The Work of Knowledge

1. In Wikipedia, look for some of the concepts or topics we have discussed in class and share your impressions and comments about the information presented. Is there anything you would add or edit?

Shedroff’s Model of Understanding is not in Wikipedia at all nor is Nathan Shedroff. It seems like a significant work so I was surprised that it did not have an entry. This sent me to Shedroff’s website. I found the model of understanding in a section called Information Interaction Design: A Unified Field Theory of Design and discovered that the model (which Shedroff labels A Continuum of Understanding) is from 1994, much earlier than I assumed since Shedroff looks barely out of college in pictures I’ve seen of him on the web. The model of understanding is only a small part of his field theory of design which may explain its absence in Wikipedia to some degree. I will consider adding this to Wikipedia but there is not much on the internet about the model outside of Shedroff’s own words regarding it so it may prove difficult to do a thorough entry but the nice thing is that I could give it a start and others can edit as needed.

Nicholas Belkin has a brief entry and his ASK model is mentioned in the entry but does not have its own entry. Belkin’s original 1982 article is linked at the bottom of the entry.

Francis J. Aguilar does have a sparse entry but it could be greatly improved by adding some of the information from this article from the Harvard Business School. I would like to add that information (which will be much easier than adding Shedroff’s model of understanding) but even these edits require me to learn more about how to edit Wikipedia articles. I previously edited some years ago but the markup looks foreign to me now. The entry shows Aguilar as a living person but he passed away this past February and I removed the ‘living person’ category from the entry.

Marcia Bates has an entry and her Berrypicking Model is part of an entry on Cognitive Models of Information Retrieval. This seems like a minimal treatment. The image found on this page could be added and it would benefit from the addition of the 6 specific strategies that Bates proposed as part of her model. Wikipedia also mentions that the main entry is an "orphan” which means that it has no other pages linking to it. This certainly makes it difficult to find the page and it would be worthwhile to find related pages to link from.

Brenda Dervin and Sensemaking are well represented.

2. On page 212, Weinberger gives an example of a third-order description of an imaginary person. Imagine that you are preparing a resume for a job application – a first order information package - how would you better tag yourself in terms of the third order to make yourself more marketable?

I’m reading an ebook version and the pages don’t quite match up but I think this is referring to this description: “a potential team member can be a pretty good French speaker, a great applications expert, a mediocre people person, and very reasonably priced.”

My initial reaction is that the third order allows for more flexibility than I might prefer. Whereas on a first order resume, I could simply leave off certain things that I don’t want to mention, a third order resume might force me to say something like “barely tolerable people person.” I suppose the greatest benefit to me would be that I could feel free to include competencies in areas outside of what would be most directly relevant to the job I am applying for. When applying for my current job, the application was a typical first order type of document but it did provide plenty of space for me to expand beyond simple answers. I don’t recall the entire document or my answers but I doubt that my high level of competency with technology was asked about or answered but my fluency in Chinese was included. By tagging ourselves in the third order and letting employers know that they get MORE than an “assistant librarian” or MORE than a “staff accountant” we can make ourselves more marketable.

3. On page 215, Weinberger writes that “understanding is metaknowledge” – relate this to Shedroff’s model of Understanding as presented earlier in this course. Search for the model on the web if necessary.

Since we can define metadata as “data about data” I suppose we won’t be wrong to suppose that metaknowledge can be defined as “knowledge about knowledge.”

On Shedroff’s website, he writes about his model of understanding within the context of A Unified Theory of Design. He specifically mentions his “understanding continuum” here and includes this image:

There is much we can glean from just this image but there is one additional important aspect about knowledge that I will get to momentarily. From this image, we can see that knowledge is in the “no man’s land” between wisdom and information. Shedroff uses a line to mark this but it might be better illustrated by a gradient between the 2 colored halves of the large circle since knowledge rarely comes on us like the proverbial lightbulb over one’s head. As we gather information from a wide range of sources (indicated by the ‘global’ label in the image, we begin to process it in a way that leadds to knowledge. This newly synthesized knowledge can affect the way we continue to interact with the available information and we move more towards the personal and participatory side of the circle where we may discover some degree of wisdom. This all happens within our particular context as is noted in the image.

Another image from Shedroff gives some more insight into something unique about knowledge.

In this image, we see the important role that our experience has in the development of knowledge. In fact, it completely encircles the knowledge portion of the continuum to indicate its supreme importance.

My own unique experiences have granted a fertile field for the development of knowledge. I don’t mean that my experiences are better than anyone else’s nor am I saying that my knowledge is more vast or of a higher quality. Each of us has opportunities to learn from information presented to us within the context of our own unique experiences and we must choose how we will engage that information. I find it difficult to be critical of Shedroff’s model because my own life seems to reflect that his model may be true. Through conversations, stories, and integration of information into my context and experiences I have gained knowledge – sometimes even to a degree that others will listen to me talk about what I know. Whether this indicates some measure of wisdom I’m not sure.

In the section called “The Experience of Knowledge” Shedroff explains:

With every experience, we acquire knowledge; it is the understanding gained through experiences--good or bad. Knowledge is communicated by building compelling interactions with others or with tools so that the patterns and meanings in their information can be learned by others.

There are many types of experiences that confer different types of knowledge. Some knowledge is personal, having meaning unique to one person's experiences, thoughts, or point of view. Local knowledge is knowledge shared by a few people because of their shared experiences. Global knowledge is more general, limited, and process-based, since it relies on such heavy levels of shared understandings and agreements about communication. Effective communication must take into account the audience's level of knowledge. This makes it more difficult to communicate to larger audiences because the pool of shared knowledge is less detailed and more generalized. Knowledge is gained through a process of integration, both in the presentation and in the mind of the participant. Information forms the stimulus of an experience while wisdom can be the understanding of the message gained through the experience. Knowledge is a fundamentally participatory level of communication and we should always make it our goal because it allows the most valuable messages to be conveyed.

To me, Shedroff’s model and this explanation of our experiences as a source of knowledge is a superb example of knowledge about knowledge, or metaknowledge.