Knowledge Society, knowledge troubadours and social artists

And once again from two very different parts of my network, there are themes that are flowing together. This time it is the link between knowledge troubadours and social artists.

At our Knowledge Conversation last night with Prof Fanie de Beer he posits that the Knowledge Worker is somebody who knows and somebody who connects. And this knowing and connecting is within intelligent communities which he sees as communities that invents worlds of shared meaning. He then also put forward that without the human being as knower and sharer/connector there is no Knowledge Society. This also necessitates that we need to contemplate and think about the knower and the sharer.

As knowers, we need to be knowledge troubadours. The troubadour search, navigate, travel to find new themes, and connect these themes, and present/communicate these in such a way that others could find meaning from it.The knowledge troubadour does not only detect and communicate knowledge links, the knowledge troubadour also invent linkages between knowledges.The knowledge troubadour engages in ongoing conversation, and by engaging in this ongoing conversation community is cultivated. Conversation is connecting and relating.

Prof de Beer then also introduced the notion of ‘connaisance’ (a term for knowledge in French). In the Knowledge Society, we are born together through our acts of knowing and connecting.

And, as can be anticipated, the first question from the ‘circle’ was – How do we get people to connect and share, since this is not natural to them? Conversation, as mentioned earlier is connecting and relating. The centrality of connecting and relating also place a focus on the importance of the role of social artists and transversal persons  - concepts I am learning about from Nancy White. This is how Nancy describes a social artist and the transversal person -

” A social artist is that person who helps create that space for people to interact and learn with each other. It is about noticing the human dynamic of what happens when we think together, learn together, play together and the idea has been articulated most recently by Etienne Wenger in the context of communities of practice. But.. for me the social artist is a role that happens in all sorts of contexts and it certainly happens in networks… interested in the different roles in these sort off loosely formed roles in these ecosystems of people for learning, and working, and doing….playing with the idea of the social artist along with the person who is working the transveral. So, the social artist is looking into creating that space between people who are interacting and the transversal person is connecting that wonderful, juicy, whatever that  is happening – learning, working, playing, with some of the other things that is in the ecosystem, like the organisation, hierarchy, I’m not sure what else. I think if we ignore those transversal connections we run into lots of problems… recognising the we live in a world where there is many actors and many forms… at least knitting little bits of them together sometimes…”

Transcript from (http://dtlttoday.com/71/).

In our society, which we often speak of as the Knowledge Society, we need knowledge troubadours connecting themes and knowledges , and social artists connecting people in moments of interacting and learning within ecosystems, and the transversal person connecting these moments and knowledges with other things in the ecosystem. Thus living in intelligent communities that are constituted by collective intelligences (another note from Prof de Beer’s conversation).

These two concepts inspired me so much that I am blogging this after a silence of almost five months:).

Advertisement