Ashley Theurer's Profile

I ask: what do we need to teach in order to equip our students to survive and thrive in knowledge work?

Knowledge work's primary product is knowledge, which is circulated across and through organizations. Knowledge work tends to be organized in distributed, heterogeneous networks rather than in modular hierarchies such as those Marx described (1990)

knowledge work encourages proliferating connections across trades, fields, and disciplines, connections across which texts circulate.

polymath

“the new jobs require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. They require a different approach to work and a different mind-set. Above all, they require a habit of continual learning” (p.305). Whereas their predecessors could count on an end to learning and a steady career path, knowledge workers must be entrepeneurial about developing and determining their own careers, largely through self-directed learning and relearning

As Drucker implies, knowledge work involves substantial collaboration across boundaries, and consequently it requires horizontal as well as vertical learning

neophyte

people must be able to “operate in and move between multiple parallel activity contexts” that “demand and afford different, complementary but also conflicting cognitive tools, rules, and patterns of social interaction” (Engeström, Engeström & Kärkkäinen 1995, p.319)

study of argumentation and persuasion

Workers must be able to adopt or adapt ways to deal with work fragmentation, including genres and rules that allow them to create their own stable transformations for prioritizing, organizing, and achieving work.

procedure of drawing complex assemblages together under a relatively simple interface and conceptual rubric – is a vital but often neglected part of knowledge work.

• Liaisons are workers or positions that develop to provide stable connections across groups.

application program interfaces used in programming, consist of routines, protocols, and tools that allow simple interactions to generate complex effects.

might include genres and other boundary objects

bottom-up characterizations of large sets of information, enabled by “applications that aggregate individual work practices in order to depict relations among the work of group members” (Hart-Davidson, Spinuzzi, & Zachry, in press). They are enabled through infrastructure that might include “tagging,” in which individuals characterize parts of a large data set for their own use.

Knowledge work involves changes in organizational structures, changes that make the skills outlined here far more important. Collaboration, planning, self-directed learning, and self-mediation are vital, and should be reconceived in the curriculum.