Notes from Millie D

Let me start off by saying that this section of George Siemens‘ book “Knowing Knowledge” was a very technical, philosophically approach to Knowledge and Connectivism.  I avoided philosophy in college until the last possible moment so this blog entry is not some of my best work…(I know excuses excuses)

“The more we desire knowledge for our intended purposes, the more inclined we are to filter and select based on our goals. The story of knowledge becomes more about us and less about letting knowledge speak for itself.”  George Siemens’  Knowing Knowledge (50).

Isn’t this the truth, in our adult lives we seem to specialize in our desire for knowledge.  When we specialize we can get tunnel vision and ignore knowledge that might enrich us in what we’re trying to accomplish.  As David Warlick stated in his keynote of the K12 Online Conference, “we need to take the side trips.”  When we take these side trips often times the end result is better.

Knowledge is based on how well we can relate new information to prior experiences and information.  When we encounter new information it is about the connections we make and how we sync that information based on our knowledge.  The stronger the connections we have to those prior experiences and information the stronger the change the information will stick and turn into knowledge. 

“Knowledge will be less of a product, and more of a process”  Siemens (55).  In today’s world of information overload we need to be able to organize the information so we can translate information into knowledge.  Web 2.0 tools have a common feature to many of them, a RSS feed.  Those RSS feeds are aggregated and allow me as well as others to organize the chaos of information contained in blogs, wikis, and other forms of information within our personal learning environments into a network that can be processed, internalized, filtered, and connected to create knowledge.  This doesn’t work for everyone but it works for me because my time is spent of processing, internalizing, filtering, and connecting instead of going out to find the information.