"When you look at knowledge as the central aspect, or the central product of education today, it would suggest that if knowledge itself changes significantly or substantially, that we also would need to consider the framework and the design of the organizations that we use to create, disseminate, share, evaluate that knowledge." 

George Siemens, author of Knowing Knowledge, Associate Director of Research and Development with the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba, and founder and President of Complexive Systems Inc., was the keynote speaker at the Ohio Digital Commons for Education Conference in Columbus, Ohio (March 4-6).

In this address, Siemens shared some of his thoughts on knowledge and technology and their implications for educational organizations. Highlights included:

• Educators are more optimistic now than five or six years ago, thanks to technology tools that have enabled them to realize certain pedagogical ideals--engaged, personalized and democratized instruction.
• "Technology becomes a strong enabler of the global conversations that we need to have within the education community."
• New technologies/tools, like wikis and blogs, are essentially a reaction to "change pressures," and these tools "enable us to interact with knowledge in a way that's reflective of what knowledge is like today." These tools then create "new structures and spaces" (e.g. the blogosphere and Wikipedia) and ultimately "new affordances" before closing the loop and creating new pressures for change. And the openness of this cycle is what generates innovation.
  
• Our educational model, our learning approaches, like knowledge, need to be "holistic" and "contextually-appropriate" for our environment.
  
• Content should not be the "value point" of our educational model if it has the potential to become quickly obsolete. Conversations should be the mechanism for generating content as opposed to "internalizing or consuming content."
• Learning should be a process of recognition and internalization of patterns within disciplinary schema as opposed to duplication of these patterns.
• The climate of knowledge today "requires understanding ambiguity and it requires accepting uncertainty."
  

Although Siemens made a sound argument regarding knowledge that is dynamic, I found myself questioning the utility of this argument in my own teaching. I agree that the instruction of dynamic knowledge should be as fluid as the knowledge itself. I also agree that some disciplines are more susceptible than others to "change pressures" that are the result of dynamic content. However, much of the knowledge in the core courses I teach is, let us say, less dynamic. Can this knowledge fit into Siemens's cycle of change (see above)? In this case, perhaps the improvement of student learning or the fostering of intentional learners is the "change pressure" that leads to the development of new pedagogies ("new methods"): new pedagogies enabled by podcasts, wikis, blogs and other new technologies.

Siemens's keynote address is available as Real Media, Windows Media, and Podcast files. The PowerPoint slides for his talk can be found at the ODCE Conference Blog.