This gets at the heart of development efforts to match western infotechnologies and local social and cultural processes. Particularly interesting is the effort to understand the differences in perceptual organization, and therefore knowledge 'management' at the most fundamental levels. Can I ask, have you considered the implications for possible education system applications, and e-learning approaches?
Stuart Hawthorne wrote: > The literature covering the implemention of Western designed information > systems in developing countries frequently attests to the difficulty of > matching the world view of the local community with the way knowledge is > represented in the system. This difficulty arises because the local > perspective is, or is historically derived from, a community-centered > approach to information sharing. It is holistic and essentially > deductive. This contrasts with the inductive, segmented nature of > Western information systems. While there is much descriptive comment on > the problems this mismatch causes, little attention has been given to > identifying the operational differences at the analytical level. Our > view is that if we can identify the actual processes that occur in the > community-based information processing system, we may be able to develop > information systems better suited to the user in the traditional > community. This will provide the means for the traditional user to > access indexed information under his own familiar perspective and > facilitate access by the traditional user to Western datastores. Given > our backgrounds, our interest lies largely with the traditional > Melanesian community but have a strong suspicion that there are general > principles that apply to all community-based (historically oral) > information systems employing distributed storage. For example, given > system requirements, it seems determination of relevance has to occur at > a different, probably later, time in the retrieval process than it does > in Western systems. The anecdotal evidence points in this direction at > least. We would very much like to make contact with anyone working in > this area or to learn of any related research we may consult. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
