Full Circle Associates

What Do We Know? The Great Info-Knowledge Debate

Amy Gahran asks "What's the difference between knowledge and information?" She goes on to write:

• Information generally includes facts, observations, sensations, and messages. Information is content which informs our minds. It's fuel.
  
• Knowledge, in contrast, is the human experience of information – it's what our minds DO with all that content. It's the fire in the forge.
  
• Think verbs, not nouns. It seems much easier to grasp this distinction by focusing on the verbs "inform" and "know," rather than the nouns "information" and "knowledge." Try that one on for size in your next discussion on this topic.
  
• This is a spectrum, not a duality. I think that hair-splitting KM professionals endure painful verbal contortions in this debate because it's often unclear precislely where information crosses into the realm of knowledge. There are many similarities between the two categories, after all. However, this gray area is OK because our brains can pick up with creating and managing knowledge where technologies reach their limit. This is why the human brain is an intrinsic and indispensable (but generally overlooked and undersestimated) part of any KM system.

In my weird little brain, it is more than a spectrum issue. For much of the "stuff" i deal with, knowledge and information are a package deal, inextricable from each other. Or is that just how my brain works?