David Weinberger on the Nature of Knowledge: A Viewing Guide

The following keynote by David Weinberger was presented at KMWorld 2012 conference held November 2012 in Washington, DC.

 

Thanks to the folks at Information Today for sharing this video (and the other videos) so that we all have the opportunity to benefit from them.

About the speaker

David Weinberger is a fellow and senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is also Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. In and of itself, this is pretty awesome in my estimation.

I first came to know him as one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto which pre-dated the social web. When I first read this I didn't know he had a law and library connection. Since then he has authored some prominent publications as well as numerous articles in popular publications such as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, The Guardian and Wired.

• Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Books, 2002)
• Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007)
• Too Big to Know (Basic Books, 2012)

Home page: http://www.evident.com/
Blog: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
Twitter:  @dweinberger
Google+: David Weinberger

The Knowledge Hierarchy

In the video above, Weinberger starts by discussing the class Knowledge Pyramid, known by various names such as the DIKW Hierarchy (for data, information, knowledge, wisdom), the Wisdom Pyramid and others.

I couldn't find an uncopyrighted image that I liked, so I created one (below). Feel free to steal this:

Viewing Questions

Here are some questions to guide your viewing. Answer these based on the thinking David Weinberger  discusses in his keynote talk (the video above):

1. What are the four traditional properties of knowledge?
2. Our traditional idea of knowledge and the pyramid of knowledge (knowledge hierarchy) is based on what medium?
3. What are the properties of the new knowledge networks?
4. What website from Cornell University Library does he mention used for quickly releasing papers/studies without peer review?
5. What is distinct about the new networks that we did not have in the past?
6. What website does he mention that places the names (identifiers) of animals and plants into a range of taxonomies?
7. What four lessons from science does he identify for knowledge networks?
8. What two websites does he identify that allo developers to learn from one another?
9. What three lessons from developers does he identify for knowledge networks?
10. How does the Internet affect learning?
11. Have a look at the Library of Congress photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/. They initiated The Commons movement to release images no longer under copyright. According to Weinberger, why did the LOC release the photos in the first place?
12. What does he say are the benefits of "messiness"?
13. What is an echo chamber? What is the problem with echo chambers?  (Some people in social media call this the "fish bowl")
14. What is Reddit?
    
15. How can we make rooms "smarter"?
16. Weinberger claims our educational institutions fell over "at the touch of a hyperlink." What does he mean by this?
17. What are properties of networks/the Internet, that he says are also now properties of knowledge?
18. What does Weinberger say we all have in common?