Hello there!
I summarize the paper “Knowledge: Digital Zoo (2006)” in this post.
What does it mean to know something?
What it means to know has changed over time as human communication methods evolved. To our closest evolutionary relatives such as apes, chimpanzees, and other primates, to know is to remember so that they can recall the stored images later. Later, our evolutionary ancestors developed the ability to represent events with a standardized gesture. A gesture is the first symbol, in which one thing represents another without necessarily sharing any features in common with the original. The development of writing made enable humans to study systematically. The systematic learning foundation is still the foundation of most academic fields of the modern world. As a result, knowing something in modern society is learning how to read, write to access parts of that cultural literature.
Digital Education
These days, computers are often used in education. A computer can perform almost any task for which we can write down explicit rules. Thus, in this digital age with computers, to know should not be about reading and writing, which computers can perform on behalf of a human, but about solving problems using simulations, which means to use the computer to do things that neither human nor it can do alone.
Simulation
Learning to use a computer is to learn how to work with simulations because every computer program is a simulation in a microworld, which is some part of the world. Decades of research have shown that interacting with simulations is a great way to learn complex topics. Every action in simulation contains an explicit or implicit hypothesis. Simulation offers a safe environment to make mistakes by testing those hypotheses, and thus people can learn by making mistakes and fixing them rather than having to always get everything right. Note that even though the key elements of the simulation is trial and error by learners, letting them work in a simulation without any support causes the learners to develop creative but spurious generalizations.
Also, in this digital age, the knowledge that matters in any domain is the knowledge that experts in the domain have. A simulation in a specific context helps learners to develop the professional vision of the context because learners think in the simulation in the same way as the experts in the field do. And what they learned will stick in their memory for a long time.
Example of Soda Constructor
The SodaConstructor is the example of the learning game offering such simulation to learners. In the game, many learners make mistake at first but they gradually realize the key elements to success in the game and learn the important concepts in physics and engineering through the simulation along the way. They can learn the knowledge that experts have by doing rather than learning first and doing later.