GLOBAL VERSUS LOCAL KNOWLEDGE IN DIY ECONOMY

According to Charles Handy (2015) whether we like it or not we are forced to move into a DIY (Do It Yourself) economy. Farmers of this new DIY economy, who use the tools and means of the information age for problem solving, best practice sharing, or implementing new business models from the rise of the collaborative consumption can be called cyber farmers. To solve problems in real life we look for information, knowledge in many ways by formal, informal learning, experience sharing. The wide spread of information technology, social media globally has a significant impact on the knowledge sharing, experience mining. The knowledge gathered from the available sources over the internet is accidental also the application of this knowledge locally in a global environment raises many questions. Nicholas Carr (2016) in one of his blogs talks about the illusion of knowledge, how the internet is making us shallow, but at the same time giving us the illusion that our knowledge is deep. In today's environment with around 8000 disciplines, by specializing in one or couple would mean to ignore more than 7990 (Nicolescu, 2002). This leads to the need of transdisciplinary approach, which would mean to not only look at certain problems from one or more disciplines, but go beyond the disciplines. In the process to mind, validate the knowledge available globally the following have to be considered (1) consistency of the accessible knowledge; this relates to the notion of internal validity, (2) relevance of the consistent knowledge; this relates to the notion of construct validity and (3) applicability of the relevant knowledge; this relates to the notion of external validity. The aim of this paper is to show a model for cyber farmers to help their learning process in the DIY economy.