maandag 24 maart 2008

Philosophical background

The term enlightenment is used far to much to have true meaning anymore. I agree with what is said in the Wikipedia article " Because it was an attitude rather than a set of shared beliefs,there are many contradictory trains to follow. In his famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1784), Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one's own intelligence."
I agree that its wise to do a lot of thinking yourself, and not to let other people or a ' belief' tell you what to think. So OER relates to that because we want all people to benefit from the knowledge we have build up together.
" Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes) is a Western metaphor meaning "One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past"; a contemporary interpretation." I agree totally on that. So to have al the thoughts of other people available is a good goal.
But wisdom of great thinkers is often only information to us. It has not been integrated in our own thinking. If we only have all the information available we are not wiser then we were beforehand. We have to work on our knowledge.
Web 2.0 can help. What we do at this moment in this course is trying to make knowledge out of a lot of information. Someone in the Wikicommunity one time said that knowledge is an ongoing worldwide conversation. So sharing is good.
The problem s that we have so much information and so little time to really discuss this information. I'm glad we have taken a little time to make knowledge out of the OER information.

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