Everything is miscellaneous - Dave Weinberger at SETT

I like Dave Weinberger's style. I'm amazed that after the ministerial address most of the 2000 odd folk left. There are now only a few hundred. Are people not really interested in investing in making links and community, and sharing knowledge? Who knows, but Dave's making 7 big points about knowledge. I caught five of them:

1. Knowledge sits in our head - not a good place to keep knowledge. Also, we assume that there is one knowledge when, in fact, there may be many.
2. Knowledge is simpler than what appears at first
   Do humans make things more difficult than they need be?
3. Most things aren't knowledge
   Experts help us make the difference between perceptions and knowledge
5. Knowledge is bigger than we are
   Knowledge has traditionally been seen as a realm, with its keepers, and we strive through education to get our understanding of this knowledge into the realm.
6. Knowledge is orderly
   You need to know how knowledge fits together (you need to know how to make a story out of it?). But in the real world we tend to sort things into one way: that book is going to go on that shelf. In fact, traditional libraries tend to make us think of knowledge as topics between covers of books that can be found in one place. That shelf. In the offline world there are three ways we can organise:
   1. you take the physical knowledge and classify it
   2. you take the metadata and restrict what can be described to what fits on one card
   3. what can we do digitally easily that the real world makes really hard?

Online makes it easy.
By being able to give lots of categories to knowledge means that we end up with a messy order of information, but this is all searchable. So the quantity of information and the messiness is indeed a virtue, not a problem like most people would have you believe.

In explaining this concept he asked how many people out of around 300 used online bookmarking - there were a smattering of about a dozen. Hopefully his talk will inspire a lot more to do this over the next wee while.

More later.

Thanks most go to Promethian and LTS for funding the wireless access codes that allow me to blog from SETT

Comments

[Lucy Crichton]

Hi Ewan
I agree, I thought this was really interesting and it was a shame that so few people were left.

I've been doing a library and information studies course in the past year - We covered traditional cataloguing and classification which have had their critics because it presents a Western, white, male 19th century view of what is knowledge. But as I was learning about the traditional classification structures I was thinking about whether this was really applicable to the online knowledge, searching, metadata and tagging so it was great to see David Weinberger clarifyng, developing and extending these vague thoughts so much further than my confused doubts!
Will definitely read his book and am hoping for more enlightenment at SETT today...
See you there
Lucy

[nova]

Thanks for this Ewan I missed David but your summary has whetted my appetite for a bit of a deeper look

[Kathleen Johnston]

Hi Ewan
I'm so glad I came across your thoughts on David's presentation, as this was one of the highlights of SETT for me. I found the part about learning being social particularly relevant to our time in education just now. Also, his thoughts on wikis put a new slant on their use for me -challenging the traditional view of an expert, encouraging critical and evaluative skills. Great stuff!
Kathleen

[Ewan McIntosh]

There's more on my own thoughts on being social to learn on this old post:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2006/01/socialising_ide.html