Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society

Rethinking Teaching for theKnowledge Society

Diana Laurillard

For over a decade now, universities have been aware ofthe pressures to expand access to higher education.1 Theknowledge society needs more graduates, and those graduateswill keep returning to study as lifelong learning takes its placein both work and leisure time. These are the positive pressuresfor expansion. But the knowledge society, fueled by the ex-panding higher education sector, is in turn generating moreknowledge industries, producing additional, competitive pres-sures for traditional institutions of higher education. Those in-volved in university teaching in this digital age must cope withthe fact that the knowledge industries are creating the meansby which individuals can acquire the immediate skills andknowledge those industries need. As a result, many individualsare questioning the true benefit of a university education,given its cost.

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Copyright 2002 Diana Laurillard. Reprinted by permission of the author

and EDUCAUSE from EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, January/Febru-

ary 2002, pp. 1625.

Universities wishing to respond to these new demands needto answer two difficult questions:

How should the curriculum balance expert knowledge andpractitioner knowledge? Universities are comfortableteaching specialist knowledge produced by experts, butpractitioner knowledge and the skill to develop it, whichis what the knowledge industry needs, is not a naturalpart of university curricula. Should universities move intothis area at the undergraduate level, as Michael Gibbonsand others suggest,2 or should they leave it to the post-graduate, post-experience programs within the privatesector?

To what extent is a degree course a long-term grounding foran individual? A degree certifies the knowledge thatgraduates have developed when they leave a university,but most graduates use very little of this knowledge intheir subsequent careers. The more enduring qualitiesgained are the skills, attitudes, and ways of thinkingderived from courses. But degrees and syllabuses are stilldefined in terms of subject knowledge, rather thangeneric skills. Should universities focus courses andteaching more on the practice of high-level skills, orshould they leave this to individuals to develop throughsubsequent work in the knowledge industries?

To answer these questions, we must be able to define whatdistinguishes a university education from the knowledge in-

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the internet and the university

dustries offerings in the form of corporate and for-profitinstitutions.

In 1997, Lord Dearings National Committee of Inquiry intoHigher Education reviewed the role of higher education in alearning society3 and defined it as having four main purposes:

1. Inspiring and enabling individuals to develop theircapabilities to the highest levels

2. Increasing knowledge and understanding3. Serving the needs of the economy4. Shaping a democratic and civilized society

The first purpose testifies to the universitys commitment tothe long-term personal development of the individual, in con-trast with the focus on the short-term employment needs in-evitably driving other forms of post-school education, such ascorporate training programs. The second purpose links thetwin activities of research and teaching in the development anddissemination of knowledge. The third expresses the economicvalue of this research and teaching, and the fourth emphasizesthe cultural value to the society it serves. For the individual,therefore, universities bring together research and teaching,and a focus on long-term needs, to offer a clear competitive ad-vantage over what the knowledge industry can provide.

The Committee defined the unique role of the university insociety, embracing these four purposes, as being to enable so-ciety to maintain an independent understanding of itself andits world.4 Each word in that definition was carefully chosen.

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rethinking teaching for the knowledge society

Society does not confine the universitys role to serviceof the nation-state. This is one of the key changes now inthe way that universities relate to their context: once anorgan of the nation-state, a university now crossesnational boundaries in teaching, in the way it has alwaysdone in research. Society also implies that theunderstanding is widely owned, fully disseminated, notlocated with some elite but with society itself, therebyenabling it to become, in the fullest sense, a learningsociety.

Maintain suggests a continuing responsibility, but onethat is responsive to change because of what is beingmaintained: an understanding of society itself, incontinual flux, and of its world, for which our theories arein continual development.

Independent refers to the unique position ofuniversities as creators of understanding. There will bemany claimants for the role of understanding our societyand its world in the new knowledge society, but most ofthemthe media, industrial research units, corporateuniversitiescannot claim independence from politicaland commercial interest. The individualistic anddisinterested nature of university research and teachingremains unique.

Understanding expresses the epistemology of auniversity as knowledge acquired with a sense ofresponsibility for how it comes to be known and with thepurpose of enabling enhanced action.

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Of itself and its world is inclusive of the full range ofthe natural, human, and social worlds as objects ofunderstanding.

This portmanteau definition helps to clarify the unique roleof universities for society as a whole. They are distinguishedfrom plausible competitors in the knowledge industries bytheir universality of scope, by their independence of inquiry,and by the nature of their epistemology. Therefore, I concludethis section with the following proposition:

Proposition 1: Universities will maintain their competitiveedge against the knowledge industries through themaintenance of their core valuesincluding research-based teaching and a curriculum that provides for thelong-term cognitive needs of individuals.

Does University Teaching Measure Up to Its Role?

The rhetoric is good, but saying doesnt make it so. Wheneversenior academics are rattled by the pretensions of the privateupstarts in the corporate education business, they incline to theview that the degree-awarding powers of universities protect theuniqueness of their institutions. At present, this is perhaps true,but governments have the ability to change that power if uni-versities are not seen to provide something valued and some-thing distinctive from the increasing offers of the private sector.

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For some time now, academics have been arguing for a radi-cal shift from the standard transmission model of universityteaching. Donald A. Schn, for example, demonstrated theneed for a reflective practicum in universities, where stu-dents can prepare for their future careers when existing profes-sional knowledge will not fit every case. Practitioners have tomake sense of uncertain, unique, or conflicted situations ofpractice through reflection-in-action, and they need to beable to go beyond the rulesdevising new methods of reason-ing, strategies of action, and ways of framing problems. Thispresupposes a very different kind of university teaching:

Designing, in the broader sense in which all professionalpractice is design-like, must be learned by doing. A design-like practice is learnable, but is not teachable by classroommethods . . . the interventions most useful to students aremore like coaching than teaching, as in a reflectivepracticum. . . . The reflective practicum demands intensityand duration far beyond the normal requirements of acourse. . . . A studio, a supervision, an apprenticeship. . . .Students do not so much attend these events as live in them.And the work takes time . . . time to live through the learn-ing cycles involved in any design-like task; and time to shiftrepeatedly back and forth between reflection on and inaction.5

Similarly, Etienne Wengers account of a learning commu-nity emphasizes the importance of individual and community

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engagement in several ways.6 For the acquisition of knowledge,the community must provide three kinds of engagement:

Give newcomers access to competence Invite a personal experience of engagement Enable incorporation of competence within participation

For the creation of knowledge, four further types of engage-ment are required:

Radically new insights Mutual engagement around joint enterprise Strong bond of communal competence Deep respect for particularity of experience

Wengers account does not privilege universities with uniqueaccess to such characteristics; the knowledge industries arelikely to develop these traits as well, if they are to succeed. Butuniversities will need graduates capable of contributing to themore fluid kind of knowledge creation that is needed by theprofessional practitioner, who is not confined to the well-trod-den paths of expert consensus knowledge of the traditionaluniversity curriculum. Students long-term cognitive needs gowell beyond the acquisition of consensus knowledge.

There are significant opposing pressures on universitiestodemonstrate research success on the one hand and to providefor wider participation in higher education on the other. Thetwo pressures oppose because research and teaching are seen

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to be in competition with each other, at the institutional leveland at the individual level. In the United Kingdom, significantfunding follows high research ratings, whereas funding forteaching is not related to quality ratings, so institutions rewardgood research more than good teaching. Academics have to di-vide their time between the two activities: the one in whichthey are professionally qualified and judged by their peers; theother in which they are neither qualified nor judged. In-evitably, research wins. There have been attempts to ignite ac-ademics interest in the professional accreditation of teach-ingfor example, by setting up the Institute for Learning andTeaching in the United Kingdombut interest is minimal; weare not yet on a transformational path.

Proposition 2: Universities are not maintaining aprofessional teaching approach that parallels theirprofessional research approach, and the curriculum is not sufficiently oriented toward long-term high-levelcognitive skills.

What Are the Challenges to University Teaching?

Our teaching methods have not evolved sufficiently to keeppace with what is needed. The dominant model is still thetransmission model, with the dominant learning technologiesstill being those it has spawned: the lecture, the book, themarked assignment. Academics have been under such pressure

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to meet research demands and teach larger numbers of stu-dents that they have been unable to go beyond the traditionalforms of academic teaching. We have begun at last to play withdigital technologies as a way of meeting the demands of thedigital age, but with an approach still born of the transmissionmodel. The academic community has not redefined whatcounts as higher learning and therefore cannot draft thespecification for how the new technology should do anythingother than what learning technology has always done: transmitthe academics knowledge to the student. The academic worldhas called each new technological deviceword processing,interactive video, hypertext, multimedia, the Web into theservice of the transmission model of learning. The potential ofthe technology to serve a different kind of learning cannot beexploited by an academic community that clings only to what itknows. The academy, with respect to the professional practiceof teaching, is not a reflective practicum. There is no progress,therefore, in how we teach, despite what might be possiblewith the new technology.

What is the difference between a curriculum that teacheswhat is known and one that teaches how to come to know?Knowledge, even academic knowledge, is not adequately repre-sented as propositional statements but has a historicity that in-corporates individuals previous experiences, their perceptionsof the immediate situation, their intentions, and their experi-ences of discovery, of recognized tensions, of uncertainties, ofambiguities still unresolved. This is not situated learning only,nor discovery learning, nor meta-learning. It comes closer to

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scholarship as learning. It requires a reflective practicum forthe learning process. But for that to be possible, universityteachers have to renew and develop their model of the learningprocess well beyond the traditional transmission model. It re-quires a teaching approach that turns academics themselvesinto reflective practitioners with respect to their teaching. Inthe context of research, of course, they would certainly de-scribe themselves as reflective practitioners. As researchers,they are consummate professionals who are

1. fully trained through an apprenticeship program, givingthem access to competence and personal engagementwith the skills of scholarship in their field;

2. highly knowledgeable in some specialist area;3. licensed to practice as both practitioner and mentor to

others in the field;4. building on the work of others in their field whenever

they begin new work;5. conducting practical work using the agreed-upon

protocols and standards of evidence of their field;6. working in collaborative teams of respected peers;7. seeking new insights and ways of rethinking their field;

and8. disseminating findings for peer review and use by others.

In the context of research, academics measure up well toSchns and Wengers ideals. Now run through the above listagain and consider the characteristics in the context of univer-

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sity teaching. How many of those eight characteristics of thereflective practitioner contributing to a learning communitytypically apply to the academic as teacher of his or her subject?None, not even number 2, since in this context we should referto a specialism in the pedagogy of the subject, not relying sim-ply on academic knowledge. It is tough for academics who areunder pressure to address this as an aspect of their profession-alism, but if there is to be innovation and change in universityteachingas the new technology requires, as the knowledgeindustry requires, and as students demandthen it followsthat academics must become researchers in teaching.

Proposition 3: University teaching must aspire to arealignment of research and teaching and to teachingmethods that support students in the generic skills ofscholarship, not the mere acquisition of knowledge.

What Is Possible?

I have argued elsewhere that a Conversational Frameworkfor learning offers a more progressive model than the transmis-sion model and is more compatible with the requirements ofthe reflective practicum to which we must aspire.7 It fits theideal of university education, which is what academics cer-tainly aspire to, for all that they do not practice it. And it pro-vides a framework against which we can specify what the digi-tal technologies should be doing to support this more elaborate

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model. It captures the essence of university teaching as an iter-ative dialogue between teacher and student(s), operating ontwo levels: (1) the discursive, theoretical, conceptual level and(2) the active, practical, experiential levelthe two levelsbridged by each participant engaging in the processes of adap-tation (practice in relation to theory) and reflection (theory inthe light of practice).

The iterative dialogue of the Conversational Framework isexpressed as a diagram in Figure 1, against which we can test arange of different kinds of learning technology.

The Conversational Framework describes the irreducibleminimum for academic learning. The interplay between theoryand practice is essential for making the abstract concrete, asMitchel Resnick put it.8 And the continually iterative dialoguebetween teacher and students is essential if the students are to

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be sure that they have understood the teachers concept. Thetransmission modelthe expression of the teachers conceptis just one part of a much more complex model for learning asshared understanding.

Taking these dialogic activities as the criteria for the reflec-tive practicum and the learning community, we can test howwell some of the more ambitious uses of the technology meas-ure up to these requirements. To what extent can a particularICT (Information and Communication Technologies) formatsupport the full Conversational Framework? We can immedi-ately see that many of the more ubiquitous forms offer nomore than the traditional print and lecture presentational me-dia, which serve only the transmission activity. Lecture noteson the Web and CD-based digital resources are two examples.However, if we exploit the communicative and adaptive capa-bilities of new technologies in carefully integrated combina-tions, they can meet the requirements of most of the activitiesin the Conversational Framework. Then they can transformthe learning experience into one that fits better with the re-quirements of the digital age.

Different learning technology models cover different combi-nations of activities within the Framework. When sufficientdesign time is given to challenging the technology to meetthese more progressive academic ideals, something more thanlecture notes on the Web is possible. Design has to be gener-ated from the learning objectives and the aspirations of thecourse, rather than from the capability of the technology.Courses at the Open University have provided several opportu-

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nities for exploiting the technology in the service of specifictypes of learning activity in which students need to engage. Ex-amples are shown in Figures 2 to 6. In each case, the commu-nicative, interactive, and adaptive capabilities of the technol-ogy facilitate different kinds of iterative dialogue betweenteachers and students. The practical exercises of investigatingand analyzing resources and running simulations are com-bined with theoretical and conceptual discussions within thecommunity, either synchronously or asynchronously.

Figure 2 shows a complex environment of reservoirsthrough which a carbon atom moves via a transformationalprocess such as burningfrom land plants to atmosphere orabsorptionfrom atmosphere to sea. The task goal is tomove the atom through all twelve reservoirs in the environ-ment. The action is to select a suitable next reservoir and itsappropriate process. There is feedback in the form of success-ful transition, video clips of each process in action, and arecord of reservoirs as yet unvisited. In its generic form, theobjective being met here isto learn the sequence andtransformational pro-cesses within a cyclicalsystem. The same peda-gogic form could be usedfor quite different content,such as the osmosis cycleor the development of anindividual.

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Figure 3 shows the beginning of an environment for investi-gating relationships between literary resources from theHomeric poems and artifacts from archaeological sites of an-cient Greece. Each week of work defines a set of investigationactivities, such as compare the mortal characters in the Iliadand the Odyssey and investigate the kind of society in Myce-nae. Students use searchfacilities through the digi-tized resources, guided byadvice on what to look forand how much material touse. They use a notepadfacility to take notes onwhat they find, and oncesufficient notes have beencollected, they can con-sult model answers. Usingthese, they may then continue their search or refine theirnotes. Again, this pedagogic form could be applied to any otherdigitized content, with the teacher supplying some appropriateinvestigation activities and matching model answers.

Figure 4 shows the form of an online asynchronous readinggroup. Students can read the article supplied and may com-ment on it using a comment button to link to a discussionthreaded around the structure of the article and around somekey questions defined by the tutor. The teacher must supplythe text, define the key questions, and contribute to thediscussion.

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Figure 5 shows the same environment adapted to discussionof a runnable simulation. This format combines both the com-municative and the adaptive capabilities of learning technol-ogy. The teacher supplies the simulation model and the taskgoalfor example, find the optimal parameters for these con-ditionsand the interactive model provides the feedback to

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the student. The student can use the comment button to linkto a discussion threaded around the structure of the simula-tion or the task. The format here allows iterative dialogue atthe conceptual level and interactive experimentation at thepractical level.

Figure 6 shows a synchronous discussion environmentaround a shared visual space. Students use a headset, and bothaudio and data are transmitted via a single modem, using au-dio on the Web. Students or tutors may submit anything, in-cluding a text, diagram, or picture (in this case, a Web site), tothe shared space and may use the tools on offer for collabora-tive designfor example, a concept-mapping tool. The teachermay specify the form of the group, the task, and the visuals.

The practice of high-level cognitive skills can be supportedthrough these more radical design formats for learning tech-nologies. Each of these addresses most of the activities in theConversational Framework and therefore supports a more

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complex learning experience than print, or lectures, or simpleWeb pages. We need to be able to offer this more elaboratekind of learning experience on a mass basis. Technology is ca-pable of doing that, since it is essentially a mass-oriented de-vice. But it cannot do so unless academics find a way to usethis new tool more effectively.

Proposition 4: Learning technologies can support studentsin the learning forms that contribute to the high-levelcognitive skills of scholarship and the practitioner-basedskills and knowledge of design-like practice.

How Might This Change Be Realized?

Designing learning technology models that are innovative andeffective, that exploit the new technology, and that address theexpectations of the knowledge industry is an additional burdenfor academics. How can this be done?

The problem is that teaching does not invent its tools; ituses those invented by others. The academy had language butdidnt invent writingtraders did that. It had writing but didntinvent booksadministrators did that. It didnt invent comput-ersengineers did that. It didnt invent the Internetthe mili-tary did that. It did invent the Web, but not for teaching pur-poses. All those technologies have been adopted by theteaching professions but only in the service of the transmissionmodel of learning. We have to conclude that it is not a natural

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part of the process of teaching for its practitioners to inventtools for the improvement of practice.

There is an alternative approach to the individual strugglingto discover how best to use a complex technology. All technolo-gies create communities that invent a range of formats withinwhich practitioners can craft a variety of contents: differenttypes of books, television programs, PC applications. We needthe same formats for learning technologies. But these devicesgrow organically. They are not designed in the abstract, aswere, say, authoring systems. They begin life in the excitementof creativity and the intention of doing something different.That is how new teaching designs should begin, and that ishow all the above examples began. But the new designs shouldnot stay rooted in the particularity of the original design. Thebeauty of computer programs is that they can endure as aform, as a tool for others to design by. So the program that be-gan as a way of enlivening the study of Homer could be gener-alized to become a tool for enabling students to undertakeguided investigations of a range of resource materials in orderto develop their own analyses of each investigation. And as adesign tool, it then becomes usable by academics in the sameway that a book format or a small-group format can be. Simi-larly, the program that began as a way of challenging studentsto drive a carbon atom through its stages of transition betweendifferent reservoirs could become a tool that other academicscustomize for quite different content, while preserving theform of identifying appropriate transition processes in a dy-namic system. The form of the learning activity, already tested

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and proven, remains the same. The content may cover a widerange of different topics.

There will be many such formspossibly hundreds acrossthe full range of the university curricula. These could beadapted to a generic form to provide design tools for academicsto use in their teaching much as they currently use PowerPointfor presentations. As we have seen, each of the programs inFigures 2 to 5 could offer a generic learning activity model:

An exercise on identifying the process changes that anobject must go through in moving from one context toanother

A guided investigation and analysis of the relationsbetween digitized source materials, with model answers as feedback

A digital-document discussion environment for any text or article, offering discussion around the structure of thearticle and defined general topics

A digital-document discussion environment for arunnable simulation, offering discussion around thestructure of the simulation and defined general topics

A synchronous discussion environment for a small grouptalking around a set of shared resources

In each case, teachers must provide the content and ideasappropriate for the particular learning activities that they wantto design, as they do for the generic form of a book, a lecture,or a PowerPoint presentation for less active forms of learning.

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They need relatively little programmer support. The pedagogi-cal design is already embedded in the generic form. It is theteachers design task to customize the content. In such a way,we should also be able to capture the generic forms that facili-tate the culture of inquiry and professional practice.

The proposal that academics could become professionals inthe sense of being reflective practitioners in the pedagogy oftheir subject is now more feasible. A generic learning activitymodel (GLAM)9 embodies good pedagogic practice from theoriginal design and evaluation process, enabling professionalsto share ideas and build on each others work. This is the be-ginning of the kind of collective R&D program we will need togenerate innovative and effective teaching. If the OKI (OpenKnowledge Initiative) led by MIT can function as a knowledge-building community, defining the design standards of goodpedagogy in the use of learning technologies, then we will re-ally have a reflective practicum for teaching.

Proposition 5: Academics need a collective R&D programthat builds design tools, or generic learning activitymodels (GLAMs), for supporting students in learning the skills of scholarship.

Would academics accept such a program? Perhaps. Acade-mics, like all other professionals, work to the system in whichthey find themselves. If universities facilitated and rewarded ahighly professional approach to teaching, academics would re-spond. Without such facilitation and reward, they will respond

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to what the system does reward, namely a professional ap-proach to research only.

Proposition 6: Universities must support a professionalteaching approach that mirrors the approach for research.

A New Approach to University Teaching?

If adopted, Propositions 5 and 6 would constitute a new ap-proach to university teaching. The technology can do only somuch. On its own, it cannot offer academics what they need toadapt their teaching to the needs of the digital age. With thisnew approach, however, they would be able to do more. Forthis approach to be successful, there has to be a common un-derstanding of the nature of learning at the university level, anacceptance that teachers must become reflective practitioners,and an intention by university management to create the con-ditions that foster and reward this rather different approach.Without a change in approach, new technology will not serveuniversities in meeting the challenge of mass higher educationand lifelong learning for the knowledge society. The digital agewill find its own ways of managing without us.

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acknowledgments

This article was developed from a presentation delivered at theannual symposium of the Forum for the Future of Higher Edu-cation, held in Aspen, Colorado, in September 2001.

notes

1. The word university is used generically here to refer to colleges,universities, and other traditional, nonprofit forms of higher educa-tion.

2. Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge: TheDynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (Lon-don: Sage Publications, 1994).

3. Higher Education in the Learning Society: Report of the Na-tional Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (Great Britain:National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997).

4. Ibid., 72.5. Donald A. Schn, Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward

a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San Fran-cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 157, 311.

6. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning,and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

7. Diana Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversa-tional Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nded. (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002).

8. Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, presentation deliv-

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ered at the annual symposium of the Forum for the Future of HigherEducation, Aspen, Colorado, September 2001.

9. GLAM is not an attractive acronym. Using the word design in-stead of model forms the acronym GLAD, which is no better. Substi-tuting customizable for generic gives CLAM, which has all the wrongconnotations. There must be a better way of putting this.

Diana Laurillard is a professor of educational technology and pro-vice chancellor at the Open University in the United Kingdom.

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Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society