In Learning in the Digital Age, John Seely Brown begins by defining the key differences between the terms information and knowledge. Information, he says, “is usually considered independent of any particular individual—it can be looked up in a book or retrieved online—whereas knowledge is usually associated with a knower, that is, it resides in someone’s mind. Knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold; it’s usually deeply intertwined with the knower’s understanding of the practices surrounding its use.”
He then describes two kinds of knowledge, explicit and tacit: “The explicit lives in books and in our brains as concepts and facts and deals with the “know-what.” The tacit deals with the “know-how” that is best manifested in work practices and skills. The tacit resides in action, most often in participation with others. As a consequence, tacit knowledge can be distributed as a shared, socially constructed understanding that emerges from collaboration.”
I was very pleased, actually, to read these definitions, because they clarify an issue I’ve struggled with for some time. It’s been obvious to me that there’s a difference between information and knowledge, but I haven’t been able to describe it satisfactorily.
Information is something that can be looked up; knowledge is something we digest rather than merely hold (and I would emphasize the word merely) captures the difference perfectly.
Brown then goes on to talk about enculturation. He states: “Learning by doing with others offers students the opportunity for in-depth enculturation into a particular practice, where one learns to be a physicist, social scientist, historian, etc., in contrast to just learning about such professions. Enculturation is crucial to learning, since relatively little of the complex web of practice can effectively be made the subject of explicit instruction.” Graduate education today, he says, “usually involves a form of apprenticeship, offers the intensive, in-depth enculturation that stems from participation in a particular community.”
This past summer I did an instructional design internship at Genentech and it was just as Brown describes it: learning about being an instructional designer rather than learning about instructional design. I highly recommend the process.
Brown then describes what he sees as dimensional shifts in the way digital learners learn. They are:
1. The ability to communicate and express oneself with images (still and moving), sound, and other media is a crucial aspect of the new literacy. Beyond this, information navigation is perhaps the key component of literacy in the digital age.
2. A shift is taking place in learning from an authority-based lecture model to discovery-based learning.
3. Classically, reasoning is linked with the deductive and abstract. Yet young learners working with digital media seem to focus more on the concrete, suggesting a form of bricolage, a concept having to do with one’s abilities to find something (perhaps a tool, some open source code, images, music, text) that can be used or transformed to build something new.
4. There is a growing bias toward action—to try new things without reading the manual or taking a course. This tendency shifts the focus to learning in situ with and from each other.
I don’t have any argument with these hypotheses, but I’d like to see some actual research. In ITEC 800, Kim said that there was a lot of discussion about the changes Web 2.0 etc. is fomenting, but not much actual research. I agree. Maybe things are changing so quickly that research is out of date before it even gets out of the design stage, but I would like to see discussions such as Brown’s that are based on something more substantive than anecdotal evidence. Perhaps in time they will be.
Gordon Dale
