Knowledge, Practice, Activities and People

Abstract

The perspective of modeling knowledge in Artificial Intelligence is that these models are equal to the knowledge itself (e.g. equate the map with the territory). This encoding view treats knowledge as if it were primarily verbal and assumes that verbal concepts themselves can be replaced by descriptions of concepts—as if a body of descriptions and neural categorizations were equivalent mechanisms for generating behavior.[ ] This paper describes a number of concepts around the notion of ‘situatedness’: situated cognition, situated action, situated learning, and the concept of autopoiesis as an organizing principle. Situatedness changes the way we think about how knowledge is created (learning) and applied (action). In this light knowledge management changes its meaning from managing the knowledge of an organization to managing the situation in which learning happens. Collaboration and participation become the key management principles. In this paper we propose that Brahms (Business Re-design Agent-based Holistic Modeling System), an activity-based multi-agent modeling environment, allows us to model knowledge in situated actions and learning in human activities.