Understanding occurs in a context
Understanding the context of new knowledge often suffers from ignorance, neglect and the lack of information ... Often, we just don’t know that we don’t know.
We may know something, but we don't know everything
"Frank Jackson (1982) formulates the intuition underlying his Knowledge Argument in a much cited passage using his famous example of the neurophysiologist Mary:
- Mary is a brilliant scientist who is for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky. and use terms like ‘red’. ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (... ) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that...
- "Everywhere we look around us for meaning, context shapes both our perception (the straight stick immersed in half a glass of water appears bent) and our interpretation (I overruled my taste buds and continued to eat). All data, information, and knowledge that we have or to which we have access comes to us immersed in a variety of contexts. In order fully to understand or clearly to communicate meaning, we must attend to contextual clues."
- "Contextual clues may be closely tied to our personal tacit frames, they may emerge from tacit assumptions and practices of the organizations in which we work, or they may inhabit the broader cultural air that we breathe. To manage successfully to enhance personal and organizational knowledge, we must learn both to penetrate and to elucidate the hidden contexts of the data/information/knowledge flowing through our organizations. In turn, we must learn to shape shared contextual environments in which communication may be more effective."
Types of Learning - Bloom's Taxonomy
There is more than one type of learning. A committee of colleges, led by BenjaminBloom?, identified three domains of educational activities. Bloom's taxonomy is easily understood and is probably the most widely applied one in use today:
- Cognitive:
- mental skills (Knowledge)
- The cognitive domain involves knowledge and the development of intellectual skills.
- Affective:
- growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude)
- This domain includes the manner in which we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes.
- Psychomotor:
- manual or physical skills (Skills)
- The psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination, and use of the motor-skill areas. Development of these skills requires practice and is measured in terms of speed, precision, distance, procedures, or techniques in execution.
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html
Learning Environments
Learning sometimes occurs in the act of doing
- "The relationship between theory and its practical applications has been at the top of the education and training agenda for a decade or so. Traditionally, teachers have seen it as their job to teach learners how to apply theory, which they may well have learned in a very different context, either on the job, or in some practically contrived context which simulates aspects of the real world experience."
Contributors: DonaldNoyes 20060829_0403
See also UniverseOfDiscourse, NearestFittingContext
CategoryKnowledge
Context Of Understanding