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September 23, 2008 - by Jake Alexander
  
How is Knowledge Packaged for Learning?

How important is IQ to the learning process, and if intelligence is important, how does it contribute?

The branch of Philosophy that deals with knowledge is called Epistemology. It is concerned with ideas like the definition and kinds of knowledge, the relation of knowledge to belief and opinion, and whether a thing can truly be known or not. Epistemology is a labyrinth philosophers have been wandering around in for centuries

I am not an epistemologist so I'm not going to try to define knowledge. Instead, we'll look at how knowledge is packaged so that it can be acquired or transferred. There are two issues to deal with here.

The first is fairly straightforward because it deals with conveyance, the means of transfer. Here we are dealing with books, publications, videos, pictures, lectures, demonstrations, word-of-mouth, and boot camps as ways of transferring information or knowledge from one individual to another.

The deeper issue deals with what is actually conveyed. What form does the knowledge or information take as it passes between individuals?

The epistemologists did come up with a useful idea -- and that is the distinction between two forms of knowledge: knowing what and knowing how, though there is some ambiguity or overlap between the two. To make it easier I like to use the terms concept knowledge and process knowledge.

Concept knowledge is knowledge about objects, images, ideas and other things that can be thought about or turned over in the mind in order to understand what a thing is. Process knowledge is knowledge about actions, events, sequences, and relationships that can be studied or practiced in order to understand how things are done. From those two forms of knowledge, I like to separate and independently treat vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge about terms and definitions, descriptions, symbols, and other elements used to define or express ideas.

The old journalism mantra who, what, where, when, why and how gives us the ability to describe a topic's concepts and processes. Vocabulary is especially important because we need it to describe the new concepts and processes associated with the topic.We gain vocabulary when we learn new words or new meanings for words we already know.

With concepts, process and vocabulary we can describe, acquire, or transfer nearly any topic we need to learn.

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