Today's topic is knowledge. I'm partly reacting to an essay titled, "Managing What We Know" by Laurence Prusak.
1)Knowledge is more than information, it's information and experience combined. You can also learn things by extensive study but the advanced student tries to also experience the subject (i.e., a French major goes to France).
2)The best way to teach/train someone is for the teacher to share the experience of the subject with the student.
3)People often don't share their knowledge because they are unable (because of time or ability) or unwilling (no incentive) to do so.
4)People are divided up in organizations without a good understanding of what they know. Everyone wants to draw organization charts, not knowledge charts. (I started "evangalizing" about organizing people according to knowledge near the end of my employment at Widgets--I'm sure everyone has forgotten about that by now.)
5) There's a difference between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is socially constructed--if we all agree on a fact, then it's a fact, even if it's false. (e.g., Most Americans probably still believe that Al Quaeda was active in Iraq before the US invasion).
6) There's a kind of knowledge we can't explain, sometimes called (among other things) procedural knowledge. How far do you have to turn the car's steering wheel to make a right turn? You can't explain it, you just know how to do it.
I think we all wind up in situations where we need to share information or we need to learn to do something. What should we do first, what's a good strategy? Thinking about knowledge helps you make those decisions when you need to and every time you try, you learn how to do it better.
1)Knowledge is more than information, it's information and experience combined. You can also learn things by extensive study but the advanced student tries to also experience the subject (i.e., a French major goes to France).
2)The best way to teach/train someone is for the teacher to share the experience of the subject with the student.
3)People often don't share their knowledge because they are unable (because of time or ability) or unwilling (no incentive) to do so.
4)People are divided up in organizations without a good understanding of what they know. Everyone wants to draw organization charts, not knowledge charts. (I started "evangalizing" about organizing people according to knowledge near the end of my employment at Widgets--I'm sure everyone has forgotten about that by now.)
5) There's a difference between knowledge and truth. Knowledge is socially constructed--if we all agree on a fact, then it's a fact, even if it's false. (e.g., Most Americans probably still believe that Al Quaeda was active in Iraq before the US invasion).
6) There's a kind of knowledge we can't explain, sometimes called (among other things) procedural knowledge. How far do you have to turn the car's steering wheel to make a right turn? You can't explain it, you just know how to do it.
I think we all wind up in situations where we need to share information or we need to learn to do something. What should we do first, what's a good strategy? Thinking about knowledge helps you make those decisions when you need to and every time you try, you learn how to do it better.
posted by changingagain at 7:05 PM
1 Comments:
Oh man. Don't try peddling (5) in any philosophy departments. Although the people who try to say what it means to know something have been forced to adopt longer and longer (pages long) definitions, you will always find "true belief" contained therein. Social philosophers tend to deal in mutual beliefs and suppositions adopted for the purpose of effective social interaction, but they wouldn't dare refer to those things as "knowledge."
But then again, philosophy isn't particularly practical, is it?
-Your smartass kid.
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