Surfing on the "sea of data" and MPSB research

My sister examined my articles and other readings, feeling perplexed in the "sea of data" that she found herself in. I think, even for students are are keen to learn, the contemporary business publications can rightly be called a "sea of data".  Our Internet infrastructure, including search engines, portals, e-libraries and, above all, the digital social media ecosystem, provides a powerful means for us to index and categorize e-resources. Such indexing effort is itself a form of literature review effort. Its nature is similar to Data Management (Loomis, 1989). From this e-resources with indexes, we then go through another literature review process in our professional development/ dissertation project works, namely, formulation and refinement of theories/ theoretical frameworks. Let's call this intellectual exercise "theorizing". Some people, me included, like to organize concepts and theories in the form of diagrams to make explicit these theoretical frameworks. Up to this stage, much literature review/ study efforts are made to codify "knowledge". In knowledge management parlence, this is codification of knowledge, resulting in the generation of explicit knowledge.  All these intellectual efforts are exerted by individuals in both isolated and collaborative learning modes.

As knowledge management theories remind us, there is another type of knowledge, namely, tacit knowledge, which is located in our brains, not in any external devices. These knowledge are gained by us via continuous experiential learning and subsequently stored in our long-term memory. This intellectual resources, in the form of tacit knowledge in our brains, enable us to make use of the external resources, including explicit knowledge, to carry out theory-driven analysis and critical thinking. The process can be called cognitive filter enhancement. The process of gaining tacit knowledge requires a learning environment that is quite different from that of explicit/ codified knowledge creation. It requires much more absorbed mental reflection of what is presented to us externally. The study environment of the 70s and 80s was, in my view, more favourable for the conduct of such kind of mental reflection activities - there were not many on-line (thus real-time) disturbances from devices as the smartphones.

When these knowledge compilation activities are driven by critical systems thinking, the learning process can be considered as a multi-perspective, systems-based (MPSB) knowledge compilation process and the resulting theoretical frameworks are MPSB frameworks.

The following diagram captures the ideas expressed in this article:

References

1. Loomis, M.E.S. (1989) Data Management and File Structures, Prentice-Hall.
2. Related blog article (JKK Ho): http://josephho33.blogspot.com/2012/03/how-does-internet-affect-mpsb.html