#networked knowledge

Leon Jacobs

Yes to everything in 10 Lessons I learnt from a career in advertising. He’s talking about John Hunt, legend and worldwide creative director TBWA\\Worldwide.

As a copywriter in an advertising agency in a past life (never leaves you, by the way) this was a great read. Enjoy!

My last post was on cultivating networked knowledge but my context was related to a business environment. Today I found out that Dr. Sugata Mitra won the TED prize for 2013 this week. I heard his brilliant TED talk on child driven education a couple of years ago, and found it to be a dramatic vision for what was possible in collaborative learning. This physicist turned educational scientist's journey from a Hole in the Wall to S.O.L.E. has been incredible. Mitra explains how self-organized learning environments (S.O.L.E.) are powerful and even necessary for disadvantaged areas where teachers won’t go or are in very short supply,  and he had serious research to back this assertion. He researched school level children in rural areas of countries like India, Cambodia and others - children, who had been never exposed to a foreign language, advanced studies, a rich collection of books, computers or a formal learning system (schools, tutors, etc) and turned them into exemplar learners in very short periods of time. Dr. Mitra was questioned if this kind of learning was in fact deep learning, he used scored tests drawn over a period of time to prove it was. His School in the Cloud concept has enabled young school going children in very disadvantaged neighborhoods to be connected to retired school teachers in the UK for a short hour every day, but that interaction gives them enough fodder to stretch themselves and tackle problems among themselves (in effect, one of the students becomes the surrogate teacher in the physical absence of formal teachers for these children). His ideas on industrialized educational systems that are outdated are similar to those of another respected educational thinker, Dr. Ken Robinson (see earlier post). Dr. Mitra's work reminds me of the underlying principle of the Montessori method which is based on the theory that children are motivated to learn on their own when surrounded by appropriate learning materials. I know from personal experience how wonderful that method was for my own son. 

Dr. Mitra's work is a brilliant example of not only what is possible in terms of collaborative and social learning, but how effective it is.  His ideas are worth scaling up. Even with very limited resources, the children in his research showed unimaginable gains. Translating it back to the world of knowledge workers, the School in the Cloud gives an amplified meaning to the idea of cultivating networked knowledge and a lesson for the rest of us.

One of the best pieces of advice that I received from one of my mentors, was to read more and read different genres. She was referring to books, but the same principles apply in the world of networked knowledge. Managed knowledge, the one that you could neatly account for, curate and stuff in a box has been making room to accommodate networked knowledge, changing the ways of traditional Knowledge Management.The hybrid and diverse thinking that comes as a result of being plugged into networked knowledge has the potential to propel us to a point of advantage. This as an idea is powerful and there are plenty of devices for networked knowledge, from LinkedIn to Quora and from Google Plus to Twitter.

Networked knowledge has a lot of potential but it should not be mistaken for a silver bullet for innovation and ideation (some of it is just noise), it is however a strong tool that can be added to the innovation suite. The dangers of being part of only specific networks is that you unwittingly apply a filter and in fact, narrow your vision and your choices. Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble warns of falling into just that trap with an internet that is constantly being personalized. To avoid falling victim to echo chambers in networked knowledge, one must be actively thinking about punching holes in their echo chambers (as David Weinberger calls them).  For example, if you work for a large Fortune 500 company, occasionally attend a local startup meetup to get a feel for the way things tick in a small entrepreneurial environment where people build something from scratch. If you are surrounded by colleagues and peers of your industry and domain, listen in to a conversation from a completely different world. 

Knowledge Managers in their traditional roles have gathered, processed and disseminated knowledge in neat nuggets, they are adroit at tapping into a lot of information to distill the 'best'  - the traditional data>information>knowledge>wisdom pyramid. However, recently even David Weinberger has been challenging the classic pyramid. His book Too Big to Know is a great read for anyone trying to understand the world of networked knowledge. If we are faced with such a shift,  how does it all affect the traditional Knowledge Manager. As we start using collaboration or social technologies both within and outside our companies to grow our networks and our knowledge, we assume people know how to use networked knowledge to their advantage. We assume that social collaboration is intuitive and to some degree it is, but most could benefit from an education in this area. The fluid nature of networked knowledge means that Knowledge Managers will lean on the power of storytelling. Knowledge Managers will have to be honest with their stakeholders about the upfront and ongoing investment of time and attention in networked knowledge before the advantages become apparent. This is where it gets tricky. In an environment, where people are short on time, attention and anything else, they will need to be persuaded to make such an investment. John Stepper of Deutsche Bank oftens blogs about how one can manage one's professional enterprise and intraprise networks. He also highlights the benefits of managing one's online reputation in these networks in order to be more visible within their organizations and outside, learn from and teach others and become recognized for their knowledge in a certain area. And even Stepper admits that in most corporations, this represents a huge cultural shift. 

The amount of knowledge embedded in a society, however, does not depend mainly on how much knowledge each individual holds. It depends, instead, on the diversity of knowledge across individuals and on their ability to combine this knowledge, and make use of it, through complex webs of interaction.

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Productive knowledge, therefore, cannot be learned easily like a song or a poem. It requires structural changes. Just like learning a language requires changes in the structure of the brain, developing a new industry requires changes in the patterns of interaction inside an organization or society.

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Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity | Brain Pickings (click through for full transcript and links)

Absolutely ridiculous article, this type of thing is my inspiration in life and the sound of my souuul.

"Both of these stories captures something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations."

"In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles."

"I like to think of it this way: We take information, from it synthesize insight, which in turn germinates ideas.

And then we take these ideas, ours and those of others, we toss them into our mental reservoir…

…where they sit and sort of just float around until one day they float into just the right alignment to click into a new idea.

"

"Curiosity is one of the most fundamental human drivers. Just look at little kids – this hunger to know the world is deep in our species’ DNA. But curiosity without direction can be a taxing and ultimately unproductive endeavor. Choice is how we tame and channel and direct our curiosity, where we choose to allocate our time and energy, and ultimately, what we choose to pay attention to."

I hope this is obvious: forcing students to answer a series of questions under the clock is probably the stupidest way to test proficiency in a subject area. The ultimate goal of teaching is not fact memorization, it's application. Exams under intense time pressure are useless: they are not at all a representation of the depth/breadth of a person's knowledge in a subject area, nor how capable they are in applying it.  And worse, they encourage short-term memorization of information that becomes useless a month after the test. How much information do you remember from the last exam you took?

I admit that there are some professions where memorization-based, timed exams are more relevant – such as emergency medicine –, where the need to recall random facts under time pressure is actually a skill in and of itself. Though I would argue that even this skill will soon change as on-demand medical data is more easily accessible.

Thanks to the Internet and the relatively powerful mobile devices we now carry around, we have moved from having a 'local' to a 'networked' brain, where data is now able to be stored and accessed not just from our own head, but from society's collective mind. These devices have literally become an extension of our brains: they help us navigate complex terrain, recall detailed information from years ago, and give us access to billions of pages of data covering almost every subject thinkable.