-
Jan 1, 1440
Gutenberg's Printing Press
Printing with movable type had existed in East Asia at least since 1377 when the Jikji, an abbreviated title of a Korean Buddhist document was printed in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, however, the invention had not spread to Europe where everything people read still had to be copied by hand or printed from wood blocks carved by hand. In about 1440, the German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, developed a movable type. Gutenberg made separate pieces of metal type for each character to be printed. -
Period: Oct 1, 1440 to
A Brief History of Information and Knowledge
-
John Locke - Defining Knowledge
John Locke (1632-1704) gave us the first hint of what knowledge is all about. Locke views us as having sense organs that when stimulated, produce “ideas of sensation.” These ideas of sensation, in turn, are operated on by our minds to produce “ideas of reflection.” Thus, ideas come to us via our senses, which in turn can be turned into new ideas via reflection. These two routes that ideas take are derived from experiences — we can have no knowledge beyond our ideas. -
Fritz Machlup - Knowledge Industry
Fritz Machlup (1902-1983) worked in two major areas of economics: industrial organization, with particular emphasis on the production and distribution of knowledge; and international monetary economics. Information theorists often use Machlup's 1962 book, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, in which he wrote that the knowledge industry represents 29% of the US gross national product as the beginning of the Information age. Machlup defines knowledge as a commodi -
Michael Polanyi - Tacit Knowledge
Genius is applying the originality of youth to the experience of maturity. - Michael Polanyi Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a physical chemist, was one of the most novel philosophers of sciences in the 20th century. His first selection of philosophical essays appeared in 1946 under the title Science, Faith and Society (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1946. We can know more than we can tell. Michael Polanyi in The Tacit Dimension (1964). -
Marshall McLuhan - Technologically Determinist
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) foresaw the approaching changes in that it would bring about a new society characterized by greater connectivity and networking: Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electrical age. As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages - -
Peter Drucker - The Knowledge Worker
Peter Drucker predicted that the major changes in society would be brought about by information. He argues that knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. According to him, the largest working group will become what he termed “knowledge workers.” Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an "executive" if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization. -
Daniel Bell - The Information Age
By information I mean data processing in the broadest sense; the storage, retrieval, and processing of data becomes the essential resource for all economic and social exchanges... By knowledge, I mean an organized set of statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. - Daniel Bell (1979) -
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave
Alvin Toffler publishes The Third Wave (1980), to herald in the new culture based on information. The central premise of Toffler's book is that human history, while being complex and contradictory, can be seen to fit patterns or what he calls three waves that describe the changes of civilization:
◦ Agricultural Society - the First Wave, that started in 2,000 B.C.
◦Industrial Society - the Second Wave, starting in 1750 A.D.
◦ Information Society - the Third Wave, starting in1950 A.D. -
John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene - Information Society
In their book Megatrends (1982), Naisbitt and Aburdene reported that we are shifting from an Industrial Society to an Information Society. Altogether, they proposed ten Megatrends (changes), that would shape the information age:
◦Industrial Society to Information Society
◦Forced Technology to High Tech/High Touch
◦National Economy to World Economy
◦Short Term to Long Term
◦Centralization to Decentralization
◦Institutional Help to Self-Help -
HyperCard - Dymamic Programming
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. -
The Internet - Network
The beginnings of the Internet grew out of an experiment begun in the 1960's by the U.S. Department of Defense. They created a computer network, called ARPANET, that would continue to function in the event of a disaster. Leonard Kleinrock was the major force behind it. He developed the basic principles of packet switching, in a monograph titled Communication Nets: stochastic message flow and delay (1964). In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, wrote the first email program. He choose the @ symbol to separate -
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger - Community of Practice
As new practitioners discuss their problems with their fellows, or learn from their colleagues how to integrate the practice with the rest of their business workflow; in such a way, the CoP becomes a repository and dissemination mechanism combined for best practice - Etienne Wenger Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998). -
Ikujiro Nonaka & Hirotaka Takeuk - The Knowledge Spiral
Nonaka and Takeuk's highly influential book, The Knowledge Creating Company (1995) is released. Their spiral process theory of knowledge creation is based upon a spiral movement between explicit and tacit knowledge. -
Karl-Erik Sveiby - Intellectual Capital
The most common purpose is the Industrial Era approach to measure for control. Management accounting is still under the spell of Taylor's “Scientific Management” in which some one up there controls the lesser beings down there. I advocate that the Knowledge Era purpose of measuring should be for learning, not for control. Mathematics and statistics are languages that help us crystallize and see things we can't see with words and pictures so they should be used as much as possible. - Karl-Erik -
Don Tapscott - Twelve Themes of the New Economy
Don Tapscott has written about the impact of digital networking on our economy. In The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1995) and in a more recent book, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1998), he forecasts the coming influence of the demographic of wired kids born since 1978. -
Davenport and Prusak - Velocity and Viscosity
Davenport and Prusak introduce the concept of Velocity and Viscosity in their book, Working Knowledge (1988): Velocity - the speed with which knowledge moves through an organization. Viscosity - the richness or thickness of the knowledge transferred.
