Sharing the Addiction

I liked the three viewpoints about knowledge. It made me me question what my beliefs are around knowledge construction. While I do subscribe to a constructivism approach, I think there are times that all three viewpoints of knowledge described here come into play for me personally as a learner.

1. Knowledge is ‘out there’ and objective and we just have to align ourselves to it
2. Through exposure to information and viewpoints, we construct knowledge that is partially objective and partly subjective due to our interruption of the information.
3. Knowledge is constructed so even if people are exposed to the same information they will gain different knowledge from this based on their own personal constructions of this knowledge.

I often talk about processing information being important in a complex world with huge amounts of information available but George takes this a step further and says that it is not the processing that is important but recognition of patterns within the information so that you can make sense from the it. From my perspective as a classroom teacher, this is the higher level thinking that we are trying to encourage in our kids. If we can design the learning experiences in our classroom so that children are able to start discovering the underlying patterns in information, then they will be able to use this knowledge to solve problems and have an understanding of the ‘bigger picture’.

I agreed with his point that we can have networked knowledge building where we can’t ‘hold on to’ all of the information that we come into contact with and so put it out to a network to continue the building knowledge. I know that people within my network are building on information that I have located for the network while I have moved onto other areas. The great thing in our networks today is that I will benefit from this sharing when the results of this are shared back to me. I don’t need to be the repository of all information for my network anymore.

I found his point about all content having started with connections very interesting. In education, we have tended to start from content and build learning experiences to transfer that content but in a networked web 2.0 world, we have the chance to start from a connection or connections that challenge our learners to make sense of these viewpoints and content knowledge is one of the outcomes rather than the starting point. George talks about the fact that we all have our own perspective of the information in our own networks (from our own node in the network) and it is the connections with others that help give us a more complete picture even if we do not agree with these perspectives.

I agree with him that one threat we have to seeing all of these viewpoints in a web 2.0 world is that we tend to only subscribe to the writing, podcasts and sites of others that we basically already agree with rather than subscribing to content that we don’t agree with or that challenges us so that we then only get our own viewpoint reflected back to us. When I glance through my Google reader subscriptions, that is certainly the case! However, I wonder how many teachers making use of new technologies are teachers that I WON’T find something in common with. I know that I need these viewpoints from like-minded people because in my role of facilitator, I certainly come across many educators who don’t share my passion for ICT in education and I think I get plenty of the opposing viewpoint from these teachers (which I try to listen to and recognise even if I don’t agree).

Anyway, I think this talk is well worth listening to and made me think about my own ways of thinking about knowledge in relation to Web 2.0.