Questions and Ignorance. Questions and Ignorance -- From the archives of John Lienhard's Engines of Our Ingenuity radio show...

"I'm pretty sure that the only real function of a teacher is to guide students in asking and pursuing questions. Once a student develops the rare talent for seeking his or her own ignorance, teachers become irrelevant. But it's hard to look at your own ignorance. And it's not easy to ask a true question. It feels like humiliation."

But a little humiliation is worth it to find the bliss within your ignorance. Since "Knowledge...flows to the point of greatest ignorance.", it's the real questions that break the dams impeding that flow. As a result, it behooves teams and organizations to both solicit and embrace them. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

I also think that good teachers are those who give you permission and safety to not know. Here's a tidbit I heard on Car Talk this morning that's relevant.

I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

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Emergence, reverence, and irrelevance.

Via Jerry Michalski, here's a great text by Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of Operations Research (pdf file), that sketches what I feel is the usual arc trajectory of successful fields of knowledge.

The life of OR has been a short one. It was born here late in the 1930's. By the mid 60's it had gained widespread acceptance in academic, scientific, and managerial circles. In my opinion this gain was accompanied by a loss of its pioneering spirit, its sense of mission and its innovativeness. Survival, stability and respectability took precedence over development, and its decline began.

I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both, I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960's most OR courses in American universities were given by academics who had never practised it. They and their students were text-book products engaging in impure research couched in the language, but not the reality, of the real world. The meetings and journals of the relevant professional societies, like classrooms, were filled with abstractions from an imagined reality. As a result OR came to be identified with the use of mathematical models and algorithms rather than the ability to formulate management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their solutions in turbulent environments.

Eventually the tails begins wagging the dog. "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

[...] In the first two decades of OR, its nature was dictated by the nature of the problematic situations it
faced. Now the nature of the situations it faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.

There's an interesting passage on interdisciplinarity as a sign of the aliveness of a field:

Subjects, disciplines, and professions are categories that are useful in filing scientific knowledge and in dividing the labour involved in its pursuit, but they are nothing more than this. Nature and the world are not organized as science and universities are. There are no physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even Operational Research problems. These are names of different points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal fruitfulness.

[...] The fact that the world is in such a mess as it is is largely due to our decomposing messes into unidisciplinary problems that are treated independently of each other.

Don't miss the ironic postscript, too.

A related earlier post of mine is Information systems research: towards irrelevance?

[Seb's Open Research]

Written almost 25 years ago, this gem from Ackoff captures why I'm back in the real world and was never a particularly good academic. I've always been more interested in making some progress against interesting problems than in solving toy problems.

I helped pay for my college education as a stage carpenter and electrician. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about tools. Probably the most important was that the tool you could get you hands on now was a lot more useful than the perfect tool back in the shop. The second was that if you had a reasonable collection of tools, you could usually adapt one to the problem. But you could rarely fit the problem to the tool.

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THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.

Lately I've been talking to quite a few companies about Social Network Enablement, Social Software, Weblogs, the ineffective use of technology and knowledge by front-line workers (both because these tools are inadequate, and because they're not used properly), and what this all means for the discipline of Knowledge Management. I've blogged about all of these subjects recently, but if anyone is interested, I've put together this discussion paper in MS Word that captures it all in one place. I plan to produce a KM Future State Vision paper, as a companion piece, as well.

[How to Save the World]

Continuing to catch up on old material in my aggregator. Another keeper from Dave Pollard.

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A Controversial View of Meta-Learning. Imagine you are the Chief Learning Officer of a successful high-tech firm in SIlicon Valley. You hear about a new eLearning title, "Mavis Beacon Teaches Reading." It takes four hours to complete. It's self-instructional. It's delivered via the web. A learner can take it in... [Internet Time Blog]

Nice rant from Jay Cross I just got a chance to follow up on (one of the reasons I'm biased toward RSS feeds that provide the whole post instead of a teaser, but that's a rant for another time).  Jay's summary:

School classes and corporate training would be more effective were learners initially told "This is our best thinking. It might be wrong. How do you see it?" That's a meta-learning tactic that would improve results without adding costs. You could preface all eLearning with a reminder that learners should look for ways to improve the content, drop thoughts in the electronic suggestion box, and that they organization is always on the lookout for ways to improve its service. Positioning a learning event as inquiry instead a recounting of someone else's truth puts a touch of humanity back into eLearning that's often sterile.

Getting the concept of meta-learning to take hold requires acceptance that nothing is set in stone. There are no givens. The world is uncertain. Everything is relative. People can learn to learn better by taking a long term view in which learning answers the inevitable query of "What's in it for me?"

The only thing controversial here is that this attitude is so hard to find in practice.

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Censorware Blocks This Site. Simon Phipps alerts me that one of the big censorware outfits, SurfControl, is blocking this and other blogs as a... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Hey, I'm hanging in a better neighborhood than I thought. Just checked McGee's Musings at SurfControl to discover I'm blocked as well. Good to know that SurfControl's rigorous methodology has carefully classified my blog as Usenet News. Won't you sleep better tonight knowing your children are safe from my thoughts?

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