Circles of Knowledge Model

This is the 2nd year I'm teaching my Technology for School Library Media Centers class at Arcadia University. The students this spring were noteworthy because so many had only rudimentary technology skills. The first day of class was a day full of apprehension for them about what would be coming throughout the term.

The first technology I showed them was blogging (Google to read some of their posts: ED566e site:.blogspot.com). I wanted them to journal what they were processing from each week. It was an obvious connection to merge that with journaling technology like blogging.

With each passing week, you could see their confidence level was increasing. So much of technology is being willing to try something new out. (Having a controlled environment and someone to walk through with you helps.)

Somewhere around the 4th week of class I was struck with the idea of a model about what I was seeing with regard to their increasing confidence. (Aside: I get these kinds of ideas; hence this blog. "I've got a piece of i-candy that I want to share with you.") The terms came a little later.

CIRCLES OF KNOWLEDGE
My students came in with a certain sense of what they knew about technology: Perceived Status. A small circle (very small for some) represents this status. There is another circle in which Perceived Status sits called Perceived Need.

(Incidentally, I'm working on a graphic for this that I'll share hopefully before too long, but understand that I diagram mentally first. This is both nature and nurture, which I'll share about in a later post about my background. Note also that I digress easily which makes for a lot of parenthetical writing.)

Perceived Need is a larger circle. For students that had some technology aptitude coming in, Perceived Status is larger than for those with nominal skills. For both sets of students, Perceived Need does not have to be terribly much larger for the student to be overwhelmed.

Some geometry here: The area of a circle is pi-r-squared. (You remember this don't your?) If a circle increases in radius by 2 times, it might seem to be 2x larger. Because of the square of the r in the area equation, however, the area increases by a square of the radius. So the radius may double, but the area increases by 2-squared, i.e., 4x. That may not seem like much, but if the circle increases in radius by 4x, the area increase is 16x. The area of the circle gets larger very quickly.

My point is that Perceived Status doesn't have to be much bigger than Perceived Need for the effect to become substantial. If students' perceived need is much larger than their perceived status then it isn't difficult to imagine how overwhelmed they must actually be.

Well the more students learn, the larger the circle of their perceived status becomes. These students only have to look at the syllabus to understand how big Perceived Need is relative to the class. It's finite. Doesn't change over the course of the class; but Perceived Status does. It actually gets closer and closer in size to Perceived Need as the class approaches its end. (April 30 is final presentations!)

(By the way, the idea of Perceived Need relative to the class being finite because the syllabus is fixed came to me as I drafted this posting. Before this moment, I had a sense of Perceived Need having only an undefined size.)

Well no wonder students become more confident; Perceived Status is slowly reaching Perceived Need in size. They are slowly grasping more and more of what they need to know so they are rapidly becoming less overwhelmed.

What they will need to realize is that Perceived Need is actually a smaller circle within yet a larger circle called Actual Need. I'm realizing (again as I write) that syllabuses are extremely important because they keep students' brains from exploding. Picture how small Perceived Status would be if they could picture it within the circle of Actual Need. After all, Actual Need can represent everything they need to learn as university students (yikes-squared) or everything they need to know as school library media specialists (rapid-expansion-of-volatile-gases-leading-to-catastrophic-redistribution-of-brain-matter: yucks-squared).

Circles of Knowledge Model will come back again in subsequent posts. It's an important model to me.

Last digression: You can read my tweet on Twitter about former Arcadia student Ben Scheinfeld's visit to me in which I shared about him expanding on the model. (Obviously the tweet is short; less than 141 characters long. It's just a red herring to get you to follow me on Twitter.) I shared it with him because he was dissatisfied with the current research he's doing on plants at Academy of Natural Sciences. He shooting for medical research at Jefferson University I told him that I wanted to talk to him again in a few years because I knew what he was learning would eventually enter the circle of actual need. He pictured several circles of perceived status from different areas slowly reaching out to each other as they grew in size and began to overlap within the circle of actual need.

As I tweeted earlier, people make life interesting!