Sept 10-11, 2013 Kent State KMCenter planning symposium DOT Library, Washington DC
Thanks for inviting me. I'm an academic, which means I tend to worry about issues you ignore, and you worry about issues of which I am ignorant. One of the things of which I remain blissfully ignorant: Stakeholder. What does this mean?
Coming from oblique angle, so predictably, perhaps, I'd like to talk about sex and Videogames and Keanu Reeves
I am anxious about "capturing" knowledge, about trying to think about knowledge as capital.
What counts is situated, experiential knowledge, but that is hard for the market to recognize bc it is largely incompatible with our storage tech: it is contextual, intuitive. Philosophically, Knowing bound up in being, in dasein. Not "capture-friendly."
However, the specifics of the situation, etc., are capture-friendly. The details of the history and workings of a19th C whaling vessel are, by now, instantly accessible. The size eg of the American fleet at the time of Moby Dick is always available, always on hand.
The experience of whaling, however, is not, and there is no way to "translate" that experience into database fodder or a trainable curriculum.
I would point to the space program as an example. All the specs of the Apollo and mercury programs are instantly on hand. But, as NASA knows, that knowledge doesn't add up to much any more. They Used to fantasize about sending poets into space to better capture the experience. That is an alphabet-oriented fantasy. Watch the amazing trailer for the new film Gravity, by the director of Children of Men, and you'll begin to get a better sense of where NASA should focus its efforts: Not merely the conveyance of experience, but the curation and provision of experience.
And this is what simulation has to offer: Mediated, contrived, immediate experience.
Importantly, though, we have to bear in mind that this form of knowledge is material, phenomenal. In the movie the Matrix, Keanu Reeves is memorably provided instantly with the knowledge of how to fly a helicopter. It is literally downloaded into his brain. This is problematic I think, and is really more of a solution for the 20th century (how do I explain how Keanu suddenly knows how to fly a helicopter) than it is for the 21st (how do I convey the experience of flying a helicopter). Keanu's acquisition of this knowledge fits nicely with the Just In Time education model we hear so much about, but it conflates data acquisition with knowledge.
This is very common as we continue to imagine that knowledge and data are both immaterial. We all agonize over Our schools habit of teaching data acquisition and testing our students for data retention--exactly the least important thing they could be doing.
Learning to fly a helicopter is a deeply experiential process, and experience is bound up in time, sensation, movement, adrenaline. Knowledge only unfolds in time and space. It goes beyond the 2 dimensions of the printed page. It is a difficult thing to capture, capitalize on, store or convey.
Our sense of knowing like "having information" is dated. We need to return to the biblical sense: knowledge Like having sex.
What can be stored and deployed however is the situation that is most likely to give rise to that experience. So knowledge management is less about controlling the flow of data than it is about curating "possibility spaces," eg virtual environments that can give rise to situated, embodied learning.
The single best illustration here is Nintendo's Mario Brothers World, or any really competent video game. Sit down with your kid and watch her play and you'll be astonished -- astonished -- at how much knowledge this game requires. Ask to see the manual, however, and you'll find a very thin booklet that is more copyright notice than anything else. Like most other games, Mario provides just in time learning, but not in the sense that a database can convey: the game tells you how to do a thing, like jump, and then -- important part -- gets out of your way while you build up the experience of jumping over time.
And this comports with what a famous game designer has said about building successful games. He said that the best game designers give people interesting tools to use and interesting environments in which to use them, and then gets out of the way.
There is a significant corollary here that I'd like to draw your attention to. Namely, the ethical implications of this re-situation of knowledge. Once we begin to acknowledge that knowledge is experiential, material, that it is literally part of the knower's being, her identity, etc., then we are obliged to treat knowledge workers, creatives, etc., in a different fashion. Our print-based copyright system treats knowledge as property, visually communicable, separable from knowers. It is not. And knowers deserve the recognition of the idiosyncratic, irreplaceable nature of the known.