In this short essay I will explain what my vision is of Visual Knowledge Building. I will explain what knowledge means to me. Why Knowledge Building Communities are important. The learning theory—Constructivism will be shown also. I will also explain why knowledge never stops. It has a process. Finally I will explain why people centric communication is the next step of knowledge building.
Knowledge itself
After some study, I’ve concluded that there’s no determined way of defining knowledge. That’s the reason I’ve created a mindmap to see what my personal perspective is on the definition of knowledge.
Basicly I think knowledge itself cannot be set free from a process. It’s not a holy object that can’t be reached. The Oxfort English Dictionary defined knowledge in various ways.
- 1. Facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
- 2. What is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information
- 3. Awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.
Philosophers are often agreed with Plato’s definition of knowledge: ‘ Justified true belief’. Another example from Buddhist sources, knowledge is just merely the understanding how the world works. While a wise person understands and is mindful of the true self. From these different perspectives I can conclude that culture is also a big factor on how knowledge is been defined.
I am sure that many philosophers will agree with my mindmap and that there’s not really a true definition for what knowledge is.
The importance of Knowledge Building Communities (KBC)
Knowledge is on-going and ever changing. That’s why knowledge is changing or it is been build. It cannot exist without human beings. Some knowledge is build in groups such as class-rooms, the research and development team of Schiphol Hilton Hotel or the research team at Erasmus Hospital. I still remember the phrase in Chinese, three peasants are better than one wise man. I think this phrase says it all about how important a KBC is. The three peasants will go through creation and innovation to get a problem solving solution. In this way knowledge will reach his value. It’s rather a collective achievement than a individual one. Like Scardamalia(2002) he agrees on the above idea that knowledge building is for a community. Scardamalia even goes a step further by identifying twelve principles of knowledge building.
1. Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world.
2. Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects.
3. Idea diversity. In the classroom, the diversity of ideas raised by students is necessary.
4. Rise above. Through a sustained improvement of ideas and understanding, students create higher level concepts.
5. Epistemic agency. Students themselves find their way in order to advance.
6. Community knowledge, collective responsibility. Students' contribution to improving their collective knowledge in the classroom is the primary purpose of the Knowledge building classroom.
7. Democratizing knowledge. All individuals are invited to contribute to the knowledge advancement in the classroom.
8. Symmetric knowledge advancement. A goal for Knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organizations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge.
9. Pervasive Knowledge building. Students contribute to collective Knowledge building.
10. Constructive uses of authoritative sources. All members, including the teacher, sustain inquiry as a natural approach to support their understanding.
11. Knowledge building discourse. Students are engaged in discourse to share with each other, and to improve the knowledge advancement in the classroom.
12. Concurrent, embedded, and transformative assessment. Students take a global view of their understanding, then decide how to approach their assessments. They create and engage in assessments in a variety of ways.
I really like these principles, especially ‘ democratizing knowledge’ . I work at the Schiphol Hilton Hotel. Recently they have cut some management positions and let the employees contribute in the thinking process. Employees are now been asked and triggered to come with ideas how to improve their business and lower the energy costs. I can see that all individuals are invited to contribute to knowledge advancement in the company. This is not just good for the business intelligence, but also the treatment to the employees is improved. They will have the idea of having a value in the company.
Constructivism the way of learning
Quote: “Knowledge building, can be considered as deep Constructivism (learning theory) (Scardamalia, 2002) that involves making a collective inquiry into a specific topic and coming to a deeper understanding through interactive questioning, dialogue and continuous improvement of ideas. Ideas are thus the medium of operation in knowledge building environments. The teacher becomes a guide rather than a director and allows students to take over a significant portion of the responsibility for their own learning including planning, execution and evaluation (Scardamalia, 2002)”.
As the quote of Scardamalia describes that knowledge building is actually considered to be Constructivism. I definitely agree with him that this way education is the best way to go beyond the existing knowledge. In this way boundaries can be found. In Asia this way of education is still not often been seen. The teacher is still a authority rather than a guide. Obedience is very important and I think this limits the idea of knowledge building. This way of education where there’s just one direction of where the information is coming and going to (teacher to student), doesn’t reach the boundaries of knowledge building. As a Buddhist I’ve learned that the Buddha is our guide rather the God to believe to. There’s this famous phrase: “Buddha’s teachings are just like the finger pointing to the direction of the moon. Find your way to the moon, don’t attach to the finger”.
Knowledge Ecology
In my mindmap I can see a certain process is needed to build knowledge. George Siemens goes a bit further with saying that knowledge building has a certain ecology. The figure above it shows which aspects this ecology has. Speaking of ecology from a Buddhist point of view, everything is in dependent origination. Everything is inter-depended from one of another. In this way even knowledge is build from different elements in different conditions. Without one condition or element knowledge can’t really reach its full result of problem-solving. From my personal point of view, George Siemens has the same idea as I do. He even goes a step further by showing the best performing mix of aspects in an effective ecology.
- · a space for gurus and beginners to connect,
- · a space for self-expression,
- · a space for debate and dialogue,
- · a space to search archived knowledge,
- · a space to learn in a structured manner,
- · a space to communicate new information and knowledge indicative of changing elements within the field of practice (news, research)
- · space to nurture ideas, test new approaches, prepare for new competition, pilot processes.
I am sure the medium or spaces that George Siemens describes above are important. As in my mindmap I show that the medium usage is important to build knowledge. From the experiences during the minor of VKB &VC, I can conclude that it is indeed important to have these kind of physical or virtual locations where everything is archived, searchable, in dialogue, structured and renewed by teachers, inspirators or students.
In this way the knowledge can be transported to another community or person all over the world.
Importance of Design & Usability
This essay is not just about knowledge building, but also discuss the ‘visual’ part of it. Design & Usability are through my opinion very important to the knowledge building. As George Siemens said that there’s a need of a space. This space can be physical or virtual. As we are living in a digital era, most of the information is distributed and build online. For example wiki-pages are knowledge building spaces where collective knowledge is been generated. So at the end the individual is obligated to reach information online. In this way the design principles are important. Examples like: golden ratio and chunking are important to receive information in a considerable matter.
Constantine and Lockwood describe a collection of principles for improving the quality of your user interface design. These principles are
The structure principle. Your design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with your overall user interface architecture.
The simplicity principle. Your design should make simple, common tasks simple to do, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.
The visibility principle. Your design should keep all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with too many alternatives or confuse them with unneeded information.
The feedback principle. Your design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
The tolerance principle. Your design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.
The reuse principle. Your design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.
In my mindmap I show that usage of media is very important to transport the information to another. Like Siemens and Scardamalia says interaction is needed to build knowledge. Nowadays interactive tools are an important support to reach communication between the people. Tools like Wikipedia, Facebook and Blackboard are still not user-friendly enough. I think this is due to the fact that it’s still very conservative of using texts over graphics.
People Centric Communication
HTC came with People Centric Communication (PCC). This is an approach supports a new fresh look towards the structured matter of information. The search of archived knowledge has reached his full potential by using PCC.
Although the presentation is about mobile communication, I think it is surprisingly important how people are connected to each other. The idea that our life has become based on applications is just a little bit fussy. HTC came with the solution that communication should be people centred. After some contemplation I think that people are the directors or information pushers in a digital space. Therefore this approach of PCC should be taken into the idea of how people think in information nowadays. Even if we use references, we always describe from where the source is from.
Right and privileges to have access to information
I still remember the discussion with my Ghanese colleague about the believe in God. I told her that most people in the Netherland are educated at school with the Evolution Theory of Darwin. Surprisingly she had never heard of this theory. In this way I really saw that I was blessed (by God) to have access to information that she didn’t have. Somehow she was only limited to the bible. As from a Buddhist point of view, freedom to information with awareness of your own greed, anger and ignorance is very important for your own development and worldly view. But somehow not everyone has these privileges to receive or access information. I just hope that the children of the future are not just been exposed to information limited to one book or person.
Conclusion
Knowledge cannot exist without people. It’s build for a community and future generations. Visual Knowledge Building is related to ‘constructivism’. Scardamalia says that deeper understanding, through interactive questioning, dialogue and continuous improvement of ideas are improving the surface of knowledge building. George Siemens spaces and ecology affects the knowledge building. The fact that we need locations or media to have an collaborating interactive outcome of knowledge building, leads us to the importance of design of the user interface. Furthermore I see that the future is related to interaction and tools like blackboard and Wikipedia will be having more graphics combined with text. At the end I think People Centric Communication will play a important role of archiving information. Like great philosophers and discoverers have become famous, the information will idolized.
References
Scardamalia & Bereiter, Constructivism
George Siemens, Knowledge Building Ecology
William Lidwell, Universal Principles of Design
Constantine&Lockwood, Fundamentals of user interface design
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