Before I began the class, knowledge was more of a fuzzy thought or idea–or just something that everyone could define for him or herself. Kind of like spirituality. But an academic take on the subject inspired me to push myself.
Explicit knowledge, the formal/codifiable type, seems to hold more clout than tacit knowledge does, and I’m realizing that with my bias toward information, I’m going to have to rethink my judgments about tacit knowledge. So if I want to get really nerdy, I can think about information standing alone, whereas knowledge could be owned by someone, and be shaped by subjectivity and experience. With that perspective, I have really pushed my own definition of knowledge to be more tacit– perhaps without ownership and cultural constructs, knowledge is just information. So, if I embrace the definition that knowledge is tacit (practice-based perspective), then my whole approach to storing/conveying knowledge is different. By realizing this, it makes for a much more useful discussion when promoting the power of social learning and communities of practice.