Knowledge Power

Interdisciplinary Education for a Complex World

Alan Wilson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135161323
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Pedagogía
• Sous-sujet: Educación general

Success in the twenty-first century demands knowledge power – for individuals, organisations, cities, regions and countries. This book offers a map showing the structure of the knowledge space in a contemporary context. The routes beyond traditional disciplines are charted, in part based on the notions of superconcepts and superproblems. There are major implications for the development of education systems, particularly for universities but also for all employers as they seek to ensure that their organisations have the requisite knowledge to meet future challenges. In many instances, radical change is called for.

The traditional disciplines and their future development are reviewed and systems concepts are introduced to develop an interdisciplinary framework for the future. The nature of the knowledge core for different kinds of organisation is outlined in the context of development strategies and management capabilities.

Super concepts are introduced throughout and through these the reader is introduced to a range of authors who, it is argued, provide the signposts for the way ahead.

Chapter 1
The knowledge challenge

All economies – both local and national – function in a highly competitive environment. The 2008–9 credit crunch has exposed the fragility of the global economy. Populations are socially polarized – intranationally and internationally. There are significant challenges for public service delivery: in health and education, from care provision for the elderly, to providing adequate housing and transport infrastructure. The planning system should sustain ‘good’ cities. There are challenges of developing and maintaining civilized cultural vitality. We have the knowledge to resolve many of these issues but do not use it. We can create the requisite knowledge. This is the knowledge challenge. It will be met in large part through education, research and lifelong learning. The need for a revolution in education is at the heart of our argument.

1.1 The knowledge economy

We live at the centre of a knowledge explosion. Technological advance, in particular, is extraordinary. And yet we live in societies of enormous contrasts of wealth and poverty, and in which the challenge of providing good, ubiquitous public services is a seemingly impossible task. In the private sector, major corporations collapse with apparently unerring regularity. Crime is a major issue; the media dumbs down. There is too much that is uncivilized in too much behaviour. So what has gone wrong? Why doesn’t the growth of knowledge sustain progress? There are two kinds of question – broadly, social and economic. How can the knowledge explosion be harnessed to enhance the lives of individuals? How can we manage things better in organizations in both the public and private sectors of the economy? What does this mean for communities?

It is commonly argued that knowledge is now the key capital resource. Universities are seen as economic instruments. Companies appoint chief knowledge officers. Knowledge is also the key social resource: it empowers people in a knowledge-based economy; it is what underpins any kind of critical thinking. It is civilizing. In a phrase, what counts is knowledge power. To respond to the big issues, we have to begin by asking fundamental questions. What constitutes knowledge? And from this understanding, what constitutes knowledge power? We need to think radically and unconventionally – to reposition ourselves – to generate knowledge power for the contemporary age, for the economy, for communities and for ourselves as individuals.

It is well understood that as economies advance, they shift from being based on agriculture to manufacturing, and then to services. Knowledge economies are post-service economies. More workers are knowledge workers – information pro cessors. Successful companies and public organizations – successful urban, regional or national economies even – are those that marshal knowledge most effectively. Anderssen has argued that successful societies can be characterized as c-societies that have three key capacities (or capabilities)¹: cognitive, creative² and communications. The cognitive represents the store of knowledge; the creative, new knowledge; and communications capacity is important for high levels of connection and hence for sharing and gaining access to knowledge. The first two seem obvious conditions for success; the third somewhat less so. But communications capacity is fundamental for two reasons: because of the global economy of knowledge and because it provides a means of handling the knowledge explosion.

It is helpful at this early stage to anticipate a later discussion and introduce the notion of superconcepts – part of the knowledge power tool kit. These will be highlighted as they are introduced:

SC 1. C-societies and organizations with the following capabilities:

SC 1a: cognitive

SC 1b: creative

SC 1c: communications

The contemporary knowledge economy is in many respects obviously global, though as Giddens³ has argued that, almost paradoxically, localization often accompanies globalization. Interestingly, at least in modern times, there has always been a global economy of knowledge. Universities through their products – whether graduates or books – are key nodes in that economy. This notion must then be coupled with that of the knowledge explosion: in recent times the rate of growth of knowledge has accelerated sharply. The way to keep up, therefore, from the perspective of any one node, is to be well connected to others: communications capacity provides the access.

However, this is only part of the battle. Even if well connected, it is necessary to handle the large volume: to filter and to be able to navigate. This is precisely what is difficult in the use of ‘internet knowledge’. Search engines need to be intelligent, and they are not. And, as we will argue, deeper knowledge is rooted in concepts rather than ‘facts’. We need, therefore, to understand the key elements of knowledge power. We need knowledge power to move beyond the ‘facts’ – data and information – and indeed, beyond the rigidities of conventional disciplines. We need to understand where knowledge derives from. We need continually to enhance what we have. The second step, therefore, in coping with the knowledge explosion is to generate an understanding of the structure of knowledge at a higher level.

There are huge challenges here. But also tremendous excitement. It is not only the volume of knowledge that is expanding, but there are also sea-changes⁴ in the kinds of knowledge available to us. We need to understand the richness of what is now potentially available. We are offered glimpses of the depths of knowledge about our world through all the core disciplines of science – arts and humanities expand and the cultural industries are a growing part of the economy. There are major challenges in virtually all public services. Through knowledge power, these can be met. Individual lives can be enriched, economies can succeed in new ways and services can be transformed. A Utopian vision, but worth the battle!

Meeting the knowledge challenge will demand a revolution in the education system – not just the formal system at all levels, but also a commitment to continuing education and lifelong learning.

1.2 Definitions of knowledge

Our approach will be pragmatic rather than, in a formal sense, philosophical. The first thing to recognize, as we trailed earlier, is that knowledge not simply about ‘facts’⁵; it is about concepts as the elements of understanding.⁶ These elements will be combined into theories about aspects of the world. In many instances, it will then be possible formally to represent theories as models that constitute operational representations of our understanding. These elements combine to produce intelligence, capabilities and critical thinking.⁷ They allow us to be ambitious in our thinking, to cope with the ‘difficult’. They enable us to think things through. (It is all too easy to think of examples where consequences of actions and plans have not been thought through.) Bransford and Brown in How People Learn⁸ usefully summarize this from an educationalist’s perspective:

Learning with understanding requires a deep foundation of factual information and knowledge organised in a schema or conceptual framework.

We need to recognize at the outset, of course, that there are different kinds of knowledge, in particular, the theoretical and the practical.⁹ Knowledge can be seen as, conventionally, partitioned into disciplines (though these are, as we will see later, social coalitions to an extent) and in combinations of disciplines – thus constituting what is commonly called interdisciplinarity.¹⁰ So a key part of the argument will be to chart out the map of knowledge and its principal conventional partitions that have evolved, in many cases, over centuries. This provides a platform for an exploration of interdisciplinary knowledge power. This analysis will contribute to the necessary breadth of understanding; it will provide signposts when we need to search. It can be the basis of a radical programme of development.

1.3 Knowledge power

Knowledge power derives from concepts, theories and models that provide the basis of understanding and enable us to handle difficulty and complexity. Intuitively, this suggests that we need both breadth and depth – what Isaiah Berlin called the hedgehog and the fox.¹¹ We need the breadth to be able to recognize the kind of problem we have and to be able to select the appropriate elements from our conceptual tool kit. We need the depth to be able to confront real difficulty. We need to handle the knowledge explosion. Does this make the task impossible? Is the tool kit too big to carry? Even in a single discipline, there is a lot to master. But we can search for the higher level. We will argue that there are superconcepts that cross disciplines and which contribute both to our depth of understanding and help us to navigate the breadth. Also, that there are superproblems – generic problems – which are not being tackled because the intellectual equipment we have is inadequate.

Building the idea of knowledge power poses questions about the value of different kinds of knowledge: how to make judgements about interest and importance. The judgements about interest are inevitably subjective; those about importance, perhaps less so. We can, for instance, relate importance to the economy, an organization, an individual or to employment. A critical question is: who needs to know what? Part of the breadth argument is that we all need to know something about everything, so that we can, in principle, muster the requisite tools. And the depth argument implies that we should have the capability to tackle the most difficult problems: we need to know everything about something! There are serious implications for education at all levels here. As the argument proceeds, we illustrate by example. This leads us to some conclusions about directions of change¹² and so we will be concerned with priorities – academic, personal and corporate.¹³

1.4 An education revolution for the knowledge economy

Education conserves, creates and communicates knowledge – the 3 Cs again in another context. Success in the knowledge economy means success in education and the context generated by the knowledge explosion, and the contemporary economy demands a revolution. This is particularly true for higher education but there are implications for schools as well. Education has always been instrumental in two dimensions: for the economy, but also for liberal personal development, which is the basis of a civilized society. A valuable framework for beginning to articulate this revolution is provided by Cisco’s 2008 White Paper,¹⁴ which was rooted in the thinking of educationalists around the world. The focus of that paper is on schools, but its core argument can be applied to universities, and indeed more widely, and hence to the prospective drivers of the education revolution.

The authors of the paper use the language of IT to describe progression in education system development: think of the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0 – from enhanced computing and communication to something fundamentally different – the basis of collaborative technologies, for example. The Cisco authors characterize education 1.0 as pre-reform traditional education, usually centrally organized with a curriculum driven in a didactic way. Education 2.0 is a reformed system, which emphasizes teacher quality, a new curriculum, school accountability and effective leadership – all of which should be learner focused. This means devolution of authority to schools within a system in which the outputs of the school are measured, providing the basis of accountability. Leadership – headships – and teacher quality are vital elements.¹⁵ This can be characterized in a shorthand as R(T, C, A, L): reform (R) to deliver teacher quality (T), an effective curriculum (C), accountability (A) in a devolved system and delivered in part through good leadership (L) at both school and system (governance) levels.

However, the authors ask the question: what is, or what could be, education 3.0, the next phase? They add three areas for this development: twenty-first century skills (S), new web-supported pedagogy (P) and maximizing the contribution of technology (Tech). The whole package, therefore, can be coded as {R(T, C, A, L), S, P, Tech}...

Table des matières

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The knowledge challenge
• Chapter 2 The knowledge space
• Chapter 3 Beyond disciplines
• Chapter 4 Knowledge development
• Chapter 5 Requisite knowledge
• Chapter 6 Knowledge power and universities
• Chapter 7 Employers in the knowledge economy
• Chapter 8 Knowledge power
• Appendix 1 The power of mathematics
• Appendix 2 Superconcepts
• Appendix 3 Glossary of superconcepts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index