The Knowledge Project

If there is one idea to which I keep returning in my mind, it is my "knowledge project." This project links my skills in the four areas described in this essay (visionary, conceptualizer, executive director, worker bee) but, more than anything, allows me to accommodate my visionary side. In most of my life I am either the "conceptualizer," helping others think about their dreams, or the "worker bee," focusing on amassing knowledge in a number of areas, but in this project I get to be the one who dreams. Let me tell you about that dream.

Our New Technological Moment

Even though I have often said it, it bears repeating: the advent of the Internet and search engines have made knowledge accessible to us in ways hitherto unimaginable. Two centuries ago education was through the lecture, with very few books available (except in the most illustrious universities). Fifty years ago, education was through the lecture and seminar, with journals, books and paperbacks galore, allowing ready access into more specialized knowledge. Yet still one had to go to a place with a big library or know how to find difficult-to-access knowledge in order to make a contribution to knowledge. Indeed, when I was a grad. student the fundamental course in the department was one on bibliography and finding books and articles. Now, however, with the advent of the Internet and personal computers/information centers, we are able to do away with courses on bibliography, and we potentially have access to all knowledge, at any time, on our screen. My point is that this knowledge revolution is so new that we haven't really thought through the issue of what kinds of knowledge are available to us, to what extent this knowledge is "usable," and how we might shape knowledge to make it accessible, useful, fun and informative for the next generation.

The Project, In a Nutshell

There currently are two knowledge-oriented projects on the Net: Google Books and Wikipedia. Both are helpful for our new generation, the former in making available millions of titles of out-of-print books, and large sections of those in print, and the latter in providing up-to-the minute encylopedic knowledge. The latter, in my mind, is the "Britannica on steriods," and it bears loads of connections to the former method of arranging knowledge, though with the advantage of linked knowledge. The former is what we might call unfiltered knowledge, contained in many languages and books from all over the world throughout all time. Both of these efforts are the merest of first steps into the brave new world of knowledge accessibility. In order to understand the problem/issue, we should look at it in two ways:

A. Knowledge Availability. The presence of Google Books should force us to ask the question: what is knowledge? where is it? How is it stored? What are the obstacles to getting access to it on your screen? If we seriously began to ask these questions, we would come up with long lists of places where knowledge resides, from archives to billing records of corporations, to insurance policies to court cases, to assessment rolls to criminal data bases, to property records, to libraries and journals. A lot of the knowledge, frankly, is threatening to someone. We also have loads of knowledge "out there" in the form of technique or skill, and we have new ways of communicating this through visual means as well as audio tapes. In other words, the first task we have before us is to come up with a list of the various places where knowledge is stored in our universe and what that knowledge consists of.

B. Filtering Knowledge. When I was in law school, I had a professor who was a former defense attorney defending huge corporate and municipal bodies. His strategy in responding to requests for production in lawsuits was to use what he called the "boxcar" approach--deluge the other side with files, without specifying which ones might have the important information desired by the other side. The other side would become so exhausted in looking through the "boxcar" of information that a settlement would soon ensue. Well, this will be and already is our situation with knowledge. We have loads of it all over the place, more of it is being produced every day, but we don't spend much time thinking about how to "filter it." A knowledge filter can consist of many things, such as a summary essay on the "state of the archives" or "state of the question" to be considered (in video, audio or written form), or a finding guide to material or a tutorial on how to get into a subject or a summary of a book, highlighting what it does and doesn't do for you. The filtering of knowledge probably takes as much time as the creation of knowledge, perhaps less, but this is no less crucial in our day. Again, a search engine's ability to give you immediate results is our current "state of the art," but it is the most primitive/crude method in filtering knowledge.

The "Knowledge Company" of the future will require armies of people to work in each one of these areas. The first task, of course, will be to define what knowledge gathering and knowledge filtering means. We will need knowledge gatherers to go into the various byways of life, to find out the state of reproduction of collections, to learn the legal issues relative to "ownership" of information, to think of unique ways that knowledge might be elicited from people (video tapes of dances, surgeons video-taped doing various surgeries, stopping along the way to give explanations, videos of someone planting a tree, helping a person understand an issue, etc.). The knowledge filterers are those people who, when confronted with mountains of data, most naturally say, "How can I make this mass accessible and understandable to people?" People in this department would do lots of writing, summarizing, arranging videos, soliciting people to write or speak summaries of things, etc. Hundreds of workers would be required, just to do these two basic tasks.

A Story To Keep Us Going

The next essay will describe how the material will actually be arranged to maximize ease of knowledge acquisition. Before I get there, however, I close with an story. A few years ago I stumbled upon an essay written by the 20th century British mystery writer, feminist and Christian writer Dorothy Sayers. In speaking about Latin, the classical language, she said that the advantage of learning it was that it tended to cut the work necessary for any intellectual task by about 50%. While not necessarily agreeing with her, I am charmed by her approach, for it assumes that there are distinct things we can do to bring shortcuts to learning. The goal of my knowledge project is not only to make everything easily available to all people, but to help students so that the knowledge-mastery time can be cut by up to 75%. What I mean by this is that when the "Knowledge Project" is complete and functioning, it ought to save a person that much time in gaining crucial knowledge.

What that means is that a doctoral program that might have taken 5 years (60 months), might now take only 15 months...a little over a year. And, to add to that, it would mean that the quality, depth and completeness of information cited would increase. The only things that might make the program last more than 15 months are the time needed to master multiple languages (if that is in the doctoral program) and the actual time to write a dissertation. Indeed, one of the great "filtering" techniques and resources/data bases will be a "dissertation ideas" section, where scholars from dozens of fields will give a short presentation about research ideas and why certain ideas are crucial to the field at this moment.

Conclusion

Now that we see the project has to do with knowledge gathering and filtering, and the promise is to put all knowledge at your fingertips, so that projects can be cut by almost 75% in time, yielding you better quality information in that 25% of time, we turn to the way that the material should be organized.

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