At 12:13 PM 05/21/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm sure all the people who build knowledge bases would be very interested
>to know, from Eugene Taurman, that:
>
>>Knowledge can not be stored, only information can be stored. Knowledge has
>>to do with ability and willingness to use information.
Perhaps you did not follow the discussion under "KM in whose hands? Ha!"
starting arould LO20589 and ending at L021147: essentially, it all depends
on what your definitions of "knowledge" and "information" are.
I would argue that people who build "knowledge bases" are building
repositories for "codified knowledge", which is a form of information. To
put it another way, they are building information bases. This distinction
is used in the March-April 1999 Harvard Business Review article "What's
Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?" Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria, and
Thomas Tierney, (for Executive Summary go to
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/ideasatwork/hansen.html)
>While I support the idea that there can be useful distinctions made
>between knowledge and information, I'm not sure that there is anything
>like a consensus to support Gene's statement.
There is in fact a lot of consensus to support Gene's statement, at least
among those I consider leading thinkers in this arena.
>Leaving that as perhaps a quibble, I think it is even more unusual to add
>the notion of "willingness to use" to the definition of "knowledge."
>There is one common definition of knowledge that includes the idea of
>"ability ... to use" -- although that meaning is even more commonly
>referred to as "practical knowledge." But I confess that this is the
>first time I have ever seen "willingness to use" stated as part of the
>fundamental nature of "knowledge."
Eugene's full sentence was "Knowledge has to do with ability and
willingness to use information." The thing is, to convert information
into knowledge, you have to be both able and willing to use it. The
"willingness" aspect reminds me of the story about the Zen master who sits
down with his student and pours tea into a cup until it overflows, and
continues to pour. This continues until the exasperated student asks,
"why do you continue to pour when the cup is already full?" The master
says, "your mind is like the cup which is so full, it cannot receive
anything more".
Regarding "ability .... to use", it applies to all information ..... I
can't use information about nuclear physics, because I have no background
in that discipline.
--"Patrick Sue" <psue@inforamp.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>