Week 5 - Knowledge

Knowledge is regarded as power nowadays, which indicates that one’s potential or capability or potential in life will increase with knowledge or education. Generally we gain knowledge from experience and study. Our knowledge reflects on our familiarity, awareness or understanding about a specific subject, and it also indicates the capability situation analysing, decision making, and information manipulating or sharing.

One aspect of epistemology claims - we have to live with the fact that our knowledge is “partial” because it is impossible to have an exhaustive understanding of an information domain in realistic cases. Therefore, we normally solve problems by taking advantage of a partial understanding of the context and data. By sharing knowledge and learning, the process of collaboration extends our “partial” knowledge into a group effort to achieve a common goal. That is also why collaboration is so important.

In order to collaborate effectively as a group, all of us have decided to allocate our own individual tasks according to our disciplines and knowledge - which means each of us, chooses the jobs that we are most comfortable to work with.

Our knowledge which contributes to this project includes research skills, interpersonal communication skills (such as writing, listening, and talking skills), thinking skills (organising and planning skills), and technical skills in terms of softwares (such as Photoshop, 3D Max, Captivate, Director, Video Maker, UT3 Editor etc). Nevertheless, each skill is reciprocal. For instant, I have got a sound perception of multimedia and graphic design from my previous education, so I am in charge of the video editing. However, that task requires a lot of technical skills such as Director, Movie Maker, Photoshop, Captivate, and Video Converter. In order to capture screen videos and make those videos accessible to movie editors, I learned how to use Adobe Captivate and Video Converter by doing research. I cannot combine the video clips that I have created into one because I never touched on Movie Maker before. Fortunately, Liming is quite familiar with Movie Maker, therefore our project process will move on as I take an advantage from Liming’s knowledge by either just simply passing her the uncompleted work or get her to help.

Here we can see, this project cannot be completed unless we broaden our knowledge by learning new skills, and manipulate our extended individual knowledge together through communication.