This is the subject of Chapter 4 of Prof Pierre Lévy’s book:
THE SEMANTIC SPHERE COMPUTATION, COGNITION AND THE INFORMATION ECONOMY Volume 1, which he has shared with ChangeMooc this week
This is a fascinating chapter on many counts and I found it easier to read and relate to that Chapter 1. Prof Lévy discusses the role of creative conversation in personal and social knowledge management, personal and collective intelligence and the ways in which knowledge and information will need to be shared, distributed and managed to keep pace with changing times. He writes:
To transform the deluge of information into useful, organized memory carrying knowledge across language barriers, moving with ease through the diversity of cultures, the creative conversation that arises from cyberspace needs a symbolic medium in keeping with its scope. (p135 – the last sentence of the chapter).
The focus of his book is the need for a symbolic medium and a new indexing system to replace current systems such as those based on the ways in which libraries organize information.
There is also a very interesting section in the chapter about strategies for personal knowledge management, but Lévy warns against reifying these, reminding us that these strategies will need to constantly change and evolve.
Particularly interesting for me, given the recent paper which Carmen Tschofen and I worked on ( http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1143 ) to explore dimensions of individual experience in a connected world, is what Lévy has to say about the relationship between the collective and the individual. He writes that ‘the crowd’ is not stupid; it is essential to our collective intelligence and knowledge, but the individual’s role in collective, creative conversions is not forgotten or underplayed.
The process of collaborative production of shared memory favours individual learning insofar as the individuals involve their personal experience in the conversations (the process of explication is always instructive) and involve the results of the conversations in the reorganization of their personal experiences. (p.122)
Prof Lévy will be speaking to ChangeMooc at 4.00 pm GMT (11.00 am EST) today and I am looking forward to learning more about his work and ideas.
