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Recommended Reading
The Knowledge Web: From Electronic Agents to Stonehenge and Back and Other Journeys Through Knowledge
by James Burke
New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1999
ISBN: 0684859343How many students have bored their way through history courses taught uninspiringly as a sequence of events and dates? Fewer have been offered ways to study this subject through the connections that make history live. The Knowledge Web presents knowledge in a highly interconnected, holistic way that allows for an infinite number of paths of exploration between people, places, things, and events. Author James Burke is the host of the television show "Connections" which airs on the Learning Channel. He has written seven books, including Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, and contributes a monthly column to Scientific American. See his website at www.k-web.org. He lives in England, France, and airplanes.
This remarkable book takes ten different journeys across the great web of change. One can simply read the book sequentially or read it in many different ways, following a thread of interest through "gateways" on the web, where it crosses with the timeline of another, different journey. Doing the latter will undoubtedly challenge your conventional ways of thinking!
Burke explains that "in its fully developed form, the "webbed" knowledge system introduced here would be inclusive, not exclusive. Modern interactive networked communications systems married to astronomically large data storage capability ought to ensure that at times of change nothing need be lost. No subject or skill will be too arcane for its practitioners to pursue when the marketplace for their skills is planetwide."
He suggests that indeed individuals using semi-intelligent technologies will be free to use their skills at higher levels. "The new technologies also bring to an end a period of history in which the human brain was constrained by limited technology to operate in a less-than-optimal way, since the brain appears not to be designed to work best in the linear, discrete way promoted by reductionism."
© December 2002 New Horizons for Learning
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