Cormac’s blog

I went to an interesting and inter-disciplinary conference on “knowledge transfer”, which was organised by the students of Manchester and Salford, in collaboration with the grad school. It was a day of presentations and discussions from a wide range of people, positions and subjects - here are some thoughts that the day provoked.

*Knowledge is sometimes seen as a product which is published, and made accessible to the few who have the institutional/financial ‘key’. In this view, “knowledge transfer” involves the delivering of this product to the door of those without the ‘key’ (or the knowledge).

*However, there is another view of knowledge (as well as a model for its dissemination). Knowledge is a construct, a creation - contextualised within the socio-cultural fabric of life. In this framework, knowledge transfer can be seen as a co-constructive process - not simply the delivery of a product, but the development of a process.

*Furthermore, the generation of knowledge will be about the furthering of thought about the subject of study - but it should also, in a critical perspective, be concerned with the context of its creation (eg. the power dynamics in which this knowledge is created, discussed and disseminated).

*Both these perspectives are useful, I believe, in shedding light on the work of Wikimedia (and hence, Wikiversity). Firstly, it is true that access to knowledge is unequally distributed. Wikimedia is one of many current attempts to open (subvert) the above system by giving free access to “the sum of all human knowledge” to anyone (provided they have access to a computer and the internet).

*Also - on the context of knowledge creation - in a wiki, both the product and the process of knowledge creation are open to anyone (with internet access) - both to observe, and also to participate in. And, obviously, the content and nature of people’s contribution and participation is subject to change and even critique by other participants. On this, for example, we discussed the nature of the ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ - both of which are interesting subjects, and often problematic, in a space like a wiki.

All of this is quite obvious, but it could give me a good perspective for looking into both the internal and external context of Wikiversity’s existence in the world of education. I also have some other ideas that could come out of it, which I will be posting to Wikiversity (a vague promise which I’ve made before, but which I constantly work towards, in my own peculiar way) - for example, how research projects are initiated, planned and developed. And, of course, there were a number of people from around the country that I’d like to keep in touch with further, including action researchers in Leeds and a funky media-based community regeneration project in Deptford, London. And i may have also initiated the seeds of a future student-led conference, where I’m the student. As if I didn’t already have enough work to be getting on with… eek!