Bearers Of Knowledge Research Articles

Female soldier-teachers: army, education and a new state

This article deals with the topic of female soldiers teaching in Israeli primary schools in immigrant communities in the periphery in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time there was a great shortage of teachers, owing to the enormous increase in the number of pupils in the education system, in the wake of the great waves of immigration. Ben-Gurion decided that the army must forgo this quality labour force, suitable for service as officers, to meet the education needs of the outlying areas. The soldier-teachers were young girls, most of them born in the country, who had gone through the Hebrew education system, had 12–14 years of schooling and perceived their teaching in immigrant settlements as voluntary pioneering work. They were the representatives of the two main socializing agents of the new state – the army and the education system. The IDF considered them to be soldiers, lent out to perform civilian tasks, and paid their salaries and was responsible for their living conditions, including their lodging, while the Ministry of Education perceived them as bearers of knowledge, teaching children living in the periphery. However, the female soldier-teachers, living within the immigrant communities, also functioned in other capacities, such as advising their pupils' older sisters and assisting the families in various ways. Some of the schoolgirls also saw them as examples of educated independent women. Through their activity, these soldier-teachers actually embodied the multifaceted formative ethos of Israeli society: Jewish sovereignty, intermingling of exiles and immigrant absorption (the melting pot version), formal gender equality (military service for women), and commitment by the modern state to provide basic education for all its citizens.

Improving Wikipedia's credibility: References and citations in a sample of history articles

AbstractThis study evaluates how well the authors of Wikipedia history articles adhere to the site's policy of assuring verifiability through citations. It does so by examining the references and citations of a subset of country histories. The findings paint a dismal picture. Not only are many claims not verified through citations, those that are suffer from the choice of references used. Many of these are from only a few US government Websites or news media and few are to academic journal material. Given these results, one response would be to declare Wikipedia unsuitable for serious reference work. But another option emerges when we jettison technological determinism and look at Wikipedia as a product of a wider social context. Key to this context is a world in which information is bottled up as commodities requiring payment for access. Equally important is the problematic assumption that texts are undifferentiated bearers of knowledge. Those involved in instructional programs can draw attention to the social nature of texts to counter these assumptions and by so doing create an awareness for a new generation of Wikipedians and Wikipedia users of the need to evaluate texts (and hence citations) in light of the social context of their production and use.

Warum selber denken?

Abstract Since the last two decades of the 20th century it has been widely accepted that testimony has to be acknowledged as a source of knowledge. As a side effect, any form of epistemic individualism has been discredited. The article provides some arguments against the dismissive attitude towards epistemic individualism. I distinguish between three forms of epistemic individualism, and I argue that only the most extreme form can be flatly rejected while there are good reasons for maintaining the other two forms of epistemic individualism. I show that weak individualism, according to which individuals are the bearers of knowledge, is concerned with a necessary condition of the instantiation of knowledge. We only accept knowledge claims if there is good reason to believe that they are maintained by at least one individual. My main interest, however, is focused on a discussion of the third more challenging form of epistemic individualism, namely normative epistemic individualism, which claims that priority of one's own epistemic experiences over the testimony of others. I first swow that such a priority claim can only be understood as a local device, i.e. if a belief based on our own experiences is challenged by other people’s assertations, then we are committed to trust our own experiences more than the words of others. In a second step, the relations between such a restricted version of the individualist priority claim and the ideal of rationality are discussed.

The problem of the existence of ancient Slavic pagan priests in VI-VII centuries.

No nation can exist without its own religious cults and traditions. The practical absence of records of the presence of pagan priests in our ancestors, the bearers of knowledge, beliefs and rituals, testifies only to the careful deliberate destruction of important aspects of national history. Some pages in the history of the Eastern Slavs are simply crossed out from the chronicles and replaced by pious stories in line with Byzantine hagiography. An example in this regard is the description of the baptism of Kiev under Prince Vladimir, which obviously had nothing to do with the real events. The pagan rites and traditions in the annals were changed beyond recognition and took the form of fairy tales and legends. Very interesting in this regard are the descriptions of the funeral rites related to the death of Prince Igor, which were transformed by the chronicler Nestor into the legend "On the revenge of Princess Olga Derevlyany". Even the term "priest" in ancient Slavic sources was replaced by the word "magician" or "old man". Because of all these facts, a fairly authoritative hypothesis has emerged in national historical science, according to which the Eastern Slavs did not have any "pagan priests" at all.

Diversity learning, knowledge diversity and inclusion

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present knowledge as an important diversity dimension in globally operating companies and to illustrate how companies with corporate universities (CUs) proceed in order to achieve knowledge inclusion.Design/methodology/approachA model is developed regarding the management of knowledge diversity methodologically based on the grounded theory approach and examples in existing CUs are given.FindingsDifferent diversity learning approaches in corporate university programmes are explained and integrated in a model. The paper recognises the need to more actively manage knowledge diversity in companies.Practical implicationsThe paper gives advice to companies on how to better manage their diversity of knowledge and knowledge bearers for strategic learning purposes. The paper is a first step in the academic discussion of knowledge as a diversity dimension.Originality/valueKnowledge is defined as a diversity dimension by scientists but has not been discussed in depth so far. The paper distinguishes between knowledge diversity and inclusion and shows in which way companies can proceed in order to profit from the diversity in learning environments.

The bonsai management

Management can be understood as a “bonsai” integrating its roots in long-term bases with the trunk of general management growing from it supporting a cultivated treetop branching out in the real time. Managers need to develop a new understanding of the management process that will respond to global trends in the world’s economy. More precisely it needs to create more progressive management styles. Management will be successful if it is based upon people’s own knowledge and their development. In addition it has to look beyond the confines of the company and even of the country and to take into account the on-going and permanent development of technology. With particular regard to technology, man should be seen as a bearer of knowledge, regarded as an investment and seen as a source of long-term profit.

Genetic Counseling for Sex Chromosome Anomalies (SCAs) in Israel and Germany: Assessing Medical Risks According to the Importance of Fertility in Two Cultures

In this article, I report findings from a comparative study of Israeli and German genetic counselors. Specifically, it concerns counselors' attitudes and risk assessments relating to prenatal diagnosis of sex chromosome anomalies (SCAs) such as Klinefelter and Turner syndromes. Data collected through in-depth interviews with counselors in both countries (N = 32) are presented, and the types of claims experts deploy in their personal and professional estimation of the risks involved in SCAs are analyzed. The article concludes by suggesting that the counselors rhetoric concerning SCAs, whose major manifestation is the future infertility of the unborn child as well as their estimations of the related risks, should be situated in a broader cultural context, that of local Israeli and German understandings of the importance of fertility, and not in their professional nondirective ethos. Hence, to understand the practice of genetic counselors in two late-modern societies, one must understand the unique relationship between the individual bodies of pregnant women and the body politics of their nations, a relationship mediated by the counselors, who are the bearers of knowledge and expertise in this field.

Testimony in communitarian epistemology

This paper suggests a new way of analysing testimony. The starting point of the analysis is ‘epistemological communitarianism’. This is the view that communities, rather than individuals, are the primary bearers of knowledge. The new perspective is developed through a discussion of four issues: the scope of testimony; the role of inferences in the reception and evaluation of testimony; the possibility of a global justification of testimony; and the question of whether testimony is a generative source of knowledge or a mere means of transmission of already existing knowledge. The last-mentioned issue is given special prominence. It is argued that testimony is a generative source of knowledge.

Science, Values and the Human Dimensions

The presented paper substantiates the principle that values are an immanent component of science and any rational cognitive activity. This principle belongs to the European cultural tradition starting from the book of Genesis of the Old Testament, the values of certainty in the antique Greek philosophy and Francis Bacon's coincidence of knowledge and power. Values in science form complicated structures inconnection with different types of knowledge including “the knowledge that”, empirical evidence, various types of generalizations or rules, methods, directions, algorithms, “the knowledge how”, “the knowledge why” or other types of knowledge. Since the assignments of different types of values are the products of a decision-making, it is useful to distinguish many types of decision-making, especially semantic decision-making, information decision-making and decision-making with distinctly pragmatic dimensions. The values assignable to scientific activities and their results also include their social recognition, respect and prestige granted to knowledge and bearers of knowledge by society and social groups or communities. Knowledge generation and the rational and justified application of the achieved and acceptable impacts are also connected with decision-making procedures, values and criteria of social acceptance.

Data and knowledge integration through the feature-based approach

One promising and convenient approach towards the integration of data and knowledge is the so called feature-based approach. Most existing definitions of the term ‘feature’ represent an attempt at generalization. However, as a rule, they depend on the application in one or another subsystem of computer integrated manufacturing systems. Probably, the reason for this is that more attention has been paid to the feature as a data-based entity. The approach, presented in this paper, can be generalized as follows: • the part (product) features are bearers of knowledge about that part (product); • there are two general kinds of knowledge: connected with data and connected with existing and/or necessary relations among these data, leading to a part (product) description; • two general types of features can be defined which correspond to those kinds of knowledge: fact-features and rule-features. Some requirements and practical recommendations for creating a feature-based application software are given. Declarative production programming languages are proposed as a most convenient tool for creating such software. In addition, those of them in which the forward chaining inference strategy is accepted are recommended. The contents of facts- and rule-bases is discussed. It is shown that the set of rules is defined as a consequence of the necessary operations, which ensure the interface with the user and external systems, parametrization of available facts and different types of their processing. As a confirmation of the ideas presented in this paper, the main components of an intelligent system for feature-based modeling in computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing are briefly shown.