Week Two: The Nature of Knowledge

This week's focus was on the nature of knowledge which is always a weighty subject indeed. What is knowledge, how is it created and how is it stored or is it stored at all? It's been a while since I've contemplated some of these concepts and I found myself going back to review. However, incorporating some of the readings required me to make big changes in my former ideas about knowledge. This entry will try to merge my new and former ideas about knowledge.

In the welcome video for this week, George Seimens reminded me that information is the bits or building blocks of knowledge and that we externalize our bits of information to help knowledge grow. But information alone does not make up knowledge. All the facts and figures in the world doesn't make up a body of knowledge. Information is a way of expressing knowledge even though it's not knowledge itself. So, that makes one thing (information) that knowledge is not.

Is knowledge social?
In the article, Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge, Downes asks who "knows" how to make a 747 fly from London to Toronto. The simple answer is that no one person knows how. The knowledge to plan, manufacture, build, fly, navigate and land lies within many people, not one person. This is certainly an example of connective knowledge. Even if we externalized all the information needed to perform all these functions, no one person ever absorb all of it well enough to make a plane fly. There are some things one human could never do. As Downes concludes, it is only because we have this network of people who contain the total knowledge of making a plane fly that we can catch a flight from London to Toronto. However, there are lots of things that one human can learn to do by him or herself. I've attained the knowledge I need to cook, manage my expenses, and work effectively as an instructional designer. Of course, I don't claim to hold all the knowledge available for any of these tasks and one could argue that I need a whole network of people to do any of these. For example, in order to cook a meal I minimally need a farmer, someone to make the pots, pans, knives and other kitchen utensils, a stove maker, and so on right down to the guys that mine the gas for the stove. Without the specific knowledge of any one of these people, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for me to eat dinner tonight. Whether I like it or not, I am part of a very large and intricate social knowledge network.

Brain power
All the discussion the past two weeks about networking has me thinking once again about the mysteries of the brain. At least they are mysteries to me as I'm not a neuroscientist. How is what we call "knowledge" formed and stored in the brain? If I remember my A&P correctly, the brain is a complex network of neural connections through which electrical current flows in erratic patterns. There are no "storage" cells where memory could be filed away for future use. So from where do our memories come? If, as some scientists believe, memories are created when neurons re-fire certain pathways that were forged at the time an event happened, then the brain, as Downes ascertains is more like a computer in that it is a fluid social network rather than the stationary storage facility of bits and bytes that I had always envisioned it to be. Downes also says that,

...human thought amounts to patterns of interactions in neural networks. More precisely, patterns of phenomena - such as sensory perceptions - cause or create patterns of connections between neurons in the brain. These connections are associative - that is, connections between two neurons form when two neurons are active at the same time, and weaken when they are inactive or active at different times.

I have a feeling that these two concepts are more interrelated than just analogy. Is it coincidence that our organic and social systems work so similarly? Am I stretching this too far?

PLE's
The final concept I explored this week is PLE or personal learning environments. Most certainly, we in this course are creating our own PLE's. My own consists of this blog, the course wiki, the Facebook group, and the Eluminate sessions. I would bet that no one else in the course has exactly that combination. It's been fun exploring all the tools and figuring out which ones I can best utilize for my own learning.

Here's the question that's been buggering me all week: Web 2.0 learning may be great for those prepared for university life and instilled with a love of learning, but could developmental and non-traditional students, especially those at the community college level, benefit from these tools. Do they have the skills and abilities to create a PLE? If not, how can we best prepare them to reach toward that end? I fear overwhelming them with tools and techniques they are ill-equipped to handle.