The enormous significance of new and expanding Bas

Abstract

Purpose

This article aims to focus on a perspective on knowledge that carries with it a most urgent challenge for educational actors to engage in personal knowledge processes wherever they take place.

Design/methodology/approach

The purpose is met through the use of philosophical argumentation and theoretical ideas developed for understanding knowledge creation. Central concepts are Ba and “knowledge activists”, but also personal insights in relation to technical knowledge.

Findings

The author argues that educational actors who do not want to be marginalised must step forward as knowledge activists, gaining access to and influencing all sorts of interpretative places (Bas), whether they are physical, virtual or mental, where information is interpreted to become knowledge.

Practical implications

Educational actors who want to continue playing an important societal role had better leave behind the idea of knowledge as something to be handled mainly in physical places. Instead they have to search for a position in the world of virtual spaces that is forming today.

Social implications

With the introduction of the internet and the emergence of a “cloud”, civil society is in desperate need of educational actors who can interlink the disparate Bas now forming, thus generating common ideas that can keep us together as a society and defend basic democratic ideals.

Originality/value

Through the use of a few well‐established theoretical concepts the article shows that there is a desperate need for rethinking education from being something limited in time and place to something that is ever present in knowledge processes of all kinds.

Citation

Hoppe, M. (2011), "The enormous significance of new and expanding Bas", On the Horizon, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 134-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748121111138335