Transforming e-Knowledge

Last week I finished reading Transforming e-Knowledge by Donald Norris, Jon Mason, and Paul Lefrere. This book is a fantastic collection of stories, memes, theories, predictions, scenarios, reference lists, and diagrams about the future of knowing. I read the hardcopy on my travels the last couple of weeks, but the entire book is online. For free.

If you’re concerned with knowledge management, intellectual capital, how to prepare for knowledge standards, best practices, and how to succeed in the emerging e-knowledge industry, you simply must read this.

From the Foreword:

Underlying many of the contributions in this book is a debate about epistemology?when the knowledge technologies change so radically, they change not just what we know, but how we come to know it. The contributors here argue that knowledge is contextual, social, relativistic?not a discrete and unchanging object. The e-learning agenda creates the dilemma that while we can atomise knowledge into elements such as ?learning objects?, we must recognise that they are there to be shared, contextualised, and negotiated in the social context of the online community of practice.

From the Introduction:

We begin with a simple vision: in the Knowledge Economy, those individuals and enterprises that share and process their knowledge effectively have a great advantage.

To succeed in the Knowledge Economy, most of us will need an order-of-magnitude leap in our ability to create, acquire, assimilate, and share knowledge. Even the manner in which we experience knowledge will be transformed, through technologies and practices that exist today or will soon be available. Between now and the year 2010, best practices in knowledge sharing will be substantially reinvented in all settings?education, corporations, government, and associations and non-profits. That is our vision.

…

This book traces the three primary indicators of e-knowledge transformation: 1) Internet technologies, interoperability standards, and emerging e-knowledge repositories and marketplaces; 2) enterprise infrastructures, processes, and knowledge cultures; and 3) cascading cycles of reinvention of best practices, business models and strategies for e-knowledge.

Posted by Jay Cross at March 31, 2003 07:22 PM | TrackBack