Abstract
Knowledge building/knowledge creation involves exploring idea landscapes, crisscrossing them in every direction to learn one’s way around. Through pursuit of multiple and intersecting rather than prescribed paths, knowledge creators come to feel at home in a conceptual environment, able to pursue promising ideas, redirect work based on advances and failures, and adopt a “design thinking” mindset in which improving the conceptual environment is a realistic possibility. Such creative activity produces inventions, solutions to big societal problems, theories, cures, new business enterprises, and so on. It is the mainstay of success in what the OECD is terming an “innovation-driven” society. In contrast, schools tend to reduce the conceptual landscape through simplification of the range of ideas to be explored, paths to be pursued, and goals, leaving students to traverse a diminished space along fixed, common paths, with prescribed goals. School procedures leave little for design thinking to get hold of. The goal of Knowledge Building theory, pedagogy, and technology is to recreate schools as knowledge-creating organizations–a formidable educational challenge requiring a shift in the modes of thought that since ancient times have characterized education. In this chapter we consider some of what this radical departure entails in terms of classroom practice and technology supports.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In an earlier formulation (Bereiter and Scardamalia 2003), we used the terms “belief mode” and “design mode,” and these terms have appeared in many of our writings and presentations since. However, we found that educators tend to equate belief mode with accepting and transmitting beliefs based on faith or authority, so that by implication design mode became equated with reliance on evidence. This totally misses the point of the distinction and assimilates it into a conventional good–bad polarization that is crippling to educational thought. Hopefully, replacing “belief” with “justification” gets rid of the false polarity and allows educators to see the virtues of both modes and their interdependence.
- 3.
Because the term “knowledge building” now appears in many documents, often without definition, we use lower case with the generic term and capitalize Knowledge Building when referring to the approach originating in our laboratory and promoted by organizations such as Knowledge Building International.
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As of April, 2015, there were 264,000 Google references to this phrase. Figuring that there are 10 sympathizers for every web publisher, the estimate of hundreds of thousands might well be increased to millions.
- 5.
This was recognized in a career achievement award to the present authors at the 2005 CSCL conference.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by grants from the Ontario Ministry of Education, Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat; Ontario principals’ association’s Leading Student Achievement initiative: Networks for Learning project; and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant titled “Digitally-Mediated Group Knowledge Processes to Enhance Individual Achievement in Literacy and Numeracy.” We extend our thanks to Monica Resendes and Bodong Chen who conducted foundational research and to students, teachers, and principal of the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, for the insights, accomplishments, and research opportunities that enabled this research.
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Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C. (2016). Creating, Crisscrossing, and Rising Above Idea Landscapes. In: Huang, R., Kinshuk, Price, J. (eds) ICT in Education in Global Context. Lecture Notes in Educational Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47956-8_1
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