Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 24.1
(continued)
Knowledge-building
principles
Definitions
Epistemic agency
Participants set forth their ideas and negotiate a fit between
personal ideas and ideas of others, using contrasts to spark and
sustain knowledge advancement rather than depending on others
to chart that course for them. They deal with problems of goals,
motivation, evaluation, and long-range planning that are
normally left to teachers or managers
Democratizing
knowledge
All participants are legitimate contributors to the shared goals of
the community; all take pride in knowledge advances achieved
by the group. The diversity and divisional differences
represented in any organization do not lead to separations along
knowledge have/have-not or innovator/non-innovator lines. All
are empowered to engage in knowledge innovation
Community
knowledge/collective
responsibility
Contributions to shared, top-level goals of the organization are
prized and rewarded as much as individual achievements. Team
members produce ideas of value to others and share
responsibility for the overall advancement of knowledge in the
community
Embedded
transformative
assessment
The community engages in its own internal assessment, which is
both more fine-tuned and rigorous than external assessment, and
serves to ensure that the community's work will exceed the
expectations of external assessors
Constructive use of
authoritative sources
To know a discipline is to be in touch with the present state and
growing edge of knowledge in the field. This requires respect
and understanding of authoritative sources, combined with a
critical stance toward them
Rise—above
Creative knowledge building entails working toward more
inclusive principles and higher-level formulations of problems.
It means learning to work with diversity, complexity and
messiness, and out of that achieve new syntheses. By moving to
higher planes of understanding knowledge builders transcend
trivialities and oversimplifications and move beyond current best
practices
Pervasive knowledge
building
Knowledge building is not confined to particular occasions or
subjects but pervades mental life—in and out of school
Symmetric knowledge
advances
Expertise is distributed within and between communities.
Symmetry in knowledge advancement results from knowledge
exchange and from the fact that to give knowledge is to get
knowledge
Online Discourse
Collaboration tools in this study were Knowledge Forum and a web-based videocon-
ferencing system, thus combining asynchronous written online classroom discourse
with synchronous oral discourse. Although we believe that hybrid learning envi-
ronments are most effective (Laferriere, Lamon & Breuleux, in press), this paper
