Educators: A knowledge base can change your life

If you are an educator and don’t use a knowledge base(KB), you really should use it. This article mainly discuss the benefits a KB brings to you, and how to implement your own KB effortlessly.

Part 1: The power of knowledge base

Before getting to know what a knowledge base(KB) is, let’s see some benefits of KB first.

1. Manage/Browse your knowledge
With a well-built KB, you have the perfect place to insert new data(no longer create new word documents just for taking notes, or store downloaded files in a big folder that you’ll never come back again), and most important, you have unlimited ways of browsing and using your existed treasures.

Why you need a KB of your own, instead of using the great wikipedia?
Because it’s your KB that contains what you need exactly, nothing more. If you are a psychologist, when you search for “Gershwin”, you want to know something exactly about the psychological impacts of Gershwin’s musics, rather than tons of pages about something else.

2. Connect your knowledge
If you’ve ever used or seen a wiki, you’ll find that in a wiki, all the topic names are hyperlinks so that all content is connected. That’s powerful, because the relevant data is always 1-click away, so you can see them if you want.
A KB is like a wiki in this way: all your topic names are transformed into hyperlinks. So, once you mentioned “George Gershwin” somewhere in a topic, you can jump to the “George Gershwin” topic with just a click, to see all your findings about his psychological impacts(if you are a psychologist).

A chapter in a book never tell you the list of relevant articles, but a KB does.
Once you connected 2 topics, say you mentioned “Gershwin” in one of your psychological finding, you can not only switch to the topic “Gershwin” by just clicking the link, but also view the psychological finding topic from the “Gershwin” topic.

3. Re-use previous works
Simply put, you can re-use your previously created/found data easily. This saves you lots of time creating same data again and again.
In the real world, people write new stuff or find new stuff everyday, and store them in a “meaningful” way but some times later they don’t remember what they did, and where the stuff are. So, treasures are lost in your own computer.
Knowledges are useless when they are not used.
How many times do you have to re-make stuff that has been carefully crafted a long time ago?

Most educators give great lectures with carefully made materials(findings, ppt documents, and many more), but after some time, these treasures are lost due to multiple reasons. Thus they have to spend lots of extra time which could be shared with their families.

But in your knowledge base, once you mentioned a knowledge that exists, it will appear as a link, right there available for you.
That’s it, a knowledge base, organizes your findings effortlessly even without searching(in most cases).

Part 2: What’s a knowledge base(KB)?

Okay, read on if you are interested in getting to know how a knowledge works. But if you want to build your own KB, please skip to the 3rd part of this article.

What’s a knowledge?
Your knowledge base behaves like a database, which stores relevant data in certain topics. Each topic is called a “knowledge”. Thus, a knowledge is not “a piece of note”, or just a picture. It’s a set of data(it could be images, notes, or documents) that describes exactly the topic, nothing more.
Let’s see a sample topic here:

George Gershwin
American composer, one of the most famous work is “Rhapsody in Blue”.
He was responsible for a number of significant developments in the 1920s…
And also I’d like to insert a picture of Gershwin in 1920 here.

How do you manage these topics in KB?
Your knowledge base will become larger and larger, therefore you need a way to categorize your topics. Everyone knows how to categorize their files with “folders”, but that’s not enough and inefficient to manage these treasures. The problem of categorizing with folders is that there is only one way to browse them — the way you organized.
Let’s see an example of categorizing with folders:

My music teacher organizes his stuff in this way. It’s very clear that you can browse by composers’ name, and see all stuff organized by time under a specific composer. But in the other hand, it’s impossible to browse the stuff in another way(say, view all musics composed in 1930s, etc).
Therefore, some genius invented a new tool called “tags” which can be used to categorize without such problem.
See a sample about “tags”:

George Gershwin(tag:composer)
Rhapsody in Blue(tag:George Gershwin, orchestra, 1920s)
Porgy and Bess(tag:George Gershwin, opera, 1930s)
Symphony No.1 in C Major, Op.21(tag:Beethoven, orchestra, 1800s)
…

This is just the reversed way of organizing with folders: you are assigning categories to your stuff. Therefore with tags, you can just browse all musics composed in 1920s, or see all operas in your KB, or, even browse everything that is related to a specific composer.

Part 3: Implementing your own KB

If you haven’t built your KB yet, it’s time to do so, as we’ve prepared a killer tool for you to do it effortlessly.
Pagico is designed specially for building knowledge bases, so you can build your own KB effortlessly, with Pagico.

Add your knowledge, and organize them in topics.
Pagico allows you to organize sets of data under topics. Add topics as you want, but there are a few things you need to keep in mind:

1. Name the topic with the term you would use in context.
If the name occurs somewhere, it will be transformed into a link.
E.g. Use “Rhapsody in Blue” rather than “Concerto Rhapsody in Blue” or something like that.

2. Tag it precisely.
When tagged properly, you’ll be able to view whatever you need.
But actually how to tag properly is really depending on personal uses, so you may need some time to practice.

3. Add relevant data.
Add “text paragraph” for taking notes, or just drag files and drop in, if you want to store a photo or a pdf file, whatever.
But please note, add data that explains this topic ONLY. Mixing up irrelevant data under the a topic is not a good idea.

Now what? You can try browsing them by tags, to test if your tags are selected properly, efficiently.

From now on, once a topic name is appeared in a topic, the name will be transformed into a hyperlink, which will lead you to the relevant knowledge. So, prepare your upcoming lectures in Pagico, name it and tag it properly, and everything you do will be turned into treasures in the future.

Okay. That’s some basics about building a KB with Pagico.
Next time I’ll write some advanced techniques in Pagico to enhance the way you organize your KB, and yes, a guideline for creating a highly effective KB will be added in the near future, so stay tuned.

Thanks for your time, and comments are appreciated, as always.

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