Knowledge: explicit, tacit or in artefacts

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Knowledge explicit, tacit - or in artefacts
Eric Monteiro, NTNU og UiO Oslo, 2001
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Contents

• Motivation
• 3 perspectives
• explicit
• non-explicit
• tacit skills
• narrative
• inscribed in artefacts
• implictions/discussion/questions

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Knowledge managment

• Innovation - new production of knowledge
• IT based support presupposes
• what is it
• where is it
• how does it unfold

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Explicit

• The cognitive stance (cf. L. Suchman)
• Plans, not situated action
• Rules
• knowledge information (ex. Intranets, DBs)

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Tacit (I)

• Skills, competence
• the body
• Dreyfus Dreyfus
• Nonaka
• Community-of-practice
• Orr
• JS Brown
• Lave Wenger

T
E
Social- isation
External- isation
T
Internal- isation
Combin- ation
E
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C-of-P

• Social networks
• narratives
• stories are work
• ex. hospitals, on/off duty, coffee

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The narrative (I)

• A primary form for c-of-p
• constructs coherence
• make sense of ambigious situations
• represent sense-making of earlier experience

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The narrative (II)
The practise of diagnosis is done through
narrative, and both diagnosis and process are
preserved and circulated among the technicians
through war stories, anectotes of their
experiences (p. 104)
Once war stories have been told, the stories are
artifacts to circulate and preserve (p. 126)
The team members are sitting there talking about
all their problems with the machines, teaching
each other what they have learned. (p. 51)
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The cathedral
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Cathedrals (I)

• how were cathedrals built??
• Dramatic increase in the 13th century
• number of cathedals (industrial revolution)
• size
• complexity
• precision
• INNOVATION

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Cathedrals (II)

• No theotetical knowledge
• no architect
• 13 redesigns of Chartres in 30 years
• no plan/drawing (came later)

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Cathedrals (III)

• Templates
• constructive geometry (compass, ruler, string)
• social organization
• LABORATORIES
• heterogenous machinery, skills, raw material
• local tacit messy

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Cathedrals (IV)
Geometry alone is not enough it has to have a
material manifestation - the template (p.323)
Templates are models or pattens, that
is,accepted concrete, local or indexical
solutions that can be applied to other problems
(p. 324)
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Questions

• Transformation - tackle also impossible
  problems (ex. DnV)
• C-o-P is conservative in the sense that
• no transformation
• no role for technology