Yesterday, finally my book arrived I had ordered at Bol.com. It's an very interesting book from John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid called "The Social Life of Information". The authors argue in this book that through our "tunnel vision", we don't get the full potential out of the digitital revolution. We should look beyond our obsession of the posibilities which tenchnology enables and start engaging the social context in which these technologies are inevitably embedded.

 

The authors are stongly influenced by the work of Lave and Wenger on learning in communities of practise and Bruners work on the constructivist theory. They talk about the differences between information and knowledge whereas information becomes knowledge when it entailes an owner and is socially constructed and transfered in communites of practise. The authors clearly state that knowledge lies less in databases (repositories) than in people and when someone who entails this knowledge leaves the company, the knowledge leaves with him (even when information is captured in the repositories). So how can we facilitate the transfer of knowledge to occur (might we call this learning?). Here's one of my thoughts captured in the attached picture.

 

The idea is that information captured in repositories will become knowledge when a member of a community entails this knowledge and puts it into his own context. Through sharing and raflection in his weblog, this context of what previously was just information, becomes know also clear for the other members in the community. Great advantage is that people do not always have to interact in the first place to be aware of someones knowledge, also communities can be easlily expanded through the use of the WWW.

 

Last week there's been an item on the playing of MORG's on Dutch television. Very interresting item for those of you who understand the beautifull Dutch language.

 

The item goes into the world of gaming in an online role playing game and the remarkable resemblance this world has with the real world. "people who are smart in the real world ar ealso playing their characters in a smart way, the same with people who aren't that smart in the real world...."

 

Unfortunatly, they don't go into the learning opportunities such a game can provide us. An interesting article on this topic is written by Kurt Squire