Knowledge environments are social practices, technological and physical arrangements intended to facilitate

collaborative Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. Most ...

knowledge building The Knowledge Building (KB) theory was created and developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia for describing what a community of learners needs to accomplish in order to create knowledge. The theory addresses the need to educate people for ...

decision making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rati ...

inference Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in ...

or discovery, depending on the

epistemological Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

premises and goals.

Overview

Knowledge environments departing from

constructivist epistemology Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natura ...

assume that

domain knowledge Domain knowledge is knowledge of a specific, specialized discipline or field, in contrast to general (or domain-independent) knowledge. The term is often used in reference to a more general discipline—for example, in describing a software engin ...

is built in and results from cognitive and/or social practices. From this perspective the primary purpose of knowledge environments is to host and support activities of knowledge building, the means including cognitive ergonomics,

social software Social software, also known as social apps or social platform, include communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usua ...

, immediate

information access Information access is the freedom or ability to identify, obtain and make use of database or information effectively. There are various research efforts in information access for which the objective is to simplify and make it more effective for ...

exploiting means of

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

and

hypertext Hypertext is E-text, text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typi ...

, content contribution functionalities and structured

ontologies In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

itself is a prototypical example of a knowledge environment in this sense. From another perspective, the purpose of a knowledge environment can be defined as a method to facilitate consistent knowledge outcomes. Knowledge outcomes reveal themselves as learning, communication, goals, decisions, etc. Consistent knowledge outcomes imply predictable learning results or replicable communication results and predictable quality of decisions. The design of knowledge environments is both commonplace activity and specialised expert work. At a simplistic level every

teacher A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...

, every

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

, every

librarian A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time, ...

and every

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

manager is a creator of a knowledge environment. At a specialized level, knowledge environments need sophisticated architecture and modeling capabilities. This approach is necessary when the creator of the knowledge environment wants to deliver replicable results in hundreds of specific instances of the same knowledge environment. On the other hand, the strengthening trend of public authorship leads to open-ended ontologies by means of, say, tagging or folksonomies. In a significant sense, knowledge environments are in such cases created not only by their authors or owners but also by the contributors of their ontologies.

Types

There are various kinds of knowledge environments: * Socio-technological environments, e.g.

Virtual Learning Environment A virtual learning environment (VLE) in educational technology is a web-based platform for the digital aspects of courses of study, usually within educational institutions. They present resources, activities, and interactions within a course stru ...

s, of which the goal is collaborative

* Learning environments where the main goal of the participants is to gain some kind of knowledge, skill, or conceptual clarity * Virtual environments incorporating communities of participation in, e.g., political processes * Creative or experimental environments in which knowledge is constructed by means of

collaborative authoring Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story. Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally – many collaboratively written works have been ...

of text, but even non-verbal, e.g. audiovisual content *

Online simulation Web-based simulation (WBS) is the invocation of computer simulation services over the World Wide Web, specifically through a web browser. Increasingly, the web is being looked upon as an environment for providing modeling and simulation applications ...

s of ecology, economy, or society * Knowledge-intensive gaming environments * Communication environments where the main goal of the participants is to transmit to each other some signals or information related to the activities and behavior being generated in that environment * Decisional environments where the main goal of the participants is to share knowledge and opinions such that decision options are generated and choices made * Operating environments where the knowledge environment is a support or enabler for the actual process or physical work being carried out

Issues of development

Variables

Knowledge environments are all pervasive but difficult to build on a scalable and a replicable basis. This is because of two groups of interacting variables: * Variables associated with diversity of context * Variables associated with the consequent multiplicity of perspectives to the domains in question * Variables associated with complexity of domain

Issues

Some of the issues in development are: * How to create a knowledge environment that acknowledges the diversity in participants, and the consequent multiplicity of perspectives to given domain of information * How to facilitate exploration of multiple perspectives to domains of information * How to optimize

cognitive economics Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

* How to measure effectiveness of a knowledge environment * How to integrate multiple

media Media may refer to: Communication * Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data ** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising ** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...

* How to give users of such environments freedom to discover knowledge in such an environment while placing them within an operating structure

Applications

Knowledge environments are useful for designing: * Learning *

Knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...

Scenario planning Scenario planning, scenario thinking, scenario analysis, scenario prediction and the scenario method all describe a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and gener ...

in companies * Decision gaining tools * Simulations * Games * Surrounding

External links

Workshops on Knowledge environment for science and engineering
* {{cite web, url=http://dougengelbart.org/about/dke.html, title=About the Dynamic Knowledge Environment , author=Doug Engelbart , author-link=Doug Engelbart

Environment Environment most often refers to: __NOTOC__ * Natural environment, all living and non-living things occurring naturally * Biophysical environment, the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism or ...