I’ve been reading Stealing Fire from the Gods by James Bonnet over the past few days (Despite the fact it came highly recommended to me, I find it too half-finished to recommend on to anyone else.), and the book looks at storytelling from its early days as a teaching tool.
It got me to thinking. Oral tradition is still practiced around the world by many cultures, but it’s died out in countries considered “civilized” or “advanced”. Teachers still transmit knowledge through lecture and discussion, but all of that it literal and supplemented with printed books. We no longer teach through metaphor, or we teach very little through metaphor.
What happened? Passing knowledge through metaphor was effective, but because information wasn’t recorded, it had the potential to be lost. This is what lead to recording knowledge through writing.
My question is: Was the evolution of oral tradition in industrialized countries stifled by the invention of the printing press?
Thoughts? Information?
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management at 7:40 AM EDT
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I sometimes think I harp on this too much, but honestly, one of the best skills we can arm students (and everyone else) with these days is the gift of being able to research. The ability to recognize a good source and a bad source. The ability to cite where information was found so it can be verified by others. The ability to verify or disprove hypotheses and theories. Information literacy is a very necessary life skill.
Sadly, research is like math. So many students believe that they don’t need to learn it, and yet they use research skills every single day as they use Wikipedia to settle arguments with friends or use a search engine to figure out how to make their MySpace profile blink. They do research without ever realizing that’s what they’re doing (not unlike how they use math).
For the most part, I really like like this list of research tips. It covers the basics of getting off to a good start in conducting research. My only complaint is that Wikipedia is suggested as a valid starting point for conducting research. Longtime readers know that I’m against Wikipedia as a primary research tool, but it can help give you a direction when you’ve exhausted other avenues of research, as long as you remember you’ll have to do extra research to confirm or deny what you’ve found in the article.
Learn to conduct good, solid, defendable research!
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 7:31 AM EDT
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My reading lately has had an interesting theme showing up over and over- We aren’t teaching students well.
No, that’s unfair. It’s not that we aren’t teaching them well. It’s more that we aren’t giving them the full set of skills they’ll need to survive once they move past their schooling. We make them sit in seats quietly and take notes, read dry (somewhat inaccurate, highly outdated) textbooks, and teach them how to regurgitate information in response to familiar situations.
And this somehow is supposed to enable them to apply what they learned when they walk out of school.
Our total knowledge is more than just the facts we cram into our heads to pass a test (those same facts that fall out a day or three after the test because they were never given a fair chance to sink in). It’s what we do, what we apply in situations because we recognize patterns. We should be teaching kids to see pieces of a puzzle, and recognize what bit of gained knowledge would best help them fill in the missing bits.
That should be the point in most classes, enabling students with what some teachers call a “toolbox” of skills to tackle a problem. That’s the point of cumulative research projects that have become so popular in the local high schools. The point of group work is to put students into teams where everyone’s gained knowledge can interact to figure out how to best approach a problem. The point of internships, volunteer work, and work studies is to help students both gain new knowledge and to learn how to apply their own knowledge.
Are you seeing a pattern here? We shouldn’t be teaching students to regurgitate. We should be teaching them how to recognize the patterns that would suggest when to use a particular skill or combination of skills. Rote learning is so twentieth century, so let’s move into the twenty-first by encouraging students to connect what they are learning to practical applications, to solving problems, to thinking critically.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Knowledge Management, Teaching methods at 7:38 AM EDT
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Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.- Samuel Johnson
I think too often our students are so focused on the first type of knowledge that they forget to cultivate knowledge of the second type. I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to teach a high school student how to use a book’s table of contents and index to find information they either don’t know or have forgotten. Part of that, though, is that even once I’ve convinced the student to use these two useful resources, they get hung up because they don’t know the proper names for what they’re looking up.
My poor students know neither a subject or where to find information on it. They go to Google, type in their own wording for the topic (which may be nowhere near what they actually are studying), and then follow the first Wikipedia link they see. Several minutes later, they’re frustrated because they can’t find what they need. When I then show them how to use their textbook to help them find their information, they decide that’s too much work, even if it gives them the information they need more quickly than their fruitless web search.
Our students need to learn subjects. It’s one thing to be able to do the work. It’s quite another to be able to describe the processes and concepts involved in that work in the correct terminology.
Our students need to learn how to research, how to identify resources. They need to understand what makes a resource worth using and how to frame their queries.
Without one or the other, these students are going to flounder once they’re left to their own devices in college and beyond.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Knowledge Management at 8:12 AM EDT
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It talks about knowledge management, but part of me can’t help but look at it and wonder if it would make for an interesting method to instruct students in information literacy. Actually, I think it would be great to keep in mind when teaching students about information litercy, communication, media…a number of topics, actually.
It’s the first time I’ve read something about knowledge management that discusses knowledge management as a means of conserving and disseminating knowledge within a culture without resorting to a bunch of catchphrases and buzzwords, and I think it’s worth passing on.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Knowledge Management at 7:37 AM EDT
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I think this is something I probably keep revisiting, but I think it’s fairly interesting, especially in light of shifts slowly coming about in education.
When I was taking my oral comps for grad school, my chair asked me about my views on preserving data when the medium it has been captured on becomes obsolete.
I answered the question from a physical standpoint- you transfer the information onto a newer medium before the old one becomes obsolete. He thought that was a basically good, but incomplete response and kept asking me to consider the question from different points of view. It was hard to try to rethink preserving information in some form other than captured to a recent, relevant medium
The question was even more interesting because my background consisted of education and mythology. I loved sharing myths with people who visited the planetarium and then demonstrating how the myth were an oral tradition, capturing how a particular group of ancient people understood some astronomy concept or designated a constellation.
People have been looking to preserve information for all of time, prehistory and history both. What we’re currently seeing, though, is a desire, not so much to preserve, but to build up and fine-tune information as we work with it and become more familiar with its ins and outs.
In this time of collaborative learning, how do we approach the conservation of information that is constantly changing to reflect the newest knowledge?
Now there’s a question worth debating.
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized, Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 7:45 AM EST
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Somewhere or other, I have this great quote about how we don’t know what we know until we’re asked to use what we know.
This is actually one of the great challenges of teaching, tapping that tacit knowledge. We ask what a student knows, the students spouts back maybe a tenth of what he or she actually knows on that topic. We give them a practical exercise, and suddenly they know a lot more.
I’m still combing through all of the links, but I think this article addresses some of the concerns in tacit knowledge and its tacit uses. It’s a tricky subject, sure, but then again aren’t most topics in education a bit sticky? It’s hard to quantify what we do.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management at 1:57 PM EST
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If you’ve poked around the site at all, you’ll know that I am primarily a teacher. Regardless of where I am, what type of role I’m supposed to be filling, I teach. It’s a sickness, I really can’t stop myself at all.
Not that anybody thinks this is a problem, but I’ve often wondered if they offer self-help groups for us teachers. Some sort of Teachers’ Anonymous where I could stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Rebecca, and I can’t stop teaching.”
Of course, I like to think that earning a reputation as a fount of knowledge is the cure for the inability to stop teaching (we’ll ignore that it only seems to enable me). Over the last month, I’ve been asked a couple of times to share my thoughts on education and lifelong learning. At work, everyone is very excited that I’m creating a book full of my training notes, the procedures I know how to do, and anything else I can think to stuff in there.
I have been a teacher most of my life. I’m a trainer. I’m a writer. If I can find a way to share what I know, I do it! It seriously is an illness!
It should be the same with you. Take what you know and find a way to share it with at least three other people! Sharing knowledge is by far one of the easiest ways to preserve that knowledge.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management at 7:52 AM EDT
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I was reading this article on the value of knowledge in narrative form last week, and didn’t feel particularly surprised.
For centuries, the passing of knowledge occurred through oral traditions. Members of a culture were designated as knowledge repositories and learned all the knowledge available to pass on, and in turn passed it on to others. they were respected for this ability.
In time, written language was developed and these stories that had been passed were recorded. We now often refer to them as mythology or folklore. Knowledge was embedded in stories, and people were expected to listen carefully and interpret the meaning from the context of the story.
Of course it makes sense for knowledge to be passed in a narrative format. Much of what we know of ancient cultures was passed on this way.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Teaching methods, Information Architecture at 7:52 AM EDT
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It often amazes me how many terms I have grown up with from other areas of my life keep wandering into education. The first, and I’m finally making my peace with it (after a fashion) is the term “artifact”. I actually ahd to go to a dictionary to find out the full meaning of the word in order to accomodate this seemingly out of place use of the term.
The one I’m now wrestling with is “taxonomy”, a method of classifying. It’s been on my mind off and on for the past few months thanks to tagging and talk of folksonomies (or personomies). All of these odd terms that seem to have appeared becasue people felt that there was no term that truly fit the activity being described.
I’m still sorting out all of it in my own mind, but this article on defining taxonomy does a great job of comprehensively explaining the somewhat simple job a taxonomy can fulfill in the development of an informtaion architecture structure.
Posted by Rebecca as Knowledge Management, Information Architecture at 8:17 AM EDT
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