Tacit knowing and presentation: The gateway to complexity

Tacit knowing, first articulated in 1966 by the physicist Michael Polanyi, is the knowledge encoded in the whole person. As such, it forms an object of scientific inquiry via such disciplines as cognitive science, developmental psychology (Vygotsky, Piaget), and cybernetics (Wiener, Bateson). It is also the means by which we propose that freshmen and sophomores gain skills to give presentations. The presentation is an example of a peak communication performance, counted among the ldquosoft skillsrdquo. Mastery is attained in a complex learning process which is an integration of materials, media, and content. Learning and integration occur through the actions of organizing, practicing, and presenting by the student. As first and second year students of technology and engineering get experience giving presentations about their extracurricular experiences rather than their specialty, they are concurrently creating a cognitive map, supported by their peers in the academy, of the shape of organizational experience. The map includes ldquopeople skillsrdquo such as team learning, planning, executing, and evaluating. Campus events and clubs, like all human organizations, are complex adaptive systems (CAS), structurally similar to all ldquolearning organizationsrdquo (LO), which are non-linear process structures in environments. Experience is the gateway for students of engineering and technology to add procedural ldquoknow howrdquo and an indexed map of complexity to their academic specialty, which will be invaluable in their future work in multidisciplinary cooperative research and development teams.