The Digital Civilizations Interviews

«Knowledge transmitters»: transforming how knowledge is transmitted

Teach and learn other things, in other ways If the nature, status, and use of knowledge can change, then its means of transmission should also adapt.

• Learn to learn, to research, evaluate, mine information from wherever it can be found, acquire the necessary knowledge from others.
• Learn to externalize, to outsource memory function and routine thought processes to machines and networks.
• Learn to collaborate, to share projects, information, and methods with others to attain a common goal.
• Learn to teach, to transfer our knowledge to other people.
• Learn to capitalise, to transform experience into knowledge.
• Learn to innovate, to transform knowledge into invention:
• Learn to project, to imagine and create new possibilities…
• … Throughout our entire lives, in every action we take.

Learning is as much the concern of individuals as it is organisations. Organisations should also “learn” from both the implicit and explicit knowledge they accumulate and learn to collaborate…

Promote and recognize «knowledge transmitters»

Just because we’re transforming the way knowledge is transmitted doesn’t mean that we can do without mediators altogether. Teachers are professional mediators, and their role remains vital, even if what they teach and how they teach it will have to evolve. But other kinds of mediators are also emerging: a retired person passing on his or her knowledge to the company’s new recruits, or an adolescent training his or her neighbours how to use computers, or a carpenter who exchanges his know-how with a plumber. What must we do?

• Open up spaces of collective elaboration, or co-creation
• Help knowledge bartering schemes come into existence
• Recognize and valorise the new “knowledge transmitters” and give them the time and tools to work and evaluate.

Capitalize on knowledge and acquired experience

An individual’s abilities are no longer easily represented on a CV. They are the result of training sanctioned by “credits”, professional experience, knowledge acquired through hobbies, projects lead, even failures. Sometimes they can be represented by lines in a CV, at others by being provided with the opportunity to reveal themselves in action. They keep growing as we age. Formal references are incomplete without proof in action. We have to invent a kind of digital “CV” that can convey the extreme diversity of these areas of competence, and be adapted to the needs the person reading it, be that a recruiter, an employer looking to map his company’s breadth of knowledge, a charity organization, or a friend.