Musings on Brown & Duguid & the Future of Education

As mentioned in my last B&D post, I'm still feeling a little let down about the quality of information's social life. I'm also aggravated by the use of "pouring" instead of "poring" on p. 119. I'm trying not to let it color my view of the book, but if this was their resume....

I love the idea that knowledge is something you can attach/detach. How often have I wished to be able to perform a Vulcan mind meld on someone and detach their knowledge?? More often than I'd like to admit. The two big ideas I get from Chapter 5 are:

1. Practice makes perfect. Theories are great, but if you can't apply them, you're more information-rich than knowledgeable. Finding a way to share best practices in a community is important to the knowledge development of the community (p. 123-4).
2. People matter. Computers are not yet able to take our places. My personal experience this weekend, attending a family function...my brother-in-law took his wife to visit his grandparents' graves. He told her his great-grandparents were buried in the same cemetery, but he didn't know where because Nana (his grandmother) always showed him where they were. That knowledge was "attached" to her, and my brother-in-law didn't think about the fact that he might need it some day. He was eventually able to find the graves he was looking for, but it took a lot more effort than he anticipated. Now he has the knowledge, whereas before, he only had information. People often provide an important link in the information-to-knowledge chain that is not considered until they have been removed from the equation.

These two ideas were on my mind while I read Chapter 8. In one example relating to Hewlett-Packard engineers and Stanford students, B&D note that "the engineers, though they had lower academic credentials coming into the course, consistently outperformed the classroom students when tested on course material" (p. 221). I have to wonder how much of this higher performance by the engineers is due to the fact that they are already "practicing," -- that is, they are in the field and can apply the information they are learning to real-life situations.

I also kept thinking of Karen (Pettigrew) Fisher's work with "Information Grounds" (shout-out to anyone who took HIB). B&D seem to be suggesting that online educational communities lack the type of information ground that is available to on-campus students. Having taken both types of courses myself, I agree with this. In my personal experience, the community that forms among the online classmates is very different than the one that forms among the campus classmates. On campus, we talk about where to eat, what the traffic is like depending on where you live (a lot of one-upping going on here), interesting movies/exhibitions, how to choose an advisor, events on campus, whether you'll ever get a library job, etc. Online, our discussions tend to focus more on topical issues, such as how to set up a blog or how to obtain copies of electronic reference articles. Much time is spent hashing out various technical difficulties, which can be so extremely frustrating for everyone involved.

Unlike information, Brown seems to have an active social life, and he recently wrote "Minds on Fire" for Educause with Richard P. Adler. I think their definition of social learning is relevant to this discussion: "...social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions" (p. 18). Online educational communities that I have been a part of do engage in this type of "conversation" -- I think we learn a lot from each other. However, the online experience tends to filter out the information ground aspect of the college/university campus, making serendipitous connections and conversations more difficult. This can lead to a continued sense of isolation for online learners and a feeling that they are not a "real" member of the university/college they attend.

Last words: People go to college to get a degree. Duh. Where B&D found people who don't want to admit this is beyond me (p. 214). I'm pretty sure they shouldn't have built their DGB of the future on the University of Phoenix model. And when I'm taking lifelong learning courses, whether it's for a job or because I want to, they better not require anything gradable.