ABSTRACT
The term “knowledge building” has come into fairly widespread use in both the knowledge management literature and education (~45,000 Google references at this writing). If we take as a starting point for discussion that something very like knowledge building does occur, at least in the sciences, if not in education, the question arises, what are the basic blocks from which this building is done? More technically, what is the ontological status of ideas/knowledge objects/conceptual artifacts and how do they come to be? Carl Bereiter (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989, 2003) has argued that we need to rethink our most cherished notions of learning, education, and, more fundamentally, of knowledge itself as we enter the “knowledge age.” He has proposed a number of key concepts—“knowledge building,” “intentional learning,” “progressive discourse”—as constitutive of a new way of thinking about learning and education. Many of these concepts have been embraced by workers in the learning sciences community and have been employed in the design and rationalization of instructional innovations.
