The power of the question
I discovered the Anti-Knowledge website recently via my tag search for knowledge management. Anti-knowledge is the home of Instant Innovation, LLC and is run by Bruce LaDuke. What struck me was the central role he gives to the power of the question in his framing of how human knowledge develops:
The question is a little understood element of human cognition, but the question has incredible power and is at the center of every scientific and technological advance. The question is a central aspect of both learning and knowledge creation.
This work is clearly deeper than a few minutes reading will provide. He's written on knowledge management in a number of arenas, from technology to innovation to cognition to artificial intelligence and more. He also has a book, Knowledge Machine, which he makes freely available from the website.
There was a thread on the idea of questions that I picked up, inspired by Lilia writing about her research process, Knowledge flows are powered by questions.
2 Comment(s)
said:
I love this example. I've even considered applying Socratic method to the class I teach at Northwestern, but I haven't figured out the best approach.
The Socratic method is almost a holy grail because it looks so simple and yet is difficult to do well. People who are experts in Theory of Constraints have learned to use this method quite well.
There is always the Wikipedia entry on Socratic method.
You might also be interested in this: http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html. It is a great example of using questions to help someone acquire knowledge rather than teach it - the Socratic method - leads to much stickier knowledge than being shown how to do something.