Acquire, Manipulate, Process, Present: My 4 Steps for Knowledge Building

The education sector essentially uses a variety of programs and strategies to add significant value to the lives of all learners. Each one depends upon unique interactions of both the educator and the learner.

We are confronting the new challenges that schools are facing in the 21st century. These include, but not limited to, technology and social media awareness, advertising, and sifting through copious a minutes of information available to us now. Handling the sheer amounts of information to create new knowledges is perhaps the biggest challenge.

The next 4 steps are basic ways that educators can achieve new knowledge:

1. Acquire – The process by which we acquire new information, guided by our learning goals, either through active processes such as conducting research, or through passive processes such as savvy advertising techniques.

2. Manipulate – Know your learning goals! What do we do with this information? What technological tools are we using to plug it in? What success criteria are we meeting? How do we bend the information to suit our academic purposes? This is undoubtedly shaped by personal backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. Where teacher understanding meets the unique ranges of experiences brought forth by the students

3. Process – How our cognitive processes work to make meaning from the data we have acquired and manipulated. Processing the information into some organized strategy, or organizational tool.

4. Present– information – share with others, collaborate, feedback on whether learning goals and success criteria were met. New knowledges can emerge!

In the 21st century, we can Embrace change as the norm, and realize that we have the freedom to add to the collective knowledge base that exists. Let’s do this safely, and in a spirit that prevents pushing knowledges onto learners, yet promotes the creation of new ones.

Deborah McCallum

© Deborah McCallum and Big Ideas in Education, 2012-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Deborah McCallum and Big Ideas in Education with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.