Curiosity, cognition and content

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Where does knowledge come from? As teachers we trade in knowledge on a daily basis, but how often do we think about its provenance? We could argue that the majority of what we 'know' derives from our ability to be able to think, to reason, to reflect, to ask questions - our higher cognitive processes. Curiosity provides the impetus for us to be able to investigate the universe we are in. Exploration and discovery have formed the basis of all scientific endeavour. Asking questions is the fundamental expression and genesis of all research. We can ask how, where, what, who and when? Yet for me, the most important question of all, when attempting to understand the true nature of knowledge, is to ask the question why?

Another question is: How do we know that what we know is correct? No-one can be certain that the knowledge we hold to be 'true' today is the ultimate knowledge, because our understanding of the world changes. Scientific advances sometimes often render previous knowledge redundant or untrue. But we do build new knowledge on old knowledge, and we need confidence in that knowledge. In the digital age where knowledge seems to be increasingly democratised, how can we be sure that knowledge is not adulterated, or contaminated with false evidence?

There is much debate about this question, especially with the advent of social media and services such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, where anyone can contribute toward a global understanding of what we 'know'. What becomes of those 'elite experts' who were previously the gatekeepers of knowledge before the Internet?

The digital age has spawned digital literacies - extensions of standard literacies that were developed in the Industrial Age. Reading, writing, listening and speaking (the latter two were literacies from an even earlier age) are now no longer enough if we wish to successfully navigate the digital terrain of modern life. How do we separate fact from fiction in the age of the remix? How can we maintain a clear, critical stance in the face of so much content?

I have written and researched extensively about digital literacies and so have many others, so I won't labour that point here. It's important though, to acknowledge that knowledge is growing rapidly and diversifying constantly, partly because of our increased access to new technologies - the mind tools of our time - and also because of the urgency of needing to know more to solve the complex and unprecedented problems faced by our society. So my third question is - what kinds of new literacies do we all need to survive and thrive in the digital age?

These are just three of the challenges I will discuss with my New Zealand colleagues when I begin my two week visit to work with Auckland University of Technology in October. What questions and challenges would you pose that are relevant to education today?


Curiosity, cognition and content by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.