A book is one thing you have in hand and it will never by changed except making notes on it by yourself. Wikipedia is just like Teemu’s word “river”, it is always running until there is no more headsteam or rain(resources). New knowledge is like the rain, it will never stop.

Content is a representation of ideas that can be dispersed, gathered, or even “mashed up”. Only lifeforms that can act for themselves can possess knowledge.

(That’s how I see the terms, anyway. I don’t manage any marketing budgets or anything so I can really say it as I see it.)

I think the speed and scalability makes a huge difference. In my world a pond, a lake, a sea and a river are all different even if they all are simply “water”. They all hold very different kind of affordances. Wikipedia is a river. A book is much more a pond or a lake. If a resource is under continuous reconsideration – in a fast and almost global scale – it starts to embed the “knowers” (the community) in it and becomes (almost) knowledge itself. This is what happens in a scientific publishing too – in a different scale. Rivers are good.

And yes you do get information from an episode of CSI, for example (getting shot is yucky), and you do get useful information from an episode of American Idol (I probably could never be a singer).

But we don’t normally tune into CSI or American Idol or listen to a song in order to learn something or gain more skills & knowledge. WeWe do have that intention however usually when we go to Wikipedia or connect to some “personal learning environment” or search on google.

I guess I like “open learning” or something that emphasizes the process and the intentions of the person.

But yes, you’re right. This, in particular, is dead on: “There is no such thing as disembodied knowledge. To know requires a knower, and what that knower knows is knowledge.”

This creates problems for George Siemens. Not insurmountable problems, if we are careful about what constitutes a ‘knower’. But problem enough. Because a brick cannot ‘embody knowledge’ or ‘have knowledge’. Nor can a book. Nor can a website.

Much, much more interesting is the question of ‘what is a knower?’. Only humans? No – I would want to say my cat knows things – it certainly knows when it’s food time; those mad scrambles aren’t just guesses.

To know – I argue – is to be organized in a certain way. It implies a certain level of complexity, and it requires the sort of set of entities that *can* be organized in that way.