In the broadest sense knowledge environments may be defined as social practices, technological and physical arrangements intended to facilitate collaborative knowledge building

Knowledge building

The Knowledge Building 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...

, decision making, inference or discovery, depending on the epistemological premises and goals.

Overview

Knowledge environments departing from constructivist epistemology

Constructivist epistemology

Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Constructivists claim that the concepts of science are mental...

 assume that knowledge about a domain is built in and results from cognitive and/or social practices. From this point of view the primary purpose of knowledge environments is to host and support activities of knowledge building, the means including cognitive ergonomics, social software

Social software

Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...

, immediate information access exploiting means of multimedia

Multimedia

Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 and hypertext

Hypertext

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

, content contribution functionalities and structured ontologies

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

. Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 itself is prototypical example of a knowledge environment in this sense.

From another perspective, the purpose of a knowledge environment can be defined as 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

Teacher

A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...

, every author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, every librarian

Librarian

A librarian is an information professional trained in library and information science, which is the organization and management of information services or materials for those with information needs...

 and every database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 manager is a creator of a knowledge environment. At a specialised level knowledge environments need sophisticated architecture and modeling capabilities. This is necessary when the creator of the knowledge environment wants to deliver replicaple 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

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...

. 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
  Virtual learning environment
  Defined largely by usage, the term virtual learning environment has most, if not all, of the following salient properties:* It is Web-based* It uses Web 2.0 tools for rich 2-way interaction* It includes a content management system...
  
  s, of which the goal is collaborative knowledge building
  Knowledge building
  The Knowledge Building 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...
  
  
• 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 of text, but even non-verbal, e.g. audiovisual content
• Online simulations 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

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 erconomics
• How to measure affectiveness of a knowledge environment.
• How to integrate multiple media.
• 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 in many ways. They are useful for designing:

• Learning
• Collaborative authoring
• Knowledge management
• Scenario planning in companies
• Decision gaining tools
• Simulations
• Games

External links

• Workshops on Knowledge environment for science and engineering at scienceofcollaboratories.org