Note: this is a draft

KNOWLEDGE WEB PROJECT OVERVIEW

In the modern world, where specialization is valued, knowledge is generally subdivided into separate subjects. The aim of graduate work (and of many careers) is to become expert in a small part of a subject field, and know more and more about less and less.

While this approach is essential to generate expertise in every field society requires, it has one major drawback: it isolates experts from one another, and opens a gulf between them and the general public. This can lead to problems in a number of ways. In the process of discovery and development, experts in one field may not necessarily understand the implications of work in an apparently unrelated field, simply because they may not be aware of it, or because it may be too esoteric. When fields come into contact, the effect is usually to generate innovation that is unexpected, and worse, not understood by the general public and its political representatives.

Given this approach, the present education system leaves most high school graduates (and many college graduates who are without specialist knowledge) unprepared when it comes to dealing with social issues relating particularly to science and technology. Some attempts are being made to bridge the gap with courses like "Science, Technology and Society." These are often established on an ad hoc basis, involving members of different faculties, each offering a snapshot of their field, but with little overall cohesion and direction.

Similarly, in many freshman classes, a Western Civilization course is still being taught which attempts to give students an overview of the cultural heritage of the West. Few such traditional courses include much mention of the relevance of the history of science and technology.

Theme-oriented education also isolates academic subjects in silos, presenting them as relatively unrelated to other subjects and to the world at large. This can leave students with the feeling that the course material is aimed primarily at passing tests, and irrelevant to their daily lives.

Finally, the absence of an established national adult-education program in most Western countries leaves the average citizen (who generally completes instruction in their late teens) increasingly out of touch, as the pace of innovation (and social change generated by advances in technology) quickens.

The spread of Internet use could offer one way to remedy the situation, were it not for the fact that the average person is not well prepared to use it. However, in an increasingly interdependent and wired world, people who are unable to think relationally about issues will find themselves educationally, politically and economically disenfranchised.

The Knowledge-Web approaches acquiring information in a way that addresses some of the above concerns:

In the way that it links everything to everything else, the Web makes it easy to see the wider relevance of study materials to other subjects and to life at large.

Making journeys on the Web prepares the user to look for connections in all areas of their life and work, a valuable skill in our increasingly inter-dependent, networked world.

Entry to the web is easy (any gateway will do), so the process is inclusive, not exclusive. Anyone, at any stage in study or career, can get in and get on. The user can access nuclear physics or Michelangelo starting from bananas, or Disney, or any other gateway subject that suits their interest or level of preparation.

The Web offers teachers a structured but (because of its scale) virtually unlimited arena in which their students can learn without getting lost, and, in searching out their own pathways through knowledge, learn to use the basic connective processes that generate innovative ideas.

Given the very large number of potential pathways through the Web, most students would find it easy to develop their own idiosyncratic ways of approaching assignments.

Perhaps most important, the Web offers the opportunity to judge intelligence not only via a test of rote learning, but by assessing the nature of the journey the student chooses to take each time. One such assessment might involve asking students to choose a pathway to a target person, event, artifact, school of thought, etc., and see how imaginatively they plan their journey.

At the core will be the K-Web, comprised of thousands of nodes embedded in a sea of connections. Connections are established the way they are in real life: they exist because people meet, are inspired, fight, love, cheat, work for, are in the family of, in the same discipline as one another, etc. Connections are... happenstance, just like life. The K-Web can be visualized as a vast, incredibly complex set of pathways through space and time. When these pathways meet and cross, things happen. All of the paths ultimately begin in the ancient past, and each of the pathways ends somewhere in the modern world, because the modern world is the outcome of all those events.

An example of a K-Web pathway that illustrates the simplest kind of interdisciplinary sequence:

James Watt (mechanic) > who worked with > Boulton (businessman) > who worked for > Adam (architect) > who learned from > Winckelmann (art history) > who fell for > Kauffmann (paintress) > who painted > Garrick (actor) > who put in his theater the lamp designed by > Argand (wine-maker) > who got development funding from > Necker (French politician) > whose daughter was > De Stael (Romantic author) > who seduced > Schlegel (philosopher) > who was the pal of > Herder (teacher) > who started > the Romantic Movement (ideology) > inspired by > the third-century Celtic poem "Ossian" (fake) > really written by > McPherson (antiquarian) > whose daughter married > Brewster (inventor, kaleidoscope) > who worked with > Marie Curie (discoverer of radioactivity) > whose lover > Paul Langevin (physicist) > invented > sonar (warfare).

The point about viewing knowledge and history like this is because that's the way things happen.

Each node on the K-Web also connects with up to twenty others. So is it possible to enter the web and follow connections, without repeating the same track, many thousands of times over. The aim of the K-Web is to show the way in which all knowledge is connected to all other knowledge.

The essential attraction of the K-Web is that it imposes no prior restrictions on use. There is no single right way to use it, no single correct pathway to a target. The web can be entered through any gateway that suits the user's personal attributes, preferences and educational qualifications. Anybody can play.

In the classroom, teachers might choose to indicate a target or number of targets for students to find or connect, and then have the students describe the route they took. Students might be also asked to design their own connections. Used as a teaching tool, the K-Web might serve to introduce freshman students to their chosen major/minor by putting the subjects in their true interdisciplinary context. In such a situation, students might be required to "travel" to their specialist subject area a number of times. These journeys would serve to show the relevance of their subject to other disciplines and help to enrich their understanding of the subject. Used in this way, the K-Web might also serve as an updated version of the present Western Civilization college freshman source. The web would also aid teachers in high school to enliven curriculum course material, and to give students a different view of the way in which learning can be done. The web might also prove attractive to parents as a kind of "game" version of encyclopedias, given added value by its interactive nature and by the fact that users can add to it.

The K-Web intends to offer a new way of presenting information in context, rather than the traditional way in which data is isolated, subject-oriented and often removed from the everyday life of the student. There is growing awareness in the academic community of the need to find a fresh approach to learning that is more attuned to the increasingly interactive modern world than was the old, reductionist, memory-based way. With the rapidly-growing pervasion of the Internet in almost every area of life, the K-Web also offers a learning system that encourages learners to think interactively. While it imparts knowledge, it also trains the user in ways of thinking that will become increasingly required for success in the twenty-first century.

If innovation is the result of interaction in a great web of change, then the way for us to better manage change is to become acquainted with the interactive process. So in a future world, changing too fast for the old fashioned, specialist approach to education, it may benefit us to require young people to journey the web as a primary learning experience, much in the same way as we taught their ancestors to read books after Guttenberg had invented the printing press.

We might even consider changing our definition of intelligence. Instead of judging people by their ability to memorize, to think sequentially, and to write good prose, we might measure intelligence by the ability to make imaginative patterns on the web. endit --JB