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HUMAN LEARNING -
NATURAL DRIFT TO LOOSE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
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CEC PEDERSEN
That's it I guess. I have a natural bent for the IT people. But I see the IT people's involvement in knowledge management as being a technical one. It is about collecting gigabytes and serbagigabytes (?). But at the end of the day, it not about the storage of it, the access of it, the speed of it... How do you actually make sense out of it ? To me its not a lot of point to just having it. You know, libraries have always fascinated me. You know... there is some incredible repositories, (city) of books, and yet you go through... you flick through and you see when they have been stamped out. I would imagine probably a very small percentage ever get circulated . And yet my own institution has done a substantial development of the library because they needed more space. I thought in this day and age they would be reducing the size of the libraries because of that technical capacity to access it. So this sort of making sense out
of it and being able to put it to a purpose... and the way in
which people are able to discern it, the stuff that is available
to them. Perhaps we are incredibly presumptuous. We're in a rarified environment. Ummm... when it comes to things like email and the internet, we were the privileged ones to have access to it from day one. So we are talking about seven or eight years of knowledge manipulation, massage and retrieval...and perhaps our competencies are significantly more than managers and community groups. And the way we differentiate knowledge in a fairly distinct way : Refereed publications is sort of the Rolls Royce. Refereed conferences is perceived as OK. But if it just happens to be off the Net I guess it's someone's opinion. And at the end of the day, a lot of individuals are looking for information that supports their gut feeling, or the perception, rather than looking for it in a critical way, that, OK, here is all the facts that I have been able to get. Here's the similarities. Here's the differences. Here are the great gaps on what is being said. We see it particularly with undergraduates.
They basically have a point of view, and all they do is go and
look at something that supports that view so therefore it's got
to be right. But I think that the side issue of the knowledge
part of it, the quality issue, is always going to be an issue.
So it really all comes down to reducing the breadth, having a
way to get to the depth out of it. Contextualising it. Ummm... promising is a fairly abstract term. Am I optimistic and excited about it ? Yes I am. I find it absolutely incredible that I can sit in my railway carriage in the middle of the bush on the outside of Brisbane and I can go anywhere in the world. We used to call that Astral traveling and Shirley MacLaine pioneered the thing really many years ago. But ... the access to information.... whether or not it is a simple seeking of information or trade shares electronically... the irony is I can buy and sell shares faster from my office in the bush than what I can driving into the closest town to visit the post office or a bank. Now when you look around to the...all
it is is a railway carriage sitting in the middle of nowhere !
So it is exciting from that point of view of the prospects. I
guess I am a learning junky and have always been curious and insatiable
sort of mind for stuff that is relevant... and a hell of a lot
that is not relevant ! ... that is interesting. Yep...Yep... One of the personal ways in which I filter is in terms of the favourite (Web) sites, is that I am very, very thorough in having a filtering... electronic filing system, whether or not it is for emails or the internet search engine. And what I do is that I pull in the sites and I categorise them. and I go back and I review them on a fairly regular basis and drop out the ones that are no longer relevant or... not providing any value. It is a fairly orderly system. That way, it is a time-saving mechanism. Because... For example, in the disciplinary area, I know that there are particular sites that are incredibly reliable. You'll go back and visit them regularly. Updated. There are others that you will never wanted go near again. So, in terms of search tools, if I hadn't looked at it in the past six months... And... the other is that you can
hold that information ...you can hold it. The difference with
a paper filing cabinet is that the staples rust and the paper
goes yellow... and the staples rust... and you never throw it
out ! A lot of people don't do that with the electronic emails
either ! Yeh... Yeh, Yeh. I work on the fundamental
premise that if I hadn't looked at it in the last six months...
a reasonable time... if it is something that I know links into
an area that I've been thinking about... talking about research
projects or interests, I sort of hold it off to one side. But
if I haven't used it in the previous six months, chances are it
goes into cyberspace. That's great Cec. Thank You. |
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