Tuesday, July 07, 2009

D'oh

I've been so focussed on categorizing the definitions of competency I missed the fact that the physical location of a definition of competency in an article is not a characteristic of the content of that definition but a conceptual characteristic: it speaks to how the author(s) created the definition in their respective mind(s) versus how they spoke of it in the text of the article overall.

The result is I do not need to create a taxonomy of definitions to the umpteenth level, as there is nothing revealing in the creation of such a taxonomy. What is revealing is a looser grouping based on this physical characteristic, its separation from text, and what this may potentially reveal about how we think about competency (as found within the text or complete article) versus how we actually define competency (outwith the text). And in those definitions outwith the text, do we actually reflect all three parts of the "typical" definition of competency: knowledge, skills and behaviour? Or is librarian's use of the concept typical but their actual definition of the concept atypical?

I'll keep working on it.