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Some people go to school and get degrees to learn how to manage knowledge – Information Sciences, Library Sciences, Law, Medicine and other professions As we learn a trade or profession, we also learn the ways of thinking and knowing and doing in that field. Every field has its own set s of “practices”. Scientists, for example, conduct experiments using a particular progression from developing a research question and hypotehsic, to  collecting and analyzing data.  Lawyers investigate witnesses and examine the record (file, police  reports, etc) before going to trial, and learn how to interrogate witnesses and presntt artugments in particular ways.

Every one develops at least one, and probably more than one, way to skin the proverbial cat.

We call this knowledge management . Knowledge management includes learning how to locate valid and helpful resoruces, determining their validity and currency, organizing the information, and applying what we learn in everyday or professional activities.  People who manage this learning process well, tend to be more aware of how they learn. They are not merely memorizing a bunch of facts. Facts change. Information grows at a rapid rate, so much so that it would be impossible for any of us to keep up with it.  

Some services today advertise on TV that if you text them they will give you the “answer” to your question – as if it were possible to know the answers to random questions. What that kind of service does is encourage us to think about learning as knowing a bunch of stuff, rather than encouraging us to learn how to learn.

Instead of telling us the answer, a good service online should teach us how to find the answer, so we can find it for ourselves whenever we need to and even if we change topics.  It’s like the old adage, if I give a person a fish, they eat today; if I teach them how to fish, they eat for the rest of their lives.

Teaching students to learn how they learn will help them become better managers of their professional learning for life.

Cole

Engestrom’s Expansive Learning Cycle (below) went circular to describe scientifically minded process of inquiry. It didn’t eliminate the need to refer to the trinagle to address mediation, but added to the richness of the thinking in this regard.

The triangle represents the theory that learning is mediated. Moll (2001) and others explain that learning is “culturally mediated”, that is, that we accumulate knowledge and practices about how to acquire and use knowledge, and distribute it as well, through our everyday lives in formal and informal settings. Family, school, friends, and nowadays YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, and all these web-based resources have become a part of our culture to different degrees and in varying ways, depending upon who you are and what your life experience is. So, learning occurs through our use of these virtual tools, as well as the the kinds of tools we can hold in our hands (like a pencil, graph paper, a book, and so on).

Learning also occurs through the “mediation of others” (Moll, 2001) – that is, people teach us or model for us what we need to know and how we can make use of that knowledge.

Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti (2005) laid out an excellent discussion of cultural mediation and “hybridity”, that is, our membership in multiple communities of work, family, learning, friendship, and so on. We are not the same with every person or group we know and we do not behave in the same ways everywhere we go.  We might be experts in one setting – a lawyer knows her way around the courtroom, and novices in others – but does she know how to create a website, or cook a meal, or paint, or any number of things. She might – and she might not.

Recognizing our expertise and knowing when we are not experts, allows us to understand – not our limits as much as where we’d like to go next in this journey and what we might need to learn to get there.

Check this out…

Metacognition can be both product and process. In other worsds, it can indicate a metacognitive thought or a metacogintive process. Focusing on metacognitive process emphasizes thinking about thinking from the thoughts that evidence such thinking.

One can provoke metacognitive thinking  by asking questions as to how someone arrived at an answer or idea. Asking “how” questions often prompt us to stop and think, how did I do that?

“Metacognition, or the awareness and regulation of the process of one’s thinking, has been recognized as a critical ingredient to successful learning” (Lin, Schwartz, & Hatano, 2005, p. 246). Students who write down how they solved word problems have been more successful than students who talked through the problems with less deliberation (Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002). We are all different, so for some, talking it through out loud (by ourselves or with someone else) can stimulate metacognition. For this reason, researchers tend to use what’s called “think alouds” to capture someone talking to themselves about how they are thinking through a problem as a way of documenting metacognition in progress.

Adaptive Expertise. Developing expertise in some topic area tends to make a person more efficient at tasks requiring that knowledge, but not necessarily more innovative or creative in expanding their expertise (Ignaki &Hatano, 1986; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). “Adaptive minds can often find a good match between a tool and the local cultural context through improvisation and reflection” (Lin & Hatano, 2005. p. 4). This highlights the importance of the arts in education. Thinking outside the box is a form of imagination. Memorization and rote teaching do not inspire creativity.

Inference, Evaluation, & Reflective Practice. Readers engage in metacognitive processes in as they gain “knowledge of task, knowledge of text, knowledge of self, i.e. knowledge of [how one learns], and knowledge of strategies and their application” (Bell, 2007, p. 85). Adult readers working alone and in collaboration used inference and evaluation and framing to make sense of  the text.

Sherry Turkle’s (2007) book, Evocative Objects: Things we think with, has inspired me to use ordinary objects to provoke metacognition. We hear songs, see a rolling pin, use hair dryers, and view photographs everyday. Sometimes when we hold or look at these objects we are brought to tears or laugh just thinking about a memory they evoke. If we stop and think about why just looking at something made us cry, for example, and begin to trace the connection between the object and our feelings and some real life event, we are engaging in a form of metacognition. Sherry Turkle’s book does not focus on the concept of metacognition, but her discussion of the intimate connection we have with everyday objects is an easy read and a recommended one. Her collection of essays provides countless examples of people engaging in metacognition inspired by their intimate relationship to everyday objects. The contributors’ stories demonstrate how easy it is to engage metacognitively on any subject matter and reminds us that every one of us is capable of metacognition. It’s not a lofty exercise, even if it involves “higher order thinking“.

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