Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on. George Siemens describes how networks disrupt traditional teaching : The old model, he writes, “works well when we can centralize both the content (curriculum) and the teacher.

It started in a innocent enough way when, in a discussion about knowledge sharing and generation on the KM4Dev listserve, somebody cited the DIKW model as a way of describing how knowledge is generated in organisations. This provoked Dave Snowden into some sharp but illuminating posts (by the way, if you ever get bored and feel like doing some Dave-baiting, get yourself a false identity, sign up to one of the listserves he frequents, and make an enthusiastic post about DIKW, wisdom management, Ayn Rand or KM certification - or any combination thereof): “I That most hallowed of mental models and glib explanations, the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy has taken a bit of a beating this week.

You are your current set of interests, contacts, Twitter postings, Facebook postings, blog postings, listserv controversies, your latest images, and YouTube videos — trapped in an eternal but changing present that gives no sense of birth or death or growing up, or even growing at all. (I’ve Michael Goldhaber, expert in the logic of the Attention Economy , wonders if we are witnessing the end of the ‘narrative self’ ? Michael Goldhaber: “Thoughts emerging from a conversation with Sandra Luft of San Francisco State U (who bears no responsibility though):