ISCRAT SESSION II.19 David Guile "Epistemic activity in small and
medium-sized enterprises"
I found the above paper by David Guile especially valuable, together with
the fact that it led me to the work of Karin Knorr Cetina on 'epistemic
cultures'.
David started by defining epistemic activity as 'the opportunity to
participate in social activites that generate new knowledge.' He cited
Knorr Cetina and the idea of the change from 'scientific epistemic
cultures', where scientists/experts produce knowledge to 'societal epistemic
knowledge' in which the production of knowledge has become democratised and
widely inclusive, often through the mediation of IT tools that have both
transformed access to knowledge, and are themselves tools that enable there
users to transform knowledge itself.
I found that David's paper helped me to make sense of the earlier excellent
organised symposium (I.3) 'Concpetualizing design as an activity', where I
heard a range of expositions of a theme that is at the heart of our current
interest in manufacturing companies. This theme is that of
co-configuration - the transformation of product design processes to those
that are continuous rather than episodic, and are generated by a
collaborative relationship between designers and users.
It now seems to me that the shift from mass customisation (where the
designers respond to user defined needs in their designing) towards
co-configuration ( where designers engage with users in a design
partnership) is directly analagous to Guile/Knorr Cetina's distinction
between scientific and societal epistemic cultures.
It also seems to me that there are interesting lines of thought here
concerning the use of IT in schools. I have long believed that the
fundamental problem concerns the fact that schools are organisational
contexts predicated on what I now understand as 'scientific epistemic
cultures' - that is the holding of knowledge by the teacher
('expert/'shaman') and the school as a place for the transmission of that
shamanistic knowledge to the novice or accolyte.
But IT is a family of mediating tools that transform the capacity of the
student to access knowledge for him or herself without the intercession of
the shamanistic teacher. (Textbooks in schools, and books in school
libraries do not do that, because the books and their content remain under
the control of the teachers. Books read outside school have a limited
capacity to do it because of barriers to access.) Once a student at school
is given access to the internet they have a tool that, as David Guile said,
is a thing that simultaneously transforms and is transformed by the user.
Schools, as currently configured, are not an appropriate context for
learning by such means. Thus schools are predisposed to try and control IT
such that it is limited in its use to applications to the precepts of
scientific epistemic activity.
Finally, in both schools and workplaces, it seems to me that we are
inexorably led by all this to a redefinition of what constitutes competence
and expertise in epistemic cultures that are social in nature and that have
access to transformational technologies.
This is all fluid and ill-formed thinking - but then ISCRAT was only two
weeks ago.
Phillip Capper,
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
Level 13
114 The Terrace
(PO Box 2855)
WELLINGTON
New Zealand
Ph: +64 4 499 8140
Fx: +64 4 499 8395
Mb: +64 021 519 741
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