Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Information vs. Knowledge

I've been thinking a lot lately (in the back of my head) about an idea that I think addresses building knowledge instead of just providing information.

What I have in mind can in one way be described as an online site that would allow users to create debates on topics. More than a debate, it would be more like a community-driven argument map. Something akin to a wiki-like creation of an argument.

My hope would be that this would be something that people could use to both express their positions and to learn about the arugments for/against a topic in order to come to their own conclusions. I'm imaging what could happen if this was done for the healthcare debate for instance.

What got me thinking about this was that it seems to me that mostly what is available today are arguments from a specific viewpoint. We read blogs, articles, watch and forward youtube videos, forward emails, etc., that tend to align with our positions. It can be hard to break out of our own little echo chambers we end up in.

What I'd love is instead if there was a place to go to get the whole argument on a topic in a way that really helped inform.

At it's grandest I imagine this as a step in evolving the "Information Age" to the "Knowledge Age", by helping people organize their thoughts and think through their positions.

The idea here wouldn't be that each topic would have one right conclusion, but that the argument for various positions would be laid out in a way that people could navigate it and reach their own conclusion. And do so informed of what the arguments are for other positions, and what assumptions rest behind all of it.

The challenge would be doing this well, which is what would make it worth doing of course.