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As we have seen, the strategic objective we have chosen for our project is to create one or several functioning practical instances of knowledge federation among ourselves.
This strategy offers several advantages:
- It provides a complete solution that can be tested, improved and adopted in practice
- It allows us to perceive and develop all the components of a complete solution that may be useful or necessary
Below we point at several such components that are already existing or under development.
Online community
An embryo of the international knowledge federation community is already operational. Currently we are communicating via the KnowledgeFederation.org wiki and KnowledgeFederation Google group. A next generation tool for online collaboration is under development.
Yearly conference
The second knowledge federation conference will be organized in Inter University Centre Dubrovnik October 3-6, 2010. After that we intend to organize one conference each year.
During the initial design phase we intend to keep the conference quite small and slowly evolve our community by invitation. While we author and publish articles, which makes our assembly a conference, we want to work closely together and co-create together in the style of a workshop.
We experiment with the role of the physical meeting in the age of federation, and find it that developing intimate social ties through engaging interaction in an inspiring invironment is a large part of it.
Dubrovnik, and IUC Dubrovnik, provides an excellent venue. Dubrovnik is a historical monument under UNESCO protection and a Renaissance town. Through long history while the region was occupied by Turkey, Dubrovnik remained an independent trading city state by developing successful diplomatic ties with all the conflicting parties. The IUC Dubrovnik was initiated in 1972 by Ivan Supek, celebrated Croatian physicist and humanist, as a place where scientists and thinkers from the political East and Wes could meet and exchange (or shall we say federate) ideas. The building with its surrounding park extending all the way to the sea provides a Platonic Academy-style venue for conversations, walks and reflection.
Internationally federated course
Beginning in 2011 we intend to add an internationally federated knowledge federation corse to our conference. The learning resources will be co-developed by researchers world wide and offered to learners internationally.
Please take a moment to reflect on the advantages that such federated education will provide. We name here only a couple:
- When instead of developing an entire course by myselof I take the task of creating a single lecture or perhaps only a part of a lecture, on a subject that I am an expert in, and I keep updating it, then I can not only present state-of-the-art knowledge, but also create state-of-the-art presentation. Federated organization offers further advantages - instead of creating my contribution on my own, I federate it with video and animation artists and immersive learning technicians, creative writers etc.
- Our federated education model will implement an active, exploratory learning environment. The students and instructors too will contribute to the federated knowledge via active participation. This educates the students to federate and contribute. Hence teaches good practice and good values. At the same time, the federated education as a process provides for digesting and composting the research material. Instead of relying only on intelligent software robots to organize our information and make sense, we engage students, on different levels. Particularly valuable student insights get graded highly and become visible in the federated course.
- We develop an education model that suits our time. We train the students to contribute and be creative (our culture will not need homework doers but people who can co-create and take responsibility). Our model is flexible regarding not only time and space, but also what is learned. It implements just-on-time and just-for-me learning.
- Through knowledge federation we educate the next generation of knowledge federators and allow our initiative to spread into the next generation.
Value matrix object
We briefly outline the idea of a value matrix object as an example of a possible component of a complete knwledge federation prototype. With this example we intend to illustrate some of the key advantages of our strategy – while developing this component
within a federation makes a number of improvements and new practices possible, an implementation within the existing system of knowledge creation, where those are not practiced, and would hardly be meaningful.
A value matrix object is simply an object that accumulates the information about the value of a knowledge resource throughout the lifetime of that resource. Or even more simply, it is an object that federates the value information.
A value matrix may be imagined as a two-dimensional matrix whose columns are criteria and whose rows are varius ways of evaluating them such as expert judgment, popular vote, referencing etc. In keeping with the idea of federation, we simply accumulate all information that may conceivably be of interest, without throwing anything away. Subsequently algorithms and procedures are developed to put this information into practice. Here are some ideas:
- In scientific publishing, the peer reviewews generate potentially a lot of valuable insight (is the article truly outstanding? Is it something everyone should read?) which is then reduced to a single bit of information - 'accepted' or 'rejected.' What if I deeply trust the judgment of a senior expert in my field and want to read the articles he or she found outstanding? Furthermore, the 'yes and no' style of evaluation reflects an old epistemology where all that matters about a research article is whether it is a 'valid piece in our puzzle' or not. Knowledge federation provides a venue for departing from the 'puzzle' mode in research.
- When a knowledge artifact is evaluated according to a variety of criteria, it can also be accessed according to different criteria, according to the needs and interests of the user. Perhaps I am an academic reader wanting only the academically most solid and most relevant research articles. I may also be an entry-level student only wanting introductory material written in an accessible way.
- From the point of view of existing cademic promotion criteria, time spent on organizing knowledge or contributing to shared views may easily seem wasted. The value matrix object allows different institutions to implement different and perhaps more finely graded recruitement criteria. By associating a value matrix object also with each researcher, a mechanis may be evolved that stimulates researchers to federate their knowledge and in that way reduce the overload.
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