When we speak of the Knowledge Age, the Information Age, and the Digital Age, there are, for many people, are more or less speak of the same thing: all stemmed from, and are closely joined with latest developments and innovations in information, knowledge, and communications technologies. Technologies are seen as something that has a crucial involvement in education in the present and in the future. Schools and other society institutions have relied on it for the promotion and dissemination of ideas or information. In fact, for some, technologies are seen a catalyst that will revolutionize the traditional methods of teaching and learning, and solving all our problems.
Throughout the course of time, our techniques of learning new information and acquiring knowledge has become highly sophisticated than ever. The extensive transmission of digital technologies has played a vital role has become noticeable to the importance of information and knowledge for a diversity of contemporary economic and social forms. Knowledge-based economies has become a subject of discussion, analysis, and even promotion for various experts such as scholars, industrialists, politicians, and policy makers. In the present age where the use of digital technology has become rampant, a number of questions will rise whether there is anything new in the fabrication of knowledge or when knowledge itself change when the tools of its acquisition, representation and distribution become digital. In the long run, perhaps, there will also be shifts in power relations around knowledge; or have affected the traditional definitions of knowledge too. These possible conditions will be addressed in association to the academic system and to scholarly and professional practices. When we speak of change, it is not necessarily connotes as a positive thing. And so, it is necessary to be critical in what kinds of changes and innovations are desirable and deserving of being promoted, from the perspective of researchers and society more generally. This kind of knowledge produced by widespread digital technology is what we call as virtual knowledge.
To further add in the understanding of virtual knowledge, Andrew Webster (2014) would say that virtual knowledge is strongly related to the notion that knowledge is embedded in and performed by infrastructures. In programmatic notion, it speaks as a knowledge that is not ‘real’ knowledge; almost/uncertain/in-the-making knowledge; opening up a space for play of ideas. Crucially, not just ‘tools’ but ways in which new technologies have a recursive relation to objects of study such that the latter are themselves changed – socio-digital structuration.
More than 45 years ago, Kenneth Goldstein (1969: 8) wrote about the world of tomorrow, and looking 100 years into the future, he speculated that:
No one will use real money any more.
… through special electronic walls of their houses, which are huge television sets, the people are ‘plugged in’ to all the world and other parts of the solar system.
… the television sets, as you might guess, are three dimensional and color. The electronic wall also connects the set to libraries, museums, and the houses of friends.
Far-fetched as some of these ideas must have seemed at the time, in some ways they are already evident in many of our lives. The pace of change is getting ever faster as we come to terms with sensor technology, 3D printing, big data, voice recognition, automatic translation and human augmentation – all of which have huge implications for how knowledge is created and shared. However, Goldstein rightly cautioned that predictions will always be limited by our imagination, and that ‘the future will be shaped by many inventions that have not been thought of yet’ (Goldstein 1969: 7).
Access to the Internet continues to reach more and more people, spreading to increasingly remote areas. While many basic necessities such as clean water remain out of reach for large swathes of the world’s population, internet connectivity is growing at such a rate that some commentators predict most of the world will be online by 2025 (Schmidt and Cohen 2013: 4).
The United States, a relatively cloistered, isolated nation has gone from having two borders to having two hundred. These borders are unexplored, are un-demarcated, and have few effective treaties… For good and for ill, the wired networked nations of the world all share common borders. We now have two hundred reasons to care about the information revolution in developing countries. The Internet has brought more borders not fewer. (Wilson 2004: 10)
As we look towards a horizon of 2030, which coincides with the period of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is clear that many think we are on the threshold of a new and hugely significant era. This project does not make significant reference to the major social and geopolitical trends or the growing humanitarian and security concerns, but limits its scope primarily to the domains of digital technologies that enhance knowledge creation and sharing.
Focusing on the technology, we can anticipate a period of major transformation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014: 37) describe this as follows:
The digital progress we’ve seen recently is certainly impressive, but it’s just an indication of what’s to come. It’s the dawn of the second machine age. To understand why it’s unfolding now, we need to understand the nature of technological progress in the era of digital hardware, software and networks. In particular we need to understand its three key characteristics: this is exponential, digital and combinatorial.
The current education systems we have – our ideas of the purpose of educational institutions, what they should teach, the necessity of what they are teaching, and why students must learn it – are very much rooted from the Industrial Age systems, that education is developed to serve the needs of industrial societies. Because of the emergence of new digital technologies that have been added on to this model of education, they are being utilized to support the ideas of Industrial Age – not Knowledge Age. Thus, now that digital technologies is playing a role in re-developing the schools for the aims of Knowledge Age, it is important to re-think some of our traditional ideas about knowledge. We need to re-examine the particular place and purpose of the traditional disciplinary knowledge, which is the underlying foundation of the current school curriculum
With this, we begin in the two fundamental ideas that are central to Industrial Age education systems – its origin and purpose.
Industrial Age education systems are based on two key ideas: (1) the importance of traditional “disciplinary” knowledge; and (2) the necessity to “sort” people according to their likely employment destination.
Where did these ideas come from? In the Western European tradition, the first of these two ideas can be traced back to the work of the Ancient Greek philosophers, in particular Plato and Socrates. Plato wrote a great deal about education. He set out a model for education that, he thought, would produce a stable, secure, just society. This system, while open to all, was specifically designed to educate the “philosopher kings” – or future rulers – of his ideal state. The curriculum of this system was explicitly knowledge-centered. Plato thought that exposing individuals to particular kinds of knowledge – the best and greatest that human minds have been able to produce – would ‘train their minds’ in ways that would allow their development to parallel the development of the best minds of the past. His model is the basis of the traditional ‘academic’ curriculum that has structured Western education systems for thousands of years.
The systems of Industrial Age education are organized to mass-produce standardized output. Students undergo a “process” through the system we call as ‘batches’ – known about as year levels or classes. A curriculum that is set in advance is delivered to them a pre-determined order by people who specialize in different levels of production. The tasks to be completed are divided and broken down into smaller components. Students are guided and processed through each level that enables them to equip in themselves the certain specific skills or the basics, but which actually renders them from generating creative ideas by considering various possible solutions – and from seeing and understanding the whole situation and full purpose of what they are learning. Students are then put through various quality assessment devices as they proceed through the system, designed to evaluate or measure their capacity and qualification to the standards of the system.
Fields such as social science, philosophy, and business literature also had its attention to the development of knowledge or information as it is the one of the subject matter of discussion. This new kinds of theoretical or practical understanding of topics are closely related with the progression of “fast” capitalism, new modes of production, and new systems of management. In this new and changed work pattern there is a great force in focus on knowledge and learning, thus we develop and instill new and different meanings on to these terms. In this context then, knowledge and learning are somehow interrelated with words like ‘innovation’, ‘transformation’, ‘quality’, etc. Innovation means to re-model traditional definition and methods of knowledge in new ways – so, it is a process that eliminates the ‘old’ idea of knowledge, and quality now speaks of constant improvement. Therefore, now, knowledge is innovation, innovation is quality, and quality assessment is knowledge management. To put it simply, knowledge is being utilized to mean something different from its meaning in the context of education.
The sociologist Manuel Castells, in his massive empirical study of organizational transformation The rise of the network society, says that knowledge is no longer thought of as if it were the static product of human thought, a kind of ‘matter’ that can be codified in ‘disciplines’ or ‘expert individuals’. Rather, it is now widely understood as being more like ‘energy’, as something which is defined via its effectiveness in action, by the results it achieves. It is not a ‘thing’ that can be defined, pinned down, stored and measured, but a dynamic, fluid and generative ‘force’, or capacity to do things. For Castells, knowledge is now something that causes things to happen: it is no longer thought of as ‘stuff’ that can be learned and stored away for future use. It is something that is produced collaboratively, by teams of people, something that ‘happens’ in the relationships between those people. It is more like a ‘process’ than a product, it is constantly changing, evolving, ‘flowing’ and re- generating itself into new forms.
The development of the new meaning of knowledge described by Castells was predicted, in the mid-1970s, by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argued that knowledge, in post-modernism will be important, not because of its relationship with truth, reason and certainty, but for what he calls its ‘performativity’, its ‘energy’ or ability to do things, its ‘use-value’. It will be ‘mobilisized’ on an ‘as-and-when-needed’ basis to produce innovative new products: that is, it will be produced in order to be sold, and its value will be determined by whether or not its results sell. For Lyotard, the idea of knowledge as a set of universal truths is obsolete. Instead many reasons, many truths, many knowledge are both possible – and desirable. As a consequence, he says, traditional disciplinary boundaries are likely to dissolve, traditional methods of representing knowledge (books, articles and so on) and ‘expert’ individuals will be far less important, and new conceptions of learning will develop. According to Lyotard, learners will be encouraged to develop an understanding of an organized stock of ‘public’ and/or ‘professional’ knowledge (‘old’ knowledge), not in order to add to it, but to pursue ‘performativity’: to apply it to new situations, to use it and replace it in the process of ‘innovation’. They will be encouraged to understand the rules or established procedures of a discipline, profession or trade, not in order to follow them, but in order to see how they might be modified or ‘improved’.
Basically, the system of education in Industrial Age is described as having a great focus on the disciplines as ends in themselves and on print or text-based ways of representing knowledge and developing print literacy; learners are then disciplined by or incorporated into the disciplines.
Digital technologies used in this context tend to be used mainly for finding existing knowledge (e.g. from databases or the internet), and/or presenting existing knowledge (e.g. word-processing, PowerPoint, video/multi-media, web pages). These are ‘old knowledge’ skills. More significantly, however, they encourage learners to see themselves as passive spectators in relation to knowledge: – to see knowledge as something ‘out there’, already developed by others, and to see themselves as having no role to play in relation to knowledge – except to ‘consume’ it. Digital technologies could be very useful in providing support in this idea by allowing forms of connections/collaborations/relationships globally and locally that are needed to develop and produce new knowledge; by providing the resources and tools necessary for ‘real research’; by enabling learners to engage and explore different ways of making meaning – thru multimedia tools – and different identities; and by helping learners to build a sense of themselves as active knowledge-builders who have a unique role in making contribution.
Hence, the idea of knowledge, learning, and minds, for Knowledge Age is that knowledge is a process rather than a “thing”, “stuff” or commodity so to speak; it does things, it creates – thus it is more like energy than matter; it happens with a collective group, teams, not just with an individual “experts”; it can’t be systematized into disciplines but it develops on as as-and-when-needed basis. Further, learning involves generating new knowledge, not storing it; it is not an individual but primarily a group activity; it happens in real world problem-based contexts; and so, it should be just-in-time, not just-in-case. Ultimately, minds, contrary to common belief, are not containers, databases, or filling cabinets – places to store knowledge for “just-in-case” situations, but rather minds are resources that can be linked to other resources for the goal of producing new knowledge.
Accepting these new “mental models” of knowledge, mind and learning, forces us to re think the Industrial Age education system’s two key ideas. In the Knowledge Age model, everyone needs the kind of knowledge and skills traditionally only provided in “higher” education. We need new ways of organizing education based, not on the one-size-fits-all, but on new models that allow flexibility, multiplicity, and new ideas about ‘ability’. Secondly, we need a new way of thinking about what we teach, and why we teach it, a new way of thinking about the traditional disciplines that underpin the school curriculum.
The people have their significant function as creators and carriers of knowledge and this implies that where knowledge really counts, people count too more than ever. However, this view is in contrast with the modern world wherein interchange and the acquirement of information is becoming increasingly impersonal. When we see teaching more than what is as a mere delivery of information – we see a vivid picture of learning – one that encompasses the background, history, resources, and social context within which information resides and where learning can prosper. Remarkably, learning is a social process – meaning that it is very much influenced by the social groups that supply the assets to learn and by the learner’s identity – who advances as he or she assimilates knowledge and information. The learning of the people about things in general is always refracted through who they are and what they are trying to learn to be. It is a fact that information is a critical part of learning but it is only one among many forces at work. Moreover, compared to what is usually recognized, learning has become more demand driven. In this instance, we say that people learn most effectively and quickly in response to need. Contrastingly, if people cannot see the need for what’s being taught, hey tend to ignore or overlook it, reject it, or fail to assimilate it in any meaningful way.
The first dimensional shift concerns the evolving nature of literacy, which today involves not only text but also image and screen literacy. Beyond imagery, information navigation is perhaps the key component of the new literacy. The next dimension moves learning from an authority-based lecture model to the investigation and discovery that characterize surfing the World Wide Web, which, indeed, fuses learning and entertainment. The third
shift, pertaining to reasoning, connects to discovery-based learning in an extremely important way. Classically, reasoning is linked with the deductive and abstract. Yet young learners working with digital media seem to focus more on the concrete, a concept having to do with one’s abilities to find something—perhaps a tool, an object, or a document—that can be used or transformed for building something new. Web-smart kids hone their judgment skills through experience and triangulation as they surf the sheer scope and variety of resources the Web presents, the magnitude of which largely befuddles the non-digital adult. The final dimensional shift has to do with a bias to action, to try new things without reading the manual or taking a course. This tendency shifts the focus to learning in situation with and from each other. Learning becomes situated in action; it becomes as much social as cognitive, it is concrete rather than abstract, and it intertwines with judgment and exploration.
Our lives has become overly dependent with digital technologies for the primary purpose of communicating ideas and updating ourselves of latest issues and events happening globally. As we live in this Age of World Wide Web and Technology, we found ourselves getting instant access and exposure to information at greater and greater volumes. Our old modes of creating, consuming, and distributing knowledge is constantly changing because of the instant growth of digital content and tools. The number of people who are involved in the access and contribution of digital content is continuously increasing even though globally participation in the Digital Age remains unbalanced. Developing countries are likely to experience wide-ranging changes in how states and societies engage with knowledge over the next 15 years. As a result of these changes, people’s lives will possibly and potentially improve than ever because information and knowledge will be more available, avenues for political and economic engagement will increase, governments will be more transparent and responsive. However, alongside this benefits, there are also the dangers of a growing knowledge becoming divided due to influenced by technology access, threats to privacy, and the possibility of the loss of knowledge diversity. With this, it is apparent that digital technologies are changing our relationship with information and our imposed meaning on knowledge. Hence, it also affects our understanding and interpretation of the world. There emerge new tools that are already so mainstream that we usually fail to notice them – these range from social media to big data and online resources – that change our manner of creating, distributing, and consuming knowledge. The implications of many of these changes are profound and comprehensive that involve not only the aspect of access, availability, and scale of knowledge, but also for our relationship to that knowledge: our conception of what knowledge is of greatest importance, its origination, its validity and consistency, and our own roles in creating and engaging with it.