The development of knowledge as social communicational process

Kirsti Booijnk-Kemna, student at the University of Twente, does a research on knowlegde productivity. She investigates the social and communicative process that plays an important role in knowledge development. Here she introduces herself:

"Why start a research on knowledge productivity? Well, I started one out of curiosity. As a student of the bachelor study ‘Educational Design, Management and Media’ of the University of Twente, the word ‘knowledge productivity’ to me was very abstract. I felt the need to find more practical cues to deal with it. That was when my passion about knowledge productivity started to grow. I started reading about it and found the 11 principles of knowledge productivity that were developed by Suzanne Verdonschot and Paul Keursten (2006). The principle about ‘making it a social and communicational process’ intrigued me the most, so I decided to do my final paper of the bachelor about this topic. The research was started in January 2006 and hopefully will be finished around September 2006."

During the research, the role of the social communicational process on knowledge development will be investigated. To do so, the existing literature was studied first to find out more about knowledge productivity and the relation between social communication and knowledge productivity. Finally several factors of social communication were found, that are related to the development of knowledge.

The second part of the research exists of a case study in witch will be investigated how the factors that were found during the literature study, interact on knowledge productivity processes during real life situations. How do they support or slow down the creation of knowledge?