Knowledge society: the social, economic and political changes that are taking place as countries move from the industrial to the post-industrial age

• based on developing and exploiting new forms of knowledge
• shows increase in the creative, technology or service based industries
• linked with developments in information and communications technologies while people’s understanding of time, space and place are changing
• new forms of info, new ways of presenting info and new forms of money emerge
• more complex forms of personal identity
• in economic terms new work order based on fast capitalism and new forms of production and new management systems. this changes the meaning of knowledge, innovation and learning. knowledge is now innovation, innovation is quality and quality control is knowledge management. knowledge, in the Knowledge Society, has a different meaning from the one it has in educational contexts.

Castells: knowledge is not a thing; it is energy; it is defined by its effectiveness in action and the results it achieves; it’s what causes things to happen; it is sth produced collaboratively by teams of people; it is constantly changing. [The Network Society]

Lyotard: he too advocated for knowledge as energy or ability to do things (performativity); used in an as-and-when-needed basis; many reasons, many truths, many knowledges are possible and desirable; traditional disciplinary boundaries will dissolve; new conceptions of learning will develop; people will develop and understanding of an organized stock of public and professional knowledge to pursue performativity, to apply it to new situations. [The Postmodern Condition]

Knowledge:

• process, not a thing
• does things
• happens in teams
• can’t be divided into disciplines
• develops in an as-and-when-needed basis
• develops to be replaced, not stored

Learning:

• involves generating new knowledge, not storing
• is a group activity
• happens is real-world
• should be just-in-time not just-in-case
• needs to be a la carte

Minds are not containers, but resources that can be connected to other resources for the purpose of generating new knowledge

To summarize then, developing a Knowledge Society education system involves approaches that can:
•Develop new knowledge – through real research, not teacher-initiated projects. Knowledge Age schools need to be producers – not consumers – of knowledge;
•Develop multi-modal literacy (understanding and using non-print modes of making meaning – images, sounds, gestures/body language and so on);
•Foreground the relationships, connections and interactions between different knowledge systems and different modes of representation;
•Emphasize difference and diversity, not sameness and/or one-size-fits-all approaches;
•Foreground process not product;
•Help learners build a sense of themselves as active knowledge- builders – as having a unique niche, role and/or point of difference/contribution to make.

References

Jane Gilbert, 2010. Catching the Knowledge Wave. In Education Canada Vol 47 (3) www.cea-ace.ca,  ISSN 0013-1253

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