Annual Meeting of the ICT-Initiative: "Information, Knowledge and Knowledge Management", TU Darmstadt, March 26-29, 2000
Ingrid Lohmann, University of Hamburg home
Knowledge Acquisition through Knowledge Production - The "Comenius in War" Digital Exhibition Example
Introduction
Today we are witnessing fundamental economy-induced transformations not only of the conditions of scientific production but also of the access to scientific knowledge and information. These transformations which include both formal and informal education can be summed up as 'market driven': Once put and packaged into digitalized forms, the chances to marketize science and scientific results for educational and training purposes on a global scale are in principle excellent, which will lead to major transformations in the modes of scientific production itself.
A most undesireable side effect of this development, though, is a growing and vastly unreflected tendency to favour receptive and in many respects static - at the cost of productive and creative - forms of knowledge acquisition.
Facing this situation the institutions of higher education, especially universities (as long as they themselves are in control of their information technology infrastructure) are challenged to develop and test ways to create and communicate knowledge which emphasize on the learners as subjects of their knowledge acquisition processes, which strengthen them as creators and not just recipients of knowledge and information in digitalized forms.
In short, a new interpretation and reinvention of the 200 year-old concept of Selbsttätigkeit seems to be necessary. The Virtual Exhibition "Comenius in War" - which is in fact conceptualized as laboratory for the teaching and learning possibilities opening up with the new technologies - exemplifies how this might be managed.
1.
I'm a teacher of history of education at the University of Hamburg, department of education. One of my current fields of research are the local and global processes of marketization of education and of commercialization of schools and universities. What I'm interested in here are - among other aspects - the effects of what is called 'the new economy' on the modes of scientific production. Also I am interested in the transformations of the teaching and learning processes in higher education through new technology; there is no doubt that the changes currently taking place in the relations between technology and the didactics of higher education - including university studies - will have a deep impact on knowledge management. In these changes teaching and learning processes are no less involved than scientific production, and most of this development, I fear, will be overturned by the question "can this result be commercialized or not?"
Let me give just one little example of what can happen to academic science in connection with digitalization: During the last few years a number of presidents of US-universities signed contracts with consortiums of dot-com companies. What is being sold to the corporations by the university presidents are the rights to marketize each and every online teaching unit or distance learning course which any of the university's scientific personal produces. In none of these cases has the academic body of the faculty been asked their prior consent. Some of the teaching personal have instituted proceedings against this practice and try to claim their intellectual property rights, but the outcome of this is still open (cf. Noble 1998). In its latest version which is currently under discussion, the German Hochschulrahmengesetz for the first time intends the university presidents - and no longer the ministry - as the ones with whom scientists negotiate their contracts. As you can easily imagine the possible future scenarios of this yourself there's no need to go deeper into this.
2.
History of education is part of each of the different academic pedagogical studies we have in Hamburg. This means that future teachers as well as adult educators and students interested in an academic career have to choose it during their first two years of study; they can but don't necessarily have to choose the 'Comenius in War'-course which I'm currently testing as a one-year (two-terms) seminar. According to the regularities for this type of core curriculum seminar I'm talking about here, the class doesn't include more than 20 students.
Since this seminar type is part of the core curriculum, there is a chance to involve these students from their first term onward into getting acquainted with and using new technology: they must have their personal E-mail account - E-mail is used for information and communication in addition to the sessions -, they must find materials in the world wide web with the help of search engines and online ressources, they must deliver texts - be it their own or from other authors - images, photographs and sometimes also soundclips in digitalized form, and in the end they must design and produce their own individual path through the exhibition.
Which means: they have to transform, combine and present - conventionally in the classroom and online - what they found, wrote, designed, and can reasonably argue about and advocate as a multimedia product which is worth to be put on the web.
We do of course give them ample opportunity to learn the required technical skills in the seminar itself; it is important not to take for granted that they have them in advance, although there are always a few students who know better than I do how to fabricate websites - which certainly is very helpful and inspiring.
3.
The main idea of the Comenius Virtual Exhibiton is: to combine an introduction into modern pedagogy - starting from Johann Amos Comenius or Komensky - with reflections on the differences and similarities between the old culture of the book and the new culture of information technology. The third aspect is: to combine these two elements - introduction into an academic discipline and its history, reflections on the changing relations between economy, society, culture and the media - with practical experience in today's cultural and technological revolution: by not only using the new technologies but also producing with them.
For the first time I had this course planned in May 98 for the summer term of 99. The NATO bombings in former Yugoslavia which took place during this term gave reason to rename the project into 'Comenius in War'. But there are also academic reasons to put together the beginnings of modern pedagogy and the European early enlightenment history with questions of peace and war.
Komensky had been born in Bohemia in the year 1597. He spent most of his lifetime in the Thirty Years' War which had been set off by the Defenestration of Prague in 1618. Komensky himself was deeply involved - both personally and as one of the leading European intellectuals of his time - in the Protestant uprising that had begun in Bohemia and stretched out all over Europe in the decades preceding the Treaty of Westphalia. Some of Komensky's most important writings in the fields of theology, encyclopedia of the sciences and pedagogy stem from the decades of war and soon after and they clearly aim at civilizing - or rather: healing - the societies in the battered European territories and the new born nation states by means of schooling, education, the spreading of scientific knowledge and Christian faith.
Now let me explain the starting page of the exhibition which is understood as an important part of its interface. The image is a kind of portrait of Komensky from around 1660 and is itself an interface of its time; there are quite a few images similar to this one in pieces of 17th century art.
This picture organizes the access to a world of knowledge which adheres to a range of newly emerging bourgeois activities: to a world of knowledge which has become very much differentiated and diverse. This picture also claimes that this world of useful knowledge can reestablish social cohesion, which was lost during the long and devastating years of war, with the help of true religion. Working activities like agriculture, setting letters and printing books, building houses, but also astronomy, painting and sculpturing and most of all spreading knowledge to others do contribute to God's worship.
At the same time this picture exemplies very nicely that interface design definitely is not an invention of our times.
Steven Johnson calls interfaces 'the probably most important art form of the 21st century'. Johnson is Editor-in-chief and cofounder of Feed, an award-winning online cultural magazine, and was named "one of the most influential people in cyberspace" (by Newsweek, among other magazines). He stresses the importance of closing the gap between technology and culture, which has been characteristic for modernity, and of overcoming it in information technology. In his recent publication on "Interface Culture" (1997:19; dt. 1999:29) he raises the question of how we should understand the cultural role of interface design in today's world. According to Johnson its importance revolves around a paradox:
