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Michael West responded with the reasonable question,
> But I'd be grateful if you could explain what you mean by
"competing paradigms" with reference to the things cited above.
Does teaching "compete with" learning? In what way? Can "paper"
documents not be "structured"? Who decided this, and why didn't
someone wake me up to tell me? <
A paradigm is a largely subjective amalgam of a shared vocabulary, a priori
beliefs, examples that are taken to represent exemplars for how members of a
discipline or "invisible college" should work, and so on. These are things
which are normally learned implicitly when we are joining a profession.
There are many fuzzy aspects to the definition due to Kuhn's own loose use
of the term in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but the definition I
have given is now commonly accepted (and was supported by Kuhn in his later
works).
Because paradigms are normally absorbed implicitly as more-or-less tacit
knowledge, we are not normally consciously aware of them.
The issue that Andrew Plato and I fought our holy war over was the nature of
the document. For many people (e.g., in the past, many manager in the
company I work for and I suspect Andrew) a document is an object in its own
right that is presented for use as a bound set of paper pages. It is
written, used and managed as a discrete object with a clearly defined scope
and purpose. Yes, it has structure in the form of formatted sentences,
paragraphs and chapters, but these are to guide the human reader and are not
seen as separate containers of knowledge in their own right. Associated with
the paper paradigm you have management objects like bindings, printshops,
bookstores, libraries, librarians, file folders, file cabinets, internal
distribution involving a mailroom and distribution trolleys, etc.
By contrast with structured documents, the focus is on the organization of
the elements or "containers" of content within the document. Structure
(e.g., SGML, XML - or even RTF if you are careful) can be defined and tagged
semantically rather than in terms of formatted appearance to indicate the
kind of knowledge held within the containers. This greatly facilitates
sharing, reuse and even repurposing of knowledge that has already been
recorded. Modern content management systems are able to understand the
semantic tagging to facilitate the retrieval and reuse of desired knowledge.
Associated with the structured paradigm you have a whole range of new
possibilities, such as single sourcing, content normalisation, highly
sophisticated web query and retrieval (Berners-Lee has been promoting the
idea of the "Semantic Web" to describe these possibilities).
The difference between the two paradigms is in the possibilities implied
tacitly in the use of the terms - and of course the exact same document
produced in a word processing or FM environment may be understood in quite
different ways depending on which paradigm is guiding your thinking - and if
we don't know and understand how the other guy is thinking about our
document we can end up shouting invective or worse. (e.g., what about the
fundamentalist and historian reading the exact same words in the Bible?)
Teaching/Learning is another such difference that I have seen in Techwrl and
in knowledge management forums I won't try to explore in detail. Teachers
dictate while learners seek.
Do offer to read my paper. I deal with these ideas in substantial depth, but
hopefully in a way that anyone with reasonable intelligence can follow. The
Web book, although it goes into some fairly esoteric areas tries to do it
via well marked paths.
Bill Hall
------------------------------------------
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST
-----------------------------
(Zappa - Packard Goose)
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