ambjorn keynote wsks-2008

Collaborative Survivalthrough Open Research and

Asynchronous Public Service Increasing the global organizational performance

of Humanity Inc.

Ambjörn NaeveKnowledge Management Research Group

Royal Institute of Technology, and Uppsala University

Sweden

http:// kmr.nada.kth.se/wiki/Amb

Keynote at the 1st World Summit on the Knowledge Society,Athens, September 24, 2008

The KMR group - what do we do?• We work with Asynchronous Public Service

in the form of infrastructures, architectures, frameworksand tools that contribute towards the creation of a PublicKnowledge and Learning Management Environment.

• This PKLME should enable a global, (synchronous and)asynchronous public discourse that aims to enhance thelearning of all participants.

• Our main information architecture for this PKLMEis the Knowledge Manifold (explained below).

• All our software is Open Source and based on SemanticWeb technology.

We work to enable a fundamental shift

• From: Teacher-centric, curricular-oriented “knowledge push”

• To: Learner-centric, interest-oriented “knowledge pull”

Sharing

Culture

Knowledge

IntegratingProcess

People

Technology

Management

Knowledge

Continous Learning

Performance Organizational Increased

A Major Aim of Knowledge Management

Functions

is to support the process of integratingpeople-, process-, and technology functionsin order to create a knowledge sharing culturethat supports continous learningaiming for increased organizational performance.

ConceptualInterface

SemanticWeb

Application Developers

End-Users

SHAMESCAMEdutella

KnowledgeManifold

Conzilla (concept browser)Confolio (concept portfolio)VWE (component composer)

Meditor (metadata editor)Formulator (formulet editor)SHAME consumerSCAM provider

ToolsFrameworksArchitectureInfrastructure

KMR contributions to a PKLME(Public Knowledge and Learning Management Environment)

Globally

Information

Age

Recorded Transmitted Annotated

Cuneiformwriting

Gutenbergprinting

Physicallymediated

Electronicallymediated

Archivinglibraries

SemanticWeb

The Globally Annotated Information Age

Challenges for a global knowledge community

• From knowledge philosophy to knowledge economy.• The knowledge emulation society.• The western self-image transformation.• Ever decreasing attention span.• Medial mass hysteria (”I am seen, therefore I exist”).• Globally relevant content (sustainable development).• Increasing ethical awareness.• Informed beggars (a TV set on top of each garbage dump).• Anti-terrorism (”hunt ʼem down and smoke ʼem out”).• New technical possibilities (semantic web, p2p, …).

Three questions:1) Given the pace of automatization

in todayʼs knowledge economy, where is the place of the average student in the workplace of tomorrow?

2) How can we counteract knowledge emulation and encourage intellectual curiosity and joy of exploration within the educational systems?

3) How can we make visible and encouragethe crucial work of “curating the knowledge volume”within higher educational institutions, where presently only “penetrating the knowledge surface” counts?

Three more questions:4) How can we counteract “edutainment” (= “easy fun”)

and promote the “hard fun” that leads to stories (= knowledge) with higher redundancy?

5) How can we counteract the increasing tendency to regard the students as “customers” of the educational systems, which builds a pressure to adjust the “product” to optimize customer satisfaction?

6) How can we foster “double-loop learning for sustainability”within our higher educational institutions, i.e., how can we transform them into learning organizations that help to re-orient our “global educational culture” towards building a sustainable future together?

Specialist

Generalist Generalist

Specialist

learning more & moreabout less & less

learning less & lessabout more & more

knowing nothingabout everything

knowing everythingabout nothing

a problemlooking fora solution

a solutionlooking fora problem

The Specialist / Generalist dilemma

The Sphere of Knowledge

Research ~ R2

Culture ~ R3

R

Fundamental problemswithin the educational systems

• lack of student interest.• life long teaching instead of life long learning.• lack of motivation to kno why (Whitehead).• decreasing interest in the natural sciences.

”Curricular-oriented knowledge push” leads to :

Our high-tech society is showing clear signs of beginning instability !

Technology Enhanced Learningis not a solution in itself, but:

• it enables non-traditional communication forms

• it can support global content sharing

• it allows the formation of distributed learning communities

The Semantic Web information architecture

• from teacher-centric to learner-centric education.

• from doctor-centric to patient-centric health care.

• from bureaucrat-centric to citizen-centric administration.

• from government-centric to citizen-centric democracy.

• from producer-centric to consumer-centric business models.

enables a shift from knowledge push to knowledge pull:

Scale

SmallLarge

Gloconomy: The Big SwitchGlocommunity and Glocality

Society

Production

Information

Local production process design

Inter-publishingOpen research

Intra-publishingClosed research

Global production process design

Electronically mediated global experts

Take what you can

from others

Open Source : Development process

Create a

modular design

Pub- lish

your own

code

Check for others’ improve-

ments

Re-factor

Are thereupdates

and/or new“serious” modules

?

Write the

rest your-

self

Todayʼs

Web

• the information is distributed• anyone can link anything to anything• but• the information about the information is

• document-based (XML)• centralized (70% in data bases)

• the information about the information is

• graph-based (RDF)• distributed

• anyone can express opinions about anything in a machine-processable context

Semantic

We see the Human Semantic Webas a mixture between

conceptual and pictorial“information landscapes”

that are linked in the structure of

a Knowledge Manifoldand allowing “deep search”

for both concepts, contexts and content

The Human Semantic Web

The Human Semantic Web (“Web 3.0”)

Concept network

The Conceptual Web

Concept

RDF triple

The Machine Semantic Web

The Web

Conzilla

A Knowledge Manifold• is a structured information architecture that supports a number of different strategies for information hiding.

• can be considered as a patchwork of knowledge, with a number of linked “knowledge patches,” each with its own knowledge gardener.

• allows the user to ask questions and search for certified live knowledge sources.

• can be used to design learner-centric learning environments (PLEs) that support question-based learning. (“knowledge-pull based on interest”)

Fundamental principles of the KM architecture

• Nobody can teach you anything. A good teacher can inspire you to learn.

• Your learning is enhanced by taking control of your own learning process.

• Your learning motivation is based on the experience of subject exitement and faith in your learning capacity from a live teacher.

• No ”problematic” questions can be answered in an automated way.• Respect for ignorance can only be upheld when the ignorant person is uneducated.

Seven different Knowledge Roles in a KM• Knowledge Cartographer

• Knowledge Composer

• Knowledge Librarian

• Knowledge Coach

• Knowledge Preacher

• Knowledge Plummer

• Knowledge Mentor

• constructs context-maps.

• fills context-maps with content-components.

• combines content-components into learning modules.

• cultivates questions.

• provides live answers.

• connects questions to relevant preachers.

• supplies motivation and supports self reflection.

Right-clicking on a concept or concept-relation brings up a menu with three choices: Contexts, Content, and Information.

• Selecting Contexts opens a sub-menu, which lists all the other contexts where this concept or concept-relation appears.

• Selecting Content opens a window (to the right) where the content-components of the concept or concept-relation are listed.

• Pointing to a content-component brings up information about it, and double-clicking on a content-component opens another window where the content is shown.

Conzilla (www.conzilla.org)

Content

Contexts

Concept

The Conzilla “Mantra”

Content in Contexts through Concept

= Outsides of Concept

= Inside of Concept= Border between these

Assess Design Implement Observe

Organizational Action

EnvironmentalResponse

Frameworks

RoutinesModels

Mental

Individual

Shared

Individual Action

World View

Organizational Routines

Conceptual Learning Operational Learning

Individual Single Loop LearningO

rganizational Single Loop Learning

Individual Double Loop Learning

Organizational Double Loop Learning

Individual / Organizational Learning

Modelled from Daniel Kim:The link between Individualand Organizational Learning

ModelsExplicitTacit Mental

AssumptionsFeelings Thoughts

Observe

“Maybe space”

Beliefs & Conscious

Act

Mental modeling

Maybe space

Ambjörn Naeve, San Francisco, 1976

The maybe spaces of Newton and Einstein

Ambjörn Naeve, San Francisco, 1976

Embryo of a value ontology

Source: Naeve, A., (2005) The Human Semantic Web - Shifting from Knowledge Push to Knowledge Pull

EconomyInformal Formal

Relational Transactional

Real Financial

Collapse

ServiceProtection

Emulation

Health care

Insurance

Community

Network

Collaboration

…Success

Product

Goods

Service

Money

facilitatesexchange

of

considers leads to

Forces that drive the creation of value accumulating collaboration networks

by conceptual bridgingConzilla: Disagreement Management

Conzilla: Disagreement Managementby conceptual bridging

by distributed dialogue mappingConzilla: Disagreement Management

Disagreement Managementby Conceptual Calibrationfor bottom-up ontological bridge-building

1. Agreeing on what we agree on.2. Agreeing on what we donʼt agree on.3. Documenting step 1 and step 2

in a way that we agree on.

Greatest advantage:Consensus does not have to be reached.

Source: Naeve, A., (2005) The Human Semantic Web - Shifting from Knowledge Push to Knowledge Pull

Money that smells (of ethics)

A simple model of the learning processthat only models the learnerʼs involvement in the process

Automatization / Life-Long Learning

Un

Able

ProjectPosition

Employ

Un

Automati- zation

Life-Long Learning

Rehabilitate

Burn-out

Employed

Goals

Obstacles

Actions

Increase shareholder value

High costs of salaries

Reduce costs of salaries

Reduce number of employees

Processes

Input / Output

Support

Computers

Programmers

Automatization

why

how

prevent

eliminate

Prerequisites

in order to

in order to

by

in order to

by

Increased unemployment

Doing more with less

Become You Your own

bank manager

an example of

Automatizationincreasing shareholder valueby decreasing nr of employees

Carnal

Tacit Explicit Story- telling

Mediocracy rules: Mass age mediaexternalization of sexuality

AristocracyMediocracyDemocracy

McLuhan:The mediais the massage

Knowledge

Good Bad

Advertise / ConsumeAdvertising takes us from feeling good (about ourselves) to feeling badenough to be willing to consume. Consumption takes us back to feelinggood about ourselves for a while, but not for too long, since that slowsdown the consumption process.

Adver- tise

Con- sume

Feel

Togetherness Loneliness

Break-up / ConnectConnecting globally and disconnecting locally is contributing to thetransformation from a relations-based to a transactions-based society.

Local Relational

Break-ups

Global Connective

Services

Deep

Informal

Shallow

Formal

CyberMath: finding the kernel of a linear map

CyberMath: avatars visiting the virtual museum

CyberMath: globally relevant information content

Unfortunately,this age of specialization has fostered an attitudewhere the attempts of interdisciplinaryunderstanding have been largely abandoned,giving way to the opposite attitude,the well-known way of the specialist.

In one of his philosophical essays Science and Humanism,Erwin Schrödinger discusses, among other things,the problems of specialization. He refers the reader toan article of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset,called La barbarie del ‘especialismo’,where he paints the picture of the specialized scientistas the typical representative of the brute ignorant rabble,the ‘hombre masa’ (mass-man),who endangers the survival of true civilization.

In the translation of Schrödinger, Ortega writes:

He is a person who, of all the things that a truly educated person ought to know of, is familiar only with one particular science, nay even of this science only that small portion is known to him in which he himself is engaged in research.

He reaches the point where he proclaims it a virtue not to take any notice of all that remains outside the narrow domain he himself cultivates, and denounces as dilettantist the curiosity that aims at the synthesis of all knowledge.

It comes to pass that he,secluded in the narrowness of his field of vision,actually succeeds in discovering new factsand in promoting his science (which he hardly knows)and promoting along with it the integrated human thought,which he with full determination ignores.

How has anything like this been possible,and how does it continue to be possible?

For we must strongly underlinethe inordinateness of this undeniable fact:experimental science has been advancedto a considerable extentby the work of fabulously mediocreand even less than mediocre persons.

Some Relevant Papers• Naeve, A., (2001) The Knowledge Manifold – an educationalarchitecture that supports inquiry-based customizableforms of e-learning, 2:nd European Conference on Web-BasedLearning Environments, Lund, October 24-26, 2001.http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/KnowledgeManifolds/KnowledgeManifold.pdf

• Naeve, A., (2001) The Concept Browser, a New Form of Knowledge Management Tool, Proc. of the 2:nd european conference on Web Based Learning Environments, Lund, Oct. 24-26, 2001.http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/ConceptualBrowsing/ConceptBrowser.doc• Naeve, A., (2005), The Human Semantic Web – Shifting from Knowledge Push to Knowledge Pull, International Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) Vol 1, No. 3, pp. 1-30, July-September 2005, http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/SemanticWeb/HSW.pdf

Some Strategically Important Books• Muhammad Yunus (2007): Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism.• Joel Kurtzman (1993): The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy has Destabilized the Worldʼs Markets and Created Financial Chaos.

• James Martin (2006): The Meaning of the 21:st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring our Future.• Michael Shuman (2006): The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition.• E. F. Schumacher (1973): Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.

• George Soros (1998): The Crisis of Global capitalism: Open Society Endangered.

• Peter Senge (1990, 2006): The Fifth Discipline. • Peter Senge, Claus-Otto Scharmer, et. al., (2006): Presence, An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society

Some Conzilla maps (Download Conzilla at www.conzilla.org)

Humanity Inc.:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layoutCM#e7e2ec115741c42d0

Ambjörnʼs maps:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/TEL-research-community/presentation/CM#ea00241132f2d1e2c

Threats to - and Possibilites for - the Survival of Humanity:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layout/contextmap#3624493c11c88c988e91c2dA Major Aim of Knowledge Management:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/KLM/layoutCM#af678c11586cfeefcSelfish and Unselfish Knowledge:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layoutCM#76358a115a4478b6cThe Big Switch:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layoutCM#76358a115a4478b6cThe Small-Mart Revolution:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layout/contextmap#-210ea64811c80d34cbf19feSystemic Patterns:http://org/conzilla/people/amb/systems-modeling/CM#e919f51133f838881245Asynchronous Public Service:http://www.conzilla.org/people/amb/KLM/layout/contextmap#54ab461511afa5bf6eb

www.conzilla.org/people/amb/humanity-inc/layout/contextmap#3624493c11c88c988e91c2d

ambjorn keynote wsks-2008

Education

knowledge society

knowledge manifold

knowledge pull

knowledge volume

knowledge philosophy

global knowledge community

knowledge emulation

pklme toolspublic knowledge