#PLENK2010 Growing knowledge with PIM

If you are a definition person, you might insist that knowledge management can be discussed only after defining knowledge, because this is what must be managed to warrant the term, otherwise it might be called only information management. I think that not every usage of a term like knowledge or information needs to refer to the same concept, and I would argue that:

• managing/ dealing with/ traversing pieces of information might well be called knowledge management because it generates or grows knowledge.

Navigating, or traversing information nodes like websites or desktop folders, discovering links and creating shortcuts, is a great way to create or strengthen conceptual connections.

However, I don’t duck out of the inevitable D-I-K (-W) definition started in the forums. Here is an old answer that does not yet account for connectivist relatedness patterns. Today, I would also put more emphasis on the diverging usages of the term “knowledge”, in particular

• the knowledge in the brain of a knower, and
• the “knowledge” of the society, accumulated like a tower in libraries and journals and encyclopedias — which is a legitimate and common usage of the term, although it might be seen as mere information.
   

More interesting than a single definition of knowledge, are the new distinctions of knowledge types that are afforded by connectivist notions:

• propositional knowledge that links subjects to predicates,
• knowledge that needs network structures with cross references rather than hierarchical tree structures to be represented, but still has binary (1 or 0) strength cross connections that either latch or not (”snap in” knowledge), and
• connective knowledge that allows for initially weak and strengthening connections.

The strengthening of connections also happens when I am traversing my folder structure and the cross referencing folder shortcuts of my (very imperfect) personal information repository.

4 November 2010 | PLENK2010 | Comments