Knowledge representation

For a constructivist, teaching and learning are not processes of knowledge transfer or knowledge copying.

For the personal constructivist, knowledge refers to the contents of individual minds. Knowledge cannot be unproblematically communicated or transferred (or stored outside of the mind).

Rather knowledge ‘transfer’ (sic, transposition) involves:

The knower representing the knowledge in some form (which is inherently different to knowledge itself)...

...and the representation being interpreted to construct new personal knowledge within another mind.

Word meanings:

Words are themselves parts of representations and do not have intrinsic meaning:

“Once we come to see this essential and inescapable subjectivity of linguistic meaning, we can no longer maintain the preconceived notion that words convey ideas or knowledge; nor can we believe that a listener who apparently “understands” what we say must necessarily have conceptual structures that are identical with ours. Instead, we come to realize that “understanding” is a matter of fit rather than match. Put in the simplest way, to understand what someone has said or written means no less but also no more than to have built up a conceptual structure that, in the given context, appears to be compatible with the structure the speaker had in mind – and this compatibility, as a rule, manifests itself in no other way than that the receiver says and does nothing that contravenes the speaker’s expectations." (Glasersfeld, 1989: 133-134)

Glasersfeld, E. v. (1989). Cognition, construction of knowledge, and teaching. Synthese, 80(1), 121–140.

In research we may collect various representations of someone’s knowledge.

Concept mapping is a procedure that produces a particular kind of representation of someone’s propositional knowledge.

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