the challenge.
Allow me to refine a bit what exactly worries me. You mention five different sources of teaching, which I believe resolve to essentially two: humans and media.
By humans I mean prolonged contact with other people who transfer implicit (i.e., human embeded) knowledge. You learn from them by imitating them, or by repeating steps which they explicitly demonstrate. Some of these people were professionals (teachers), others weren't (family).
This was the first method to pass knowledge on to new generations. It has served us well, but it has certain limitations. More on that later.
Media is a really great way to store and distribute explicit knowledge, codified in books, videos, etc. Networks and IT have greatly diminished the problem of storing and distributing such content (as long as you stay within the context of the developed world).
What worries me is that living, embodied, knowledge is actually a very fragile thing. There are two major threats. One is a calamity of great proportion which decimates educated people (pandemic, nuclear war, major industrial accident, famine, war, etc.).
Another is the kind of situation you have in many places where a valuable skill is in short supply in a given population, and this makes it exceedingly difficult to transfer using a human vector. There are two good examples. One is the case many developing countries find themselves in, with a coming demographic boom, and a shortage of teachers which is impossible to solve by traditional means.
The second is the case of developed societies where some skill becomes valuable but is in short supply and you must find other ways to come around this bottleneck. Think of Mandarin or Arabic language skills in many western countries.
In both scenarios you have a situation where new needs, or demographic changes, lead to an increase in the number of ignorant people in a society. How do you teach them? Codified sources are not an ideal answer. Some people learn well by themselves, but a lot of skills are difficult to transfer effectively without direct one on one contact.
I'm currently writing a thesis on this topic, so I've considered different possibilities. One approach which seems plausible is deskilling the teacher in many developing countries. In other words you resort to technological solutions where you try to embed the implicit knowledge in some device which is operated by someone who uses it to teach others, without him or herself actually possessing said knowledge. This lets you use unskilled (cheap) labour to teach.
I think this solution is promising in that it can help reduce the knowledge bottleneck I mentioned, but it worries me because I don't think the real consequences of raising a generation of people taught by people who are themselves ignorant will be apparent for decades, and I'm wary of what hidden dangers may hide there.
So, to summarize. Your post shows you were a very lucky child, you grew up in a knowledge rich human environment. The problem is how to replicate these conditions when the human capital dimension is missing?
Sorry about the exceedingly long comment. I considered replying to your post in my own blog, but I would have had to do so in French.
Your thesis sounds really interesting! I've never heard of the idea of using a deskilled person to teach knowledge (although I've sat through many an IT course where the trainer seems to be working in those parameters).
I imagine that one of the problems with that approach (beyond the unknown implications for the future) is that the deskilled 'teacher' still holds a measure of power - they have the means of distributing the knowledge, even if they don't understand it. And so if they meet with 'pupils' who readily grasp a concept and try to move beyond it, then perhaps they'll feel threatened and somehow clamp down (...this is prompted by memories of school, where the weaker teachers were so insecure that they couldn't let us pupils shine or go deeper into certain subjects...and is one of the reasons why I think technophobe teachers are obstructing the creative use of technology in the classroom - they don't know as much as their pupils and are scared to lose 'control' or 'power').
I do feel incredibly lucky to have grown up with access to so much information. I remember my mother telling me that she only got five or six new books a year - but I had access to hundreds. Now I wonder what children growing up in the developed world will make of their access to information.
And I wonder do we need to teach them methods for dealing with the sheer amount of information? when I had too much I used to head off up a field or go climb a tree, away from everything. Today I go to a beach where I can't get mobile reception. But ultra-connected kids can't get away like that. I've heard of tech workers using meditation as a means to alleviate the 'stress' of information overload.
I feel I've wandered off the subject - but your comments make me think of lots of different angles to learning and information! Thanks a million :)
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