I am continuing to work through comments and suggestions from individuals who offered to review the draft of Knowing Knowledge. The feedback, from a very diverse group of people, has been excellent.
I attempted to duplicate knowledge through my form of writing (not only the content). As a result, the book does not read like a traditional book. The content has been created as a sequence of fairly individual thoughts. I took this approach for several reasons: 1) it duplicates knowledge itself (chaotic, miscellaneous, linked) and 2) it loosely follows a style Marvin Minsky used in his book Society of Mind (I was impacted by the stand alone nature of thoughts in his text - allowing readers to "write" themselves into the content through reflection and connection forming).
I received a review this morning (I won't list the author's name, as I did not state I would use comments publicly) that made me stop and think about an author's role in writing. The individual stated that my proclamation of allowing readers to form their own connections was a dereliction of an author’s duty - namely sense making. I'm still trying to work that through in my head (it's an intriguing point). Is an author's main duty to make sense for readers? Is it to open doors? Is it to present a preformed world view? Is it to invite the reader to dialogue…to think…to reflect?
Sense-making is undoubtedly a key activity in our world today (much of confusion and insane amounts of information). The real question - and I still encounter this in my classrooms - is who is the sense maker: the author or the reader?
The key to knowledge that is social, emergent, networked and resides within an ecology is to ask hard questions, engage the reader, allow annotations and to provide affordances for forminf connections.
It is not the author's role to perorate nor duty to enlighten - that must come from within, by making new connections, finding deeper understanding and sharing meaning.
Sense-making happens in dialog within a community of users.