As a media practitioner and educator I’m interested particularly in the ways that new media are transforming the landscape of how we source our information, knowledge and beliefs about the world. We are shifting from a passive stance of absorbing from fixed media like books and newspapers, and from the relatively traditional teaching methods of the lecturer and didactic instruction; to an active model where we seek out the material we are interested in form a variety of sources, with the web increasingly predominant as the first port of call. Knowledge, especially social knowledge, is therefore a construction in which we are engaged at both a private and personal level.
This paradigm shift I think has implications too in terms of how it opens up our understanding that knowledge is an artificial construct, the sheer weight of information and volume of opinion on the web cannot but lead to the realisation that nothing can be ‘objectively true’ and that everything is socially constructed.
We have to therefore constantly engage with the web in an ongoing dialogue of assessment and evaluation of the sources, trusting some and abandoning others according to out personal perceptions of what we believe in, and what others that we believe in, believe in.
This constant process of sifting in a conscious way maps closely onto Douglas Schon’s theories of the Reflective Practitioner, an approach to understanding how professionals navigate the ever changing problems they encounter by testing them against their existing set of practices, or repertoire, and then adapting and developing that repertoire in response to the solving of the new situation.
The potential for the web, especially in blogs and the other forms of social media that entice us to evaluate our positions e.g. linkedin, means that we are potentially able to seamlessly upgrade our reflective practice in a way that becomes embedded in our daily rituals of gathering information about the world and then disseminating and explaining it to others
In this blog I will try to map out my (and others) thoughts on this ever changing landscape, and highlight innovations and new perspectives, as well as think through some of the issues myself