Accessible and usable knowledge

Image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay.

In the US, corporations now spend nearly triple the amount on research compared to public sources such as the US National Science Foundation (Science Progress 2011).
IBM estimates that humans now generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, with 90% of the information ever created having been produced in the past two years (IBM 2013). …

Much of this falls within the domain of Web 2.0, that is, user-generated content, through billions of blogs, tweets, texts, pictures, and videos, as well as cell phone GPS signals and purchase-transaction records. The resulting infosphere has become a smog of information that one surfs, cherry-picks, or simply ignores.

(Frodeman, 2014)

Creating knowledge for the sake of creating knowledge may be better replaced by creating useful knowledge that is applicable to solve pressing problems.

What is the point of amassing knowledge if we cannot access and use it?

What does it mean to make knowledge useful? I generate knowledge on this blog. I generate knowledge in my postgraduate studies. Is any of this useful?

A number of my blog posts have been “borrowed” over the years and turned into teaching resources in several countries. I can find these online. Are these useful to students, whoever they may be?

Maybe all I can do is have the intention for the material I generate to be useful. As a baseline, my blog posts are useful to me to reflect, organise my thoughts, bed down insights, and document ideas. Sometimes, they will be useful to others who are asking the right questions to hook into them. With my academic studies, I am defining specific audiences and contexts I am researching for and writing to.

If you create knowledge, how do you make it practical?