The Web of Knowledge: Vision, Design and Practice

The Web of Knowledge: Vision, Design, and Practice

by Patrick McKercher, Judy Bonne and Andy Rogers

The Knowledge Web (K-Web) is an interactive tool for understanding and inspiring the creation of ideas, and for vividly demonstrating how our world is a direct result of ideas and events of the past. Students can trace the profound influence not only of Aristotle's logic, but also see how perspective in painting literally changed the way we see the world, or how the invention of the car would not have been possible without the perfume bottle. By flying through its unique 3D nested globes, which combine space and time into a single intuitive construct, users can explore how seemingly unrelated people, places and disciplines interrelate in unexpected and unpredictable ways to produce our world.

The first section of the article, The Vision, traces the origins and socioeconomic importance of the K-Web. Patrick McKercher sketches what the K-Web will do, including how it will be enhanced by virtual reality in the second section--The Design. Andy Rogers and Judy Bonne conclude with a discussion of the involvement of teachers, and suggest why and how the K-Web can be integrated into the classroom--The Practice.

The Vision

Perhaps the Connections books and television programs resonate with people because its associative nature reflects the architecture of our minds, or because the serendipity in it mirrors our own experience. For example, the Connections series itself was the result of James Burke's ability to speak Italian, which led to the BBC hiring him to make a program on the mafia in Sicily. No fool, he suggested we make a program on how one could NOT make a program about the mafia in Sicily. After the program won some recognition, the BBC asked him to tell them what he'd like to do next, in a single sentence, next week if you please.

You can imagine the frantic rummaging through books for inspiration which ensued, until he came across a footnote on how the stirrup, a device for loading camels, had been adopted by medieval horsemen with lances to be able to stay mounted and thus skewer multiple enemies. This resulted in the need for larger war horses, and thus some alteration in agricultural and ultimately social practices. When he asked the "stirrup" scholar if he could use his idea, he replied, "Young man, you don't think we're born with ideas, do you? I stole it, you steal it." And so began his investigation on the social impact of technological innovation.

In doing the prodigious amounts of research for the Connections books and television series, Burke began to see how innovation happens--not smoothly, but in fits and starts. For example, a needed piece emerges, or someone takes the disparate pieces that have been lying around and assembles them, as was the case with the telephone. Given the crucial importance of integration, in looking at the present he was somewhat troubled at the Balkanizing overspecialization resulting from the information explosion of the post-war era (a friend got his Ph.D. in Milton's use of the comma).

Even within the same discipline, industry, company, or lab, people are creating things having no idea what the person at the next bench is up to, or how these different products might interrelate in great or frightening ways. Perhaps more ominous, ordinary people, and even their political representatives, throw up their hands, content to leave the decision to these "experts." Since this system has given us massive environmental degradation and alienated most of the people on the planet, we clearly need to think systemically--especially in this transitional period (from a national industrial to an international information based economy).

This transformation may well be the reason our schools are now often seen as not doing their job--because that job has changed but without our noticing it consciously. We forget (or perhaps we remember too well) what a phenomenal success the schools were in the last century: a free ubiquitous national system which united people from all over the world, and gave them the literacy to be competent citizens and workers. Granted, we had a lockstep one-size-fits-all approach, but it was an industrial model suited to an industrial age. Fortunately, technology gives us the ability to tailor education just as surely as it can allow you to order a laptop or car to your specifications and needs. Reductionism and specialization worked well in the machine age, but now our students need twenty-first century skills; creative problem solving, communication and people skills, technology, and the ability to stand back and see how fragments can be unified.

We noted above that sometimes an idea will lie fallow for a while until a piece comes along to enable it, and so it was with the Knowledge Web. Burke found himself doing a good bit of traveling, especially to the Silicon Valley, whose residents value innovation perhaps more than anywhere else because they see on a daily basis what happens to those who don't. He began doodling away on meter square sheets of paper, diagramming the people and things in my books, as well as their connections. He'd occasionally show these spaghetti diagrams, found some software that would allow me to do it digitally on a much larger scale, and began designing a computer interface that would allow people to not only accompany him on the sort of pinball journeys through human history in my books and television programs, but to create their own.

Happily, this coincided with the giddy dot-com period in which business plans were considered hopelessly passé, so he was able to enlist some support for artists' conceptions of the system. After the dot-bomb bubble burst, he thought that was the end of it. When some teachers who'd somehow heard rumors about it wrote to ask when it'd be ready to use, he had to break the bad news to them. They suggested politely that he had it backwards: instead of my building the thing hoping some community would adopt it, why not let a community build it? Teachers understood how essential a tool the Knowledge Web could be in the transformation of education. Who better to build the K-Web? The team quickly grew from four to forty, and we're well on our way to four hundred--teachers, designers, programmers, and other professionals bringing a myriad of skills together. The K-Web is being built by a community, but is also a community building tool which can reintegrate people and schools.

The Design

The Knowledge Web vividly demonstrates that all subjects are connected, and offers an innovative, accessible yet compelling and powerful tool for their exploration. Moreover, it graphically shows that the present is the outgrowth of the past, and helps us anticipate the future.

The K-Web is informed by Constructivist methodology, and thus the ability of students to create material, not just passively consume it, is key. It is what one of the project advisors Doug Engelbart (best known for creating the computer mouse and a pioneer of virtual collaborative organizations) calls a Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Not only will its database be able to connect to the Library of Congress and other digital collections, but students will be able to contribute content. In this ever-growing omnipedia or library, the user can get the kind of information she wants in the way she wants it (text, video, simulations and immersive virtual reality.) Moreover, the user can see how ideas of a given text evolved (or even mutated) through time, how they were situated in varying contexts, and their effects on our lives today.

But the Knowledge Web goes beyond interactivity to immersion. Selected people and places will be recreated in virtual reality; thus students could visit DaVinci's studio, chat with him, read his notebooks, and solve a problem with him and other students in real time using his materials or apparatus. It might seem that educational virtual reality (edVR) is too difficult and expensive, but the opposite is true. The software is free, and some software like Activeworlds makes creation of such environments so simple that middle school students make them. Some artificial intelligence programs are so easy that the only skill required to teach a character to interact with a user is typing. Students can create learning environments for other students, and teachers will be able to pool assignments they've created based on the K-Web in a searchable database articulated to standards and frameworks.

Perhaps the most important reason for edVR is that it enables the creation of empowering metaphors. Our culture in general and higher education in particular overemphasizes analytical reductionism and the breaking of things into simplest components. This is done at the expense of synthetic and metaphorical thinking like putting different ideas together, or seeing X as Y.

Science will sometimes give grudging acknowledgment of Einstein's imagining he was riding a beam of light, or Kekule's dream of the serpent eating its tail that enabled him to crack the carbon problem, but the Scientific Method never explains how we do Step Two: form a hypothesis. Reductionism is not the answer to thinking creatively about these more complex problems.

EdVR allows role-playing and simulations, which enables rich exploration of complex situations. For example, my eCollegE VR project allows a student to be a head of state, getting briefed in order to act during an environmental crisis [link: http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/vc8main.html]. Such role-playing brings us back to the original meaning of e-ducation, to draw out: students can engage passionately but safely.

I am excited by the potential of VR for a number of other reasons (see: http://cyburkespace.net/content/origins.htm), but briefly it lends itself to constructivism by its very nature. Often students too shy to participate in class or who do not shine in the rather narrow range of behavior we call being a good student will do so in virtual spaces. When students see VR, they want to master it, which requires all sorts of mathematical, artistic and even diplomatic skills. They either have to acquire these skills or deal with those who have them.

An important aspect of the Knowledge Web is that we involve students and teachers as participatory designers. We learn by best by doing together and we are "hard-wired" to play, to build and to work cooperatively. Students build learning experiences that require many and high level thinking skills, precisely those needed in the twenty-first century. This is further explored below.

The Practice

The introduction of the desktop computer has simultaneously challenged and invigorated the institution we know as school. The technology and information age launched a whole new vocabulary and concept of teaching. The days of teachers as purveyors of knowledge were made increasingly irrelevant. The new questions are:

"How is learning organized in the classroom?"

"What is the role of the teacher?"

"How do we teach students to access, evaluate, and synthesize the volume of information they encounter?"

Schools have been slow to adapt to the information age for a number of reasons. Lack of technology, infrastructure, learning needs of the teachers, and poor quality materials are a start on a lengthy list of barriers. We nevertheless need to prepare learners to live in a complex, high tech, and fast-changing world. That requires that schools be responsive, fluid and adaptive to emerging needs and opportunities. Howard Gardner challenges us;

We must prepare to live in a world whose contours we cannot anticipate. The best preparation, in my view, is to understand deeply the insights about the world and about experiences that have accumulated over the millennia. (Gardner, p. 244.)

In this endeavor the Knowledge Web is pivotal; a dynamic learning resource converges with equally dynamic approaches to teaching and learning.

A dozen and a half of us gathered in Edmonds, Washington last July to test the Knowledge Web, create curriculum and to strategize how it could be integrated into the classroom. Teachers from middle school and high school in Social Studies and Science participated in this week-long venture. Nine students from 8th-12th grade joined us at the end of the week to test the lessons created. Our week with teachers, students, James Burke and the Knowledge Web served as an opportunity to integrate our best thinking about learning, multiple intelligences, constructivist practice, backwards design, WebQuests, critical friends protocols, and learning communities. We were encountering a learning resource that was actually being designed to utilize these concepts and constructing our own knowledge and understanding, as well. The K-Web is not a two-dimensional text translated to an electronic format. It is a three-dimensional interactive learning experience. And it challenges us to rethink our role as "teacher" and the very nature of our practice.

We were a bit nervous at the start the week yet determined to put the Knowledge Web to test with real teachers, real content, and real students. As the week unfolded we experienced the difficulty of changing our more traditional ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and content. We let go of our tendency to try and squeeze the K-Web into our preconceived notions. What really crystallized our thinking about the potential of this tool was the dramatic entrance of students into this learning process.

The "teacher" in us had us genuinely concerned about what role students would play in the testing of this tool. Within an hour of their arrival our apprehension was eased. We began to wonder out loud why we had not called on them sooner. We saw students and teachers as co-creators of learning experiences and understanding. We saw students who readily adapted to a different mode of thinking, a mode that had been a genuine struggle for the adults in the room. It made sense for students to think in a nonlinear, interconnected, and dynamic fashion. They were frustrated with the lack of three dimensions of the early prototype but were reassured to know that it would have a "virtual game" interface. Our constructivist mentors Brooks and Brooks have a fitting reminder:

When students work with adults who continue to view themselves as learners, who ask questions with which they themselves still grapple, who are willing and able to alter both content and practice in the pursuit of meaning, and who treat students and their endeavors as works in progress, not finished products, students are more likely to demonstrate these characteristics themselves. (Brooks & Brooks, p.9.)

Teachers brought units of study that they wanted to integrate with the Knowledge Web. One exemplary project that resulted was to have students write an episode of Connections which showed the effect of the banana on US foreign policy. With only minimal instruction and an unfinished prototype, the students produced rather elaborate networks of relationships between political, technological, economic and cultural factors that could serve as the basis of a script, an argumentative essay, or even a mural. See: http://cyburkespace.net/content/bananapower.htm

In sum, we realized that teachers learn best just as their students do: by studying, doing, and reflecting; by collaborating with other teachers. Good settings for teacher learning provide many opportunities for research and inquiry, for trying and testing, for talking about and evaluating the results of learning and teaching. We became a community of learners during that week in July. We tested the Knowledge Web, explored possibilities, and discovered some of its rich connections. As a community of "all age" learners, we breathed life into E. M. Forster's formula "Only Connect."

References

Brooks, J. & Brooks, M. (1999). In Search of Understanding; The Case for Constructivist Classrooms. Virginia: ASCD.

Gardner, H. (1991). The Disciplined Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

James Burke is responsible for the overall vision and authoring of the Knowledge Web project. He has authored many books and has created a number of award winning television documentaries for the BBC, PBS and the Discovery Channel, including Connections, The Day the Universe Changed, and Masters of Illusion. He advises and has keynoted for organizations such as IBM, NASA, MIT, Lucas Films, the United Nations and the European Parliament. Burke holds an M.A. from Oxford as well as several honorary doctorates. James Burke can be contacted at james.burke@k-web.org.

About the authors:

Patrick McKercher is the Project Manager for the Knowledge Web. He teaches courses in writing, technology and the environment at the University of California Santa Cruz. Long involved in using technology in outreach to the public schools, he has served on the advisory boards of Vlearn3D, Borderlink and AVID. Patrick's doctoral studies in rhetoric, literature and linguistics were at the University of British Columbia. To join the K-Web team contact Patrick McKercher pat13@pacbell.net.

Judy Bonne is the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the Crawford AuSable Schools in Grayling, Michigan.

Andy Rogers is the Principal at College Place Middle School in Edmonds, Washington. Judy and Andy organized and directed the project for teachers held in Edmonds this past summer.

To join teacher teams designing lessons using the K-Web contact Andy Rogers or Judy Bonne jbonne@casdk12.net or rogersa@edmonds.wednet.edu.

For more information, see www.k-web.org.

© December 2002 New Horizons for Learning
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