Got Knowledge?
Knowledge
From my grade book, from the scantron, from the state assessments, from my administration, from my bills, and from the news… why else would I read the Economist every evening?
This semester I am co-teaching a class called Data-Driven Decision-Making, and it’s really making me think again.
Last week I read an article by Michael Fullan (The Role of Leadership in
the Promotion of Knowledge Management in Schools, presented at the OECD conference in 2002). He identifies the difference between Information and Knowledge:
Information is machines. Knowledge is people. Information becomes knowledge only when it takes on a “social life”
Do you ever feel oppressed by data? We receive volumes of it, but if it never embeds itself in community it is merely noise… just information.
Collaboration has been a buzzword in education for eternity, but we still work primarily in our own spaces. The edublogosphere is still the high of collaboration for me. In my school the only real collaboration I experience is on a leadership team, or with my teacher intern.
So, my challenge is to turn the information I receive this week into knowledge.
I commit to engaging my colleagues in conversation about the instructional and operational data I receive. I also promise not to pass on data without establishing a “social life” for it.
Data for data’s sake is merely information… it lacks meaning.
Image from: flickr.com/stanleymoss
