Ambjörn Naeve, Head of Knowledge Management Research Group, KTH/Nada/Media (Sweden)
The Human Semantic Web – Increasing the Global Organizational Performance of Humanity Inc.
From teacher-centric, curricular-oriented “knowledge push” to learner-centric, interest-oriented “knowledge pull”.
The Semantic Web opens the gate towards the globally annotated information age, in opposition to recorded or transmitted information age. We all become librarians.
Being a generalist (knowing less about more things) or a specialist (knowing more about less things). You have to choose, but cannot be both. The question is: how to solve problems when you do need both kind of knowledges?
We need to improve the representation of reality, to make it more and more simple. Reinventing the wheels, beginning from scratch is no more an option, it takes too long… or it is just impossible to catch up with the speed of change.
We cannot use negative motivations — e.g. do your homework or get punished — in education.
Curricular-oriented knowledge push leads to:
- Lack of student interest
- Life long teaching (or tenure based teaching), instead of life long learning.
- lack of motivation to know why (whitehead)
- decreasing interest in the “hard fun”
Technology helps enabling non-traditional communication forms, support global content sharing, the formation of distributed learning communities.
The semantic web information architecture virtually converts the whole web into a huge database, a relational database of content and people.
The information about the information (metadata): From document based (XML), centralized, to graph-based (RDF), distributed.
Integrate people, processes and technology to manage/create knowledge. Knowledge is not about technology, but about people. And it’s becoming more and more important not to know but to know who knows.
We live in a Knowledge Emulation Society, not a Knowledge Society, is the impression of knowledge we work with.
Ever decreasing attention span: from homo sapiens to homo zapping.
From cogito ergo sum to “I am seen, therefore I exist”, the medial mass hysteria.
The power of thinking is to know what to think about.
Nobody can teach you anything: a good teacher can inspire you to learn. Teaching should be left to computers. People, teachers of flesh and blood, are to inspire, to encourage. Your learning motivation is based on the experience of subject excitement and faith in your learning capacity from a live teacher. Your learning is enhanced by taking control of your own learning process. We have to reintroduce school rights, and remove school duties.
Seven different Knowledge Roles:
- Knowledge Cartographer: constructs context-maps
- Knowledge Librarian: fills context-maps with content-components
- Knowledge Composer: combines content-components into learning models
- Knowledge Coach: cultivates questions
- Knowledge Preacher: provides live answers
- Knowledge Plummer: connects questions to relevant preachers
- Knowledge Mentor: supplies motivation and supports self reflection
We’re living in a knowledge emulation society, and forgetting reflection. We will probably be living anyway in emulation, but have to focus on reflection, on putting content before the form and not form before the content.
Fragmented science and technology, Desire for effectiveness and efficacy; and Integrated human development and wisdom, all combined have the following side effects (adapted from Petger Senge)
- Environmental damage
- Loss of community
- Loss of tradition
- Technological divide
- Complexity of social and environmental challenges
- Belief that any technology can solve such problems
More info
- Conzilla, the Concept Browser
- Conzilla map for Humanity Inc.
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