This is a presentation I gave in one of my courses in Knowledge Media Design collaborative program on Nov 4, 2010. It articulates a design challenge--idea-centered open knowledge building environment--I want to pursue in this course. Any comment will be highly appreciated!

1. Idea-centered
Knowledge Building Environment
Bodong Chen
Nov 4, 2010

2. What is an “idea?”
• An idea could be:
– whatever is before the mind when one thinks (arising in a reflex,
spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection)
– a personal view
– representational images; i.e. images of some object
– the content of cognition
– a fundamental ontological category of being
• Karl Popper’s (1972) philosophical theory of reality:
– World 1: the world of physical objects and events
– World 2: the mental or psychological world—metal states or processes,
such as feelings, perceptions, memory, experience, etc.
– World 3: the world of the products of the human mind, such as languages,
tales, mathematical constructions, symphonies, paintings, sculptures.
– Interactions among three worlds.

3. Knowledge Building:
Towards idea-centered education
• Idea-centered education (Scardamalia, 2002)
– KB is the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a
community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003a).
– … ideas are treated as real things, as objects of inquiry and
improvement in their own right. KB environments enable ideas to get
out into the world and onto a path of continual improvement
(Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003a).
– … ideas that have a life out in the world, where they are subject to
social processes of evaluation, revision, and application … support
idea development in both education and workplace situations
(Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003b).
– Knowledge building refers to collective work for the advancement
and elaboration of conceptual artifacts (product plans, business
strategies, marketing plans, theories, ideas, and models), the
entities of Karl Popper’s World 3 (Paavola et al, 2004).

4. Ideas in KB communities
Figure. An evolutionary view of idea improvement (Hong & Sullivan, 2008).

5. Environments for idea improvement
• Knowledge Building environments
– Knowledge Forum
• Idea-management software
– Edistorm
– Wridea
– IdeaScale
– Jive
– Kindling
– …

6. Knowledge Forum

7. Edistorm

8. Ideascale

9. Kindling

10. Design challenges
• How to give lives to ideas in this environment?
• How to support knowledge-creating discourse
in an idea-centered manner?

11. In Knowledge Forum
Big Ideas tool for students to make judgment on ideas’ promisingness (Chen et al., 2010).

12. New contexts:
social media and open education
• Blog, Twitter, … • Open Learning Resources,
Open Learning Initiative (OLI),
P2PU, …

14. References
• Chen, B., Chuy, M., Resendes, M., & Scardamalia, M. (2010). “Big Ideas Tool” as a new feature of
Knowledge Forum. Poster presented at the 2010 Knowledge Building Summer Institute, Toronto,
Canada.
• Hong, H.-Y., R. Sullivan, F. R. (2008). Towards an Idea-Centered, Principle-Based Design Approach
to Support Learning as Knowledge Creation. Educational Technology Research and Development,
57(5), 613-627
• Paavola, S., Lipponen, L., & Hakkarainen, K. (2004). Models of innovative knowledge communities
and three metaphors of learning. Review of Educational Research, 74(4), 557–576.
• Popper, K. (1972). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
• Scardamalia, M. (2002). Collective cognitive responsibility for the advancement of knowledge. In B.
Smith (Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society (pp. 67-98). Chicago: Open Court.
• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge Building. In Encyclopedia of Education. (2nd ed.,
pp. 1370-1373). New York: Macmillan Reference, USA.
• Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building environments: Extending the limits of
the possible in education and knowledge work. In A. DiStefano, K.E. Rudestam, & R. Silverman
(Eds.), Encyclopedia of distributed learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.