The Walled Gardens and the Wild Forests
Recording Knowledge in the New Age
Kirsten Winkler, expert on the new education entrepreneurs, makes an appeal for the knowledge graph.
As citizens we are becoming more and more transparent to each other. I won't rehash the whole controversy of checking Facebook profiles prior to job interviews or Eric Schmidt's suggestion to let people change their names when turning 18 to white wash their past.
The essence is: in the future one will be more defined than ever by one's Social Graph and digital footprint. However, the question is, should we be defined and thus evaluated by party pictures, our 1378 “friends”, a Farmville highscore, or other parts of a entertainment-based web history? Or, turning this question around: does my highscore in Farmville say anything meaningful about my job qualifications? These questions underscore why I think we need to establish the Knowledge Graph.
What is the Knowledge Graph?
The Knowledge Graph, similar to our Social Graph, will collect all of our interactions with content and people on the Internet and parts of the offline world. However, unlike the Social Graph that collects trivial data, the Knowledge Graph will collect information that demonstrates our knowledge and all related human connections. This includes not only the classic school, college and university career but also every piece of informal learning we do in our lifetime.
Right now, there is basically no possibility for us to prove what we know beyond official certification, although we have ever more branching avenues of learning. I can go to Academic Earth or Udemy Academic and watch an entire course about Roman architecture and potentially I will have gained a level of understanding equal to someone who attended class. The difference is that the person attending school will have a certificate to prove it; I won't.
I can sign up for services like Livemocha and learn a new language entirely online, in the process getting my speaking to the same or maybe even better level as somebody who attended a classic language school. However, this person will have a certificate of attendance or a test result at the end, whereas I won't.
In order to add value, lasting appreciation and therefore measurable results other than the personal satisfaction of learning new skills or achieving a personal goal, we need a unified method to collect, evaluate and archive the knowledge we acquire during our lives.
How is data collected?
The Knowledge Graph can be connected to all kinds of different devices and services, similar to Facebook Connect. Possible use cases of the Knowledge Graph are:
1. Location based
An application installed on a mobile device automatically and regularly tracks your attendance in the Roman architecture class. It also registers the profile of every student in the room as well as the professor’s and adds those to a micro network.
2. Learning application
You are doing a 15 minute learning sprint during your commute with a Spanish learning application on your mobile device. Your score and progress will be saved in your Knowledge Graph.
3. Video lesson
You are watching a recording of a lecture at Stanford University on your tablet device. The Knowledge Graph registers what you saw and for how long you watched. The same is true for an episode on the Discovery Channel or any other documentary you watch on TV or VOD.
4. eBooks
The Knowledge Graph registers which book you buy and read on your eReader and records this information.
How is data validated?
Every provider of knowledge from academia to learning apps will have to validate their content. Most language learning applications today, for example, are already built on certain frameworks that comply with official school curriculum. Academia already has some experience with how to validate educational content based on a credit system. What we need to do is to open this credit system to informal learning and simply validate the content that is learned, may it be the vocabulary we learn through a mobile application or the general knowledge about marketing through taking a video course.
Making use of the Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph will be built on the principles of the semantic web and therefore be able to understand the data and pieces of information that will be added not only by individuals but also by companies and institutions in the education space.
Due to this it can be used in various situations and will not only simplify but also add fairness and objectivity to important decisions taken by ourselves or others. People will have the choice to open their Knowledge Graph to the public or make it private and only open it via request or invitation.
Recruitment
This brings us right back to the beginning and why we need a Knowledge Graph. If you are applying for a job or you want to study at a university your recruiters will most likely go online and search for your name, either on Facebook or Google. Part of the data they get from those sources is most likely related to the private life of the person they are scanning and hence it normally adds no measurable value other than to validate social behaviour outside the work or study place and therefore drawing conclusions on a very limited base of information. In the case of a person who is very aware of sharing private information on the web, the virtue of such search nears zero.
The Knowledge Graph will deliver exactly the kind of information that recruiters need. It will act as a repository of the composite skills and abilities of an individual. The Knowledge Graph can be filtered for special skills or a certain focus in one’s learning, and as it is constantly evolving employers will also be able to follow the progress of their staff. What they learn as a complete whole might throw light on a person’s competencies for a higher or even different position.
Headhunters can search public Knowledge Graphs and more accurately find people for a position they need to fill. This not only makes their own jobs a lot easier and more efficient but also heightens the chances of career progress for people who constantly invest in their own knowledge.
Career decisions
One life, one job, and a single knowledge base is a fast receding mirage that will disappear in our lifetimes. We are living in a time where most of us won't be in the same job for life. It is therefore essential to see the possibilities ahead. The Knowledge Graph can filter possible careers one could pursue given their current background, but it can also show me what I need to add to my skill set in order to work in a different job.
Of course, the same is true during our studies. By automatically scanning and validating information in its database the Knowledge Graph can show me what careers are open to me with the current set of courses but also what other options I might have by adding another certification. If I choose to take a second program of study during my work life in order to qualify for a superior position, the Knowledge Graph can show me not only what but also where to study or how to organise those studies depending on my changing learning preferences such as when, where and how I want to learn.
Lifelong Learning
The Knowledge Graph is not static, as discussed earlier in my point about career decisions and the spotting of connections between careers or possible gaps in our knowledge we might want to fill. It will therefore also address the sustainability of our collected knowledge, as we all need to constantly revise what we have learned to keep it in our long term memory.
This will not only be helpful in later phases of our lives but especially during our academic career. The Knowledge Graph knows what we are studying and hence what we need to revise to be well prepared for upcoming exams. Instead of panicking three weeks before the exam, learning everything we can, like most of us did during university, I suppose, the Knowledge Graph will bring up the topics we need to learn before they vanish from our memory. This way we will not only be ideally prepared for the exam but also much more relaxed and thus open to new topics to learn.
Who could implement the Knowledge Graph today?
Every service that offers learning content on the Internet today has found some way to measure the progress of the learner. Most likely, those measurements are based on frameworks that already exist. Therefore, extracting this data and feeding it to the Knowledge Graph would not be a technical challenge.
As difficult as this may sound, I feel the work of creating and sustaining the K.G. should be a shared effort between academia and the for-profits. We need to eliminate the unjustifiable differences between the walled gardens of formal learning and the wild forests of informal learning. This way, everyone will benefit as continual learning from a range of sources will make sense as each can be validated and ultimately rewarded.
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About
Kirsten Winkler has been involved in the emerging field of educational entrepreneurship from day one. She is one the most experienced entrepreneurs in the sector and today is active as a journalist (she hosts EDUKWEST, a series of webcast interviews with education entrepreneurs, and blogs at www.kirstenwinkler.com), a consultant and an entrepreneur, working on her own products and services for the online education market.
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Kirsten,
Thanks for this article. Very impressive! Smart thinking, indeed. A lot of it may sound very familiar, but you might want to skim a piece I have written earlier this year on technology and higher education:
http://www.bildungsrepublik.de/2010/05/remaking-higher-education-using.html
I would love to get in touch in order to discuss this in greater detail.
Thanks,
Hannes
We live in a world that is getting more and more user oriented instead of work package or whatever. Lot of companies assign people to work, instead of work to people.
Same goes for education. I have been a teacher and mentor for several years and most of the times we are focussed on our own classes. How does the student perform in our class?Instead of a "Student Oriented Architecture" in which knowledge evolves around the student. How do we contribute to this student's growth.
A knowledge graph as proposed can certainly help to shift that focus to Student orientation. From my current ball park, technology, I would say that Identity Management plays a crucial role in this. Too often I've learned just months before the final test of a pupil's illiteracy or other learning handicap where it has been diagnosed years before but somewhere got lost in the transition of student files.
The question is how do we trace this knowledge graph throughout a person's life. Of course we digitize the files, but as a student moves from kindergarten to primaray, secondary, higher education, post grad, career and change after change. How do we ensure the graph stays put to the person, and not just the scope of the school?