Knowledge Building: Theory, Pedagogy, and Technology
Bookmarked: Knowledge Building: Theory, Pedagogy, and Technology
http://ikit.org/fulltext/2006_KBTheory.pdf
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and technology. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 97-118). New York: Cambridge University Press.
#cogntiiveapprenticeship #agency #knowledge #innovation
Accordingly, it involves students not only developing knowledge-building competencies but also coming to see themselves and their work as part of the civilization-wide effort to advance knowledge frontiers.
- Knowledge advancement as a community rather than individual achievement
- Knowledge advancement as idea improvement rather than as progress toward true or warranted belief
- Knowledge of in contrast to knowledge about
- Discourse as collaborative problem solving rather than as argumentation
- Constructive use of authoritative information
- Understanding as an emergent
Knowledge building pedagogy is based on the premise that authentic creative knowledge work can take place in school classrooms
One component of knowledge building is the creation of “epistemic artifacts,” tools that serve in the further advancement of knowledge (Sterelny, 2005).
In knowledge building, idea improvement is an explicit principle, something that guides the efforts of students and teachers rather than something that remains implicit in inquiry and learning activities
From a pragmatic standpoint, a more useful distinction is between knowledge about and knowledge of something. Knowledge about sky-diving, for instance, would consist of all the declarative knowledge you can retrieve when prompted to state what you know about sky-diving. Such knowledge could be conveniently and adequately represented in a concept net. Knowledge of sky-diving, however, implies an ability to do or to participate in the activity of sky-diving
The strong version asserts that the state of public knowledge in a community only exists in the discourse of that community, and the progress of knowledge just is the progress of knowledge-building discourse.
New conceptual structures, like crystals and ant colonies, emerge through the interaction of simpler elements that do not singly or in combination represent the new concept (Sawyer, 2003). This became evident with the rise of connectionism in the late 1980s (Bereiter, 1991). Connectionist models of learning and development characteristically generate progress from a conceptually impoverished to a conceptually richer system, sometimes by a process analogous to learning from experience and sometimes only by internal self-organization. Connectionist models are examples of the larger class of dynamic systems models, all of which attempt to deal in some rigorous way with emergent phenomena
There is no way to create higher-level organizations of information, to comment simultaneously on a number of messages, or to make a connection between a message in one thread and a message in another. Thus the possibilities for knowledge building discourse are extremely limited. In fact, our experience is that threaded discussion militates against deepening inquiry; instead, it is much more suited to rapid question-answer and assertionresponse exchanges. Although communities based on shared interests do develop in some threaded discussion forums, this technology provides little means for a group to organize its efforts around a common goal.
“epistemic agency” (Scardamalia, 2000). Although among philosophers this term denotes responsibility for one’s beliefs (Reed, 2001), we use the term more broadly: epistemic agency refers to the amount of individual or collective control people have over the whole range of components of knowledge building—goals, strategies, resources, evaluation of results, and so on
