Enabling Knowledge

There are two aspects to turning information into knowledge. If we take the term 'knowledge' to refer to information that is stored in a person's head, then there are two phases to putting it there. First there is in finding the important point or insights that will resonate with knowledge already held. Then it has to be presented in such a way that it can be absorbed clearly and effectively by the target.
 Neither of these activities are particularly easy since both depend on the unknown idiosyncrasies of the person taking in the knowledge.For instance, in many cases the missing piece is not actually information as such. It may well be a way of linking two previously discrete items to provide a new insight. Much progress is made in science by people outside their area of experience simply because they are able to make these linkages.
[By the way, there is an existing profession which specialises in exactly these activities. In our culture it is called teaching.]

Presentation of data is something that everybody thinks they know something about, but which only a few people are seriously studying. Edward Tufte is the only one I know off the top of my head but I have not made a serious search myself.
Nevertheless, new ways and different ways of presenting complex information so that it is meaningful to the recipient are being introduced constantly. The internet is a prime cause of this since so many different mechanisms can be trialled, and incrementally improved, with a large number of people. And multiple different techniques can be available at once so that learners are able to try to find a method that works for them. The Khan academy is a prime example of a new way of learning, Open University initiatives abound and the TED organisation provides many cool presentations.

In each case the major variable is the audience and for someone to internalise the information - to properly learn it - the presentation needs to be keyed directly to them. Not only prior knowledge is important, but also the context of the presentation and even the state of mind of the target. When I was a fitness instructor, the way I talked about the topic was quite different for a client, a class of student trainees or to a group of office workers.

The other difficulty is in finding useful information in the first place. I said above that I don't know how many people are seriously studying presentation techniques. That is not because that information is not readily available on the Internet. But I really don't care enough to wade through the search results that would appear in Google if I tried to look it up. Tracking down useful information is easier now than it ever has been in the past but the signal to noise ratio is very high.
What is needed is a method of curating or maintaining information in such a way that key points can be easily found. Google does a good job in search, but the sources are scattered and disparate with almost no consistency in either quality or content. Attempts have been made to correct this situation but the anarchic nature of the internet resists standardisation even at the most basic level.
Categorisation as an overlay, held separately or independently of the actual source itself would seem to a possible solution. A catalogue to the Internet - such as Google attempts to be - but with metadata evaluating the quality, reliability and even usefulness of the information. It is difficult to see how such a thing could be practical for any organisation unless something like cloud-sourced tagging were used.
But I am not an expert in the management of knowledge or information - just an interested amateur. Of course there are people who are trained in exactly this field and who deal with highly complex classifications of all fields of knowledge. Any organisation wishing to structure their artefacts or introduce a knowledge base should probably hire at least one trained librarian.

Turning Information into Knowledge

There are a couple of things recently that brought my attention back to the topic of knowledge, information and data. At a recent presentation about TOGAF certification it was mentioned that there was still some disagreement about the distinction between data and information. It seems to me that the next step, processing information into knowledge is at least as important and is still an unrecognised gap in the conversation.
I can see an obvious link to the current focus on "Big Data" and the extraction of useful correlations from the enormous and diverse records collected by entities such as Facebook or Google. To me, this appears to be in the same category as trawling through mine tailings in search of missing nuggets. This is not necessarily a pointless activity - many mines are becoming profitable as new extraction techniques allow finer traces of material to be recovered. However, more intelligent application of tools at the time of collection would seem to provide a more efficient (and timely) method of collecting useful artefacts.
But, to stretch the analogy, even as the rock is only useful for the ore it contains, the ore cannot be used without further processing. Data is only useful because of the meaning/information that may be extracted. But that information is only valuable because of the knowledge that may be gained. Knowledge that may then be used to direct an enterprise and create value; or just to create pretty things.
One known 'gotcha' when dealing with "Big Data" is the possibility of false positives - patterns in the data which appear simply because there is so much data that some of it must be linked in some way. The best way to avoid this problem is to have a discerning review of the findings by an experienced person (not machine). In other words to connect the information extracted to the framework of knowledge held in someone's head. Similarly low-yield ore is discovered and discarded during processing and only the pure metal is extracted (at least in principle).

Wrong by intention

The current interest in Lance Amstrong tied in neatly with an old blog I was reading by Aaron Swartz.
One thing that Armstrong said several times is that it did not feel like he was cheating. He was just doing what was necessary to win.
Of course he was - no-one ever does wrong without some rationalisation in their own mind to justify there actions. This was the point that Swartz was making. Even Hitler thought he was doing the right thing by his country and the world.
The other connection to the same concept is one that we have talked about in our family, having 3 children at school, is anti-bullying campaigns. The major issue is that most (all?) bullies don't see their actions as bullying. It is just teasing or play or joking and the other person is not entering into the spirit of it.
We have an (ex-)friend who once said that she suspects that she was a bit of a bully at school. Forty years to come to this realisation and everyone else at the table was thinking "what do you mean 'was'".