FROM :
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY IN PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION
Ronald E. Anderson
University of Minnesota, Minnesota, MN, USA
The Information Society
The metaphor of “information society” was first used in Japan by Kohyama (1968) and it was in Japan that this metaphor was first used as a rationale for national policy (Masuda, 1981). In the 1970s, the authors of computer-related texts were not likely to refer to an “information society” but instead used words like “information age” and a “computerized society” (cf. Martin and Norman, 1970; Rothman and Mosmann, 1972). However by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the information society was mentioned so often around the world that many forgot that it was only a metaphor.
In fact by the late 1980s, “information society” had become a phrase that captured the essence of a culture inundated by information and dominated by information technology (IT). Daniel Bell’s “framework for the information society” spearheaded the movement to legitimize the information society concept (Bell, 1979). He confirmed that a majority of the jobs in the United States were information oriented in that they were structured to produce informational rather than material products. In subsequent years, as global networks became ubiquitous and a global information economy became more obvious, the information society metaphor became even more widely accepted (Webster, 2002).
The Knowledge Society
Ironically, the information society concept was undermined by the emergence of a new metaphor in the 1990s, the “knowledge society.” While the information society metaphor was associated with an “explosion” of information and information systems, the knowledge society metaphor primarily referred to economic systems where ideas or knowledge functioned as commodities. Many, if not most, people could not differentiate the two concepts because they tended to largely equate information and knowledge (Allee, 1997). Confusion about the nature of knowledge is still a problem, especially in the field of education. The educational community tends to define knowledge mostly in terms of facts or declarative knowledge, but the field of management defines it much more broadly encompassing insights, values, and other tacit cognitions (Tiwana, 2002). In this chapter, the broader definition of knowledge will be used.
Information vs. Knowledge
Increasingly, the definitional distinction of information from knowledge is that information consists of intentionally structured and formatted data, but knowledge consists of cognitive states needed to interpret and otherwise process information (cf. David and Foray, 2003). While information can generally be reproduced for minimal costs, knowledge reproduction requires training, apprenticeships, and other more costly forms of transmission. Knowledge that is difficult to codify and reproduce is called “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge includes judgment, experience, insights, rules of thumb, and intuition and its retrieval depends upon motivation, attitudes, values, and the social context (cf. Polanyi, 1996; Tiwana, 2002).
A knowledge economy necessarily depends upon information as well as the intellectual capital of economic communities. Thus, a knowledge society necessarily presumes an information society, but not the other way around. In this chapter’s discussion of education, the rhetoric of the knowledge society will be used, but for the most part it will apply to the information society as well.
Knowledge Societies in Education
While economists tend to think of “knowledge society” as a global economy, other social scientists tend to think of it as a smaller level social collective. Thus, a knowledge society may exist on at least four levels: a global system, a national or cultural system, a social organization like a professional society, and a smaller community, e.g., the “Dead Poet’s Society.” A knowledge society is generally defined as an association of people with similar interests who try to make use of their combined knowledge. Of course, knowledge societies are not new, but what is new is that there has been a sharp rise in them and they are much more visible. Their rise follows digital networks that make them possible without members coexisting (do you mean residing?) in the same region and the technology makes accessing and sharing knowledge so much more feasible. On top of that is the pressure to exchange knowledge that emerges from the knowledge economy.
Loosely speaking, any educational system is a knowledge society, and that would include schools and classrooms. However, unless the educational unit devotes particular attention to knowledge-related activities, it is not particularly useful to call it a knowledge society. When an educational group invests considerable effort toward sharing and producing new knowledge, then it should be called a knowledge society. Communities of practice, typically groups of teachers that work with each other to improve their teaching, are good examples of knowledge societies, especially those that use all the tools, electronic and otherwise, to facilitate their goals (cf. Hargreaves, 2003).
“Knowledge society” in the next section refers to the (global) knowledge society.
Later sections of the chapter shift toward smaller scale knowledge societies.
Implications of the Knowledge Society for Learning Priorities
The contemporary currents of the knowledge society derive from two major forces: greater intercultural interaction made possible by global electronic networks and an economic system in which knowledge functions as a commodity. Underlying the new role of knowledge in society is, on the one hand, an explosion of information and knowledge, and on the other hand, a greatly increased value for knowledge that helps people get what they most want. Table 1 shows the major implications of the global knowledge economy for the skills and learning strategies of young people, particularly those entering the work force. For instance, making knowledge a commodity means that youth needs the skills to construct new knowledge, and project-based learning offers opportunities for learning such skills. Read more »
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