Blog-Power of Metaphor
In one search for interesting new perspectives on KM, I discovered “Questions and Information: Contrasting Metaphors,” by Thomas W. Lauer, published in Information systems Frontiers, (3:1, 41-48 (2001) The question that powers his article is a critical one to our purposes: “How do people conceptualize information?”
Particularly in the Information Age, we all have, consciously or not, an information paradigm. An examination of those paradigms offers further enlightenment/insight as to how HE can proceed to apply insights from the LO debate to creating enterprise content mgmt systems that will serve one institution’s specific information needs and at the same time be capable of enriching the larger academic landscape through strategies such as federated searching.
First, some groundwork: Lauer defines a paradigm as “ a pattern, exemplar, or model that provides a coherent mental organization for some complex set of phenomena.” (p. 41) The worlds of object-oriented programming, database structure, and XML meta-tagging certainly quality as complex sets of phenomena. However, to explore the metaphors that have driven the dialogue thus far is to gain insight into some of the obstacles standing in the way of the promise of digital repositories.
Lauer examines some embedded, popular metaphors for information, beginning his exploration with this definition of metaphor: “they are conceptual mappings from one domain to another. Metaphors are commonly used to describe abstract concepts that are less amenable to crisp definition. “ (42) Considering the number of articles that have poured forth from academic presses arguing about the correct definition of a “learning object,” I’d say we are very short on “crisp definitions.”
The first familiar metaphor for information transmission and communication is the conduit metaphor. Ideas are objects; linguistic forms are containers (for ideas); and communication is sending of idea-objects through linguistic forms.
Even more commonly, information is envisioned as a resource. Once again, the key is the objectification of information as a commodity. This metaphor focuses on the processing of information into a form amenable to transmission; in this scenario the human being is an information processing system which uses information as a resource for decision making. It’s not a great distance from this metaphor to viewing information as he product of a manufacturing process, a metaphor that is pervasive in early writing on knowledge management in the corporate world. Several principles follow from this metaphor:
• Understand the consumer’s information needs
• Managed information as the product of a well-defined production process
• Managed information as a product with a life cycle
• Appoint an information project manager to manage this product.
At first glance, these principles appear to be foreign to the educational venture, but in reality, this structure, with a shift in perspective, offers promising new ways to view the masses of unstructured, informal data produced on a daily basis by an institution of higher learning.
We edge toward some of the metaphors that have been used to promote learning objects with a food metaphor from the KM field. Three key activities are necessary for creating organizational knowledge:
• Knowledge hunting (collection process)
• Knowledge harvesting (filtering to discover value)
• Knowledge hardening (structuring tacit knowledge into explicit usable knowledge)
Recognizing the limitations of each of these metaphors, Lauer moves on to examine some metaphors surrounding the asking of questions, the art of inquiry. Suddenly, we have shifted in the world of the Socratic dialogue, one familiar to those in the education field. “Inquiry is an action whereas information and knowledge are objects to be acted on.” Inquiry, by definition, involves two; it involves the asking and the answering and the process of constructing new knowledge from this dialogue. We have shifted almost imperceptibly into the world of constructivist education theory and practice.
The relevance of this discussion of the assumptions behind our unexamined metaphors for information leads us to the conclusion that higher education needs to understand both. Learning objects (digital assets, raw data, unstructured information) can be structured into an enterprise-level database, coded and tagged using XML, and then made available, first to the home institution, and then to the academic community at large through federated search engines, currently under development.
If the information architecture has been carefully and thoughtfully designed, then the attention can be shifted to the mission of the university, to create, capture, disseminate, and share information, to turn it from information into knowledge and ultimately into the wisdom of our civilization. A recent ECAR Research Bulletin defines this terrain in clear terms, moving toward the explication of information architecture as it provides the foundation for both an Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS), and an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). (“The Information Architecture Imperative,” volume 2003, Issue 2, January 21, 2003)
