Course Description
We live in a knowledge society. In such societies, we are heavily dependent on information in many
spheres of our activities, be they personal, economic, educational, medical, or political. Most of our
everyday activities involve both the mind and information—that is, we use, work, and think with
information to be able to perform knowledge-oriented activities, such as making decisions, solving
problems, planning, analyzing, forecasting, learning, and knowledge discovery. We will broadly refer to
all these activities, involving the mind and information, as knowledge work.
The amount, variety, sources, contexts, forms, and complexity of information are constantly increasing.
We are awash in a tsunami of information. To cope, we need and use cognitive technologies (CTs) to
help us carry out our everyday knowledge activities. These technologies maintain information in a digital
form and sit at the interface between the mind and this information, mediating our interaction with the
information—hence allowing us to perform knowledge work. In other words, they participate in the
‘interplay’ between the mind and information. There are many different kinds of CTs, with varying
degrees of complexity. These can range from digital games to digital libraries, from search engines to
mind mapping tools, from information visualization systems to virtual science museums.
This course explores the relationship between knowledge activities and cognitive technologies (CTs)—
i.e., technologies that maintain information in a digital form and allow users to interact with this
information to perform knowledge work. We will examine the nature and types of information and
knowledge; we will study different cognitive technologies, their role in knowledge activities, their
essential components, and their conceptualization and design. This course will help us develop a deep
understanding of the aforementioned issues and will enable us to have a systematic approach when
analyzing, selecting, and assessing the utility and design of different CTs.
