Digital epistemologies

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.

Chapter 7. 'Digital epistemologies": Rethinking knowledge for classroom learning

Epistemology - the nature of knowledge

• Definition: the study of the origins, presuppositions, nature, extent, and veracity (truth, reliability, validity) of knowledge (e.g., What kinds of things can we know? What kinds of things are most important to know? How can we come to know things? What kinds of knowledge are possible?)
• Knowledge that a curriculum contain
  
  • propositional ~: knowing that something is the case
    
  • procedural ~: knowing how to do something
    
  • explanatory ~: knowing why something is the case
• the digitization of aspects and experiences are challenging the conventional epistemology
  

Standard epistemology: "justified true belief"

• General concept/model: for A (a person, knower) to know that P (a proposition), A must believe that P, P must be true, A must be justified in believing that P.
• The primary object of learning: the content of subjects (what we need to know about the world in order to function effectively in it is discovered through (natural and social) scientific enquiry
• Knowledge has both its literatures (content) and its languages (disciplined procedures)
• Authentic practice: apprenticeship, guided participation, participatory appropriation (promote the development of knowers as well as to transmit knowledge
• Problem: knowing how (procedural) has been subordinated to the pursuit of content (propositional)
  

The challenge of "digitization": an overview

• Changes in "the world (objects, phenomena) to be known", resulting from the impact of digitization
  
  • Difference in "stuffness": atoms (the world of analogues) vs bits (the digital world)
  • Ontological changes: The reality and logic impacts: aesthetics, evaluation, quality, trueness; expanding beyond the limits (verbal - text/print - television - computer); "being digital" (Negroponte, 1995)
    
• Changes in conceptions of knowledge and processes of "coming to know", contingent upon deeper incursions of digitization into everyday practices
  
  • Knowledge change in the postmodern/postindustrial condition (Lyotard, 1984) - two key functions of knowledge (research and transmission of acquired learning) change under the diminishing of the modernity belief and the effects of new technologies
    
    • Availability of knowledge as an international commodity becomes the basis for national and commercial advantage within the emerging global economy
    • Computerized uses of knowledge become the basis for enhanced state security and international monitoring
    • Anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable into quantities of information will be abandoned
    • Knowledge is exteriorized with respect to the knower, and the status of the learner and the teacher is transformed into a commodity relationship of "supplier" and "user"
  • Attention has moved from aims, values, and ideals to a new focus on "means and techniques for obtaining (optimally) efficient outcomes" (Marshall, 1998): Performativity - "Is it saleable?" "Is it efficient?" instead of "Is it true?"; Create "truths" rather than to discern them (e.g., research that finds what their clients want to hear...The TV documentary "People's Republic of Capitalism")
  • Access to perfect information being equal, imagination carries the day: enactive projects bring visions into reality - cybercultures; e-commerce
    
• Changes in the constitution of "knowers", which reflect the impact of digitization
  
  • Example 1 - "fast capitalist" workplaces and Discourses, and areas of enquiry like cognitive science and social cognition: e.g., "distributed cognition", "collaborative practice", "networked intelligence", and "communities of practice"; knowledge assembly, customization (my example: wikipedia); knowledge (P) located within the individual (A) vs knowledge (P) as an attribute of an individual (A).
  • Example 2 - people being electronically wired together as networks by means of wearable computers
    
• Changes in the relative significance of, and balance among, different forms and modes of knowing, which are associated with the impact of digitization
  
  • Conventional epistemology has privileged propositional knowledge - abstraction and decontextualization of classrooms - prohibited a more equitable balance between propositional and procedural knowledge (knowing how)
  • four facets of rethinking epistemology in terms of the evolving digital age
    
    • The importance of understanding knowledge in relation to building, inhabiting, and negotiating virtual worlds (e.g., SecondLife)
      
    • Multi-modal truth (from print to multimedia; meaning arrives in spatial as well as in verbal expressions in Cyberspace)
      
    • Attention economy (endless originality; focus on imagination)
      
• Challenges facing conventional epistemology
  
  • The rhetorical and normative modes challenge the scientific-propositional mode (e.g., digital media displacing older forms of typed and printed word)
  • Justified true belief is disrupted by practices mediated by digital ICTs (e.g., distributed cognition - fast capitalism, networked technologies; knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated; individual knowledge vs collective knowledge)
  • More performance epistemology (of knowing as an ability to perform, e.g., telematics, informatics) than propositional knowledge (of what already exists): Knowing how to proceed in the absence of existing models and exemplars; gaining attention vs scientific knowledge; chaos vs stability; bricolage, collage, montage...
    
  • None of the 3 logical conditions of justified true belief (JTB) is necessary for information (Lankshear et al., 2000): Senders - receivers; knowledge produced to be sold or to be valorized in the postmodern condition (Lyotard) doesn't necessarily require that the conditions of JTB be met.
    

Implications for classroom curriculum and pedagogy

• Social practices beyond the school within digitally saturated milieu privileging modes of knowing that are
  
  • more performance- and procedure-oriented than propositional (thus the subject-based curriculum founded on texts and academic teachers as authority is in trouble)
    
  • more collaborative than individualistic (thus individuals shouldn't be assessed as the personal bearers of knowledge)
    
  • more concerned with making an impact on attention, imagination, curiosity, innovation than with fostering truth, engendering rational belief, or demonstrating their justifiability
    
• Multi- and cross-disciplinary expertise is developed in performance, not through absorbing content
  
• Consistent with the idea of
  
  • school as a knowledge producer and provider for communities
  • diver forms of activity-oriented learning
  • trying to approximate to the quality of learning and approaches to learning that is characteristic of e.g, online video games and the communities associated with them
    

References

Lankshear, C., Peters, M., & Knobel, M. (2000). Information, knowledge and learning: Some issues facing epistemology and education in a digital age. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34 (1), 17-40.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Marshall, J. (1998). Performativity: Lyotard, Foucault and Austin. Paper presented to the American Educational Research Association's Annual Meeting, San Diego, 11-17 April.

Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. New York, NY: Vintage Books.