PRAGMATIC INSIGHTS FROM THE EXPERTS

"The word ‘knowledge’ actually means ‘to have sport with ideas’.

A knowledgeable person is someone who can play with ideas, not just someone who can retain facts, recall information or simply repeat a task.

To play with ideas means holding information in the short-term and long-term memory and processing them by comparing and contrasting, attributing, classifying, sequencing, prioritising, evaluating, determining cause and effect, analysing for bias and drawing conclusions.

Through these series of thinking activities, new ideas can be created through inventing, inferring, generalising, predicting, hypothesising and making analogies.

Therefore, if you wish to be a knowledgeable person, you should not practise retaining information, but instead, process information.

When you put effort into processing information, you will become capable of a metacognitive or executive level of thinking that includes self-awareness, self-inquiry (self-dialogue), self-monitoring and self-regulation of the processes and contents of thoughts, knowledge structures and memories.

In essence, you become a thinker capable of solving problems, creating ideas and making decisions."

~ Professor Y.K. Ip, Associate Director, Centre for Development of Teaching & Learning, NUS, Singapore;