[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Roma]

Dear TWers,
With much of humility, may I contribute to thoughts about these learning 
concepts started with D. Hillis during the OSCON you refers to... as I'm 
very concerned with the use of TW in this scope and already achieved some 
good results.

   - TW is shown through a web browser. Recently, firefox, - my favourite, 
   shows several drawbacks : the need of an addon, tiddlyfox, because the 
   improved security rules prevents TW to save ; advertising to get rid, if 
   possible, of google's financial control. What will be next ? I found it 
   better to come back to a firefoxportable version 13 having suppressed the 
   updater.ini file to prevent the browser to self update, which did, even 
   with the correct options selected.
   - TW takes its main strength with its ability to be autonomous. It means 
   to me that it is a perfect tool for personal use, - yet easy to share. But 
   a share probably more oriented with physical contact, even if through a web 
   server is also possible. We should think about that because I'm not sure 
   how the web services will go in the (near) future. Electricity is 
   everywhere in the nature, so that we can always find a way to make a 
   computer work. Autonomy is about simplicity.
   - TW, may be, is not the simplest system for a newbie ; but far from 
   being the most complicated. And still we can see a fork of TWC with TW5, 
   which is, in my opinion, more like what is done nowadays : "sexy" style, 
   more distracting, more dictatorial, more complex.
   - Putting these points altogether, along with some philosophical 
   thoughts (yet drawn through experiments), I found that we should not forget 
   a small student group way of learning concept because the massification has 
   so many drawbacks ; one being that it brings more problems than it eases 
   things. As a matter of fact, the more people are put together, the less 
   they have common points, and, as a conclusion, the more control over the 
   system we have to put on. So, TWC, with a smart organization concept, is 
   already able to handle the bright ideas Mr Hillis refers to if only we can 
   accept a TW becomes "Mrs Wilner" (the teacher, first human, then virtual, 
   and finally in-between as I propose). It means that a TW can be a mind we 
   can look into, be presented by its human counterpart, and considered, 
   depending on infinite contexts, as a teacher, a student, a friend... To 
   stress again on my idea : the cyberspace already contains quite everything 
   ; what we need from it and how to exploit it can probably be better done by 
   small groups rather than by a learning system reproducing the cyberspace 
   diversity once more.

I do not intend to influence anyone ; I know too well how destructive 
opposite opinions can be : I wish all the best to the bright developpers 
and conceptors. I rather wanted to give my profound acknowledgement to the 
TWC creator, and his followers... 

Le vendredi 14 novembre 2014 13:19:27 UTC+1, Richard Smith a écrit :
>
> Hi TWers,
>
> As you may know, I am very interested in educational (micro) content. I 
> just came across this excellent talk by Danny Hillis which pretty much 
> crystalises my own opinion about the kind of learning system that we need 
> to build.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKcZ8ozCah0
>
> I think that much of what he is describing can be achieved with TiddlyWiki
>
> Regards,
> Richard
>
>
>

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[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Tobias Beer]

Thanks, Richard, really interesting topic here and surely something that 
has always attracted teachers and learners alike to the realms of the 
TiddlyVerse.

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[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Richard Smith]

Hi Tobias,

Thank you very much for your thoughts. 

>
> I believe Khan Academy provides an excellent example of this type of 
> integrated learning environment with much of the features as discussed by 
> Danny 
> Hillis in this talk. Of course, he seems to go a few steps further, talking 
> of something like an open protocol to which an institution like Khan 
> Academy would be but one node a student can hook up with, like a travel 
> agent for packaged vacations. ^_^ personally, I'm more of a guy going 
> places and discovering what's there, not much of a need or desire for all 
> the packaging, be that learning or traveling.
>

The khan academy is very good, in it's own way but yes, as you say, I feel 
they should be only one small piece of a vast ecosystem of 'vendors' who 
produce content against some sort of standard "api". 

I'm sure you are perfectly capable of 'travelling' solo across the wilds of 
the internet unattended but I need to build a tool for children and there 
is still a need to curate and package that content for them, even though it 
should be unique for each child.



> I believe the greatest challenge in this networked knowledge approach is 
> the question of whether and how to unify and consolidate all the different 
> knowledge bits and their representation. Just as there are a bazillion 
> things to learn, there are a bazillion different ways to go about learning 
> supposedly the same thing, let alone representing that, not to mention the 
> mountains of people and institutions working on achieving exacly that, each 
> their own way.
>

I agree. The different ways of learning are often called 'modalities'. It 
seems pretty clear that we are not going to have too much trouble 
generating enough content but rather, as you say, the big problem will be 
how to find the most suitable content. The key to this, I think, is having 
sufficient metadata on the content. For example - not only how is it been 
tagged, but who tagged it that way? How much do I trust them? How closely 
does their 'learning style' match my own?
 

>
> This rather visual map through which to navigte with colored places for 
> all the things you've already managed to visit (and those you are about to) 
> very well shows what's kinda missing in this traditional school 
> environment... an approach where students have a way to look back and get a 
> feel for how individual progress bars they can fill depending on their 
> talents and interests rather than being forced up and down a supposedly 
> unified class curriculum.
>

I suspect you are of a 'learning type' similar to myself. My preferred 
approach, given the quality of most of my teachers, would have been for 
them to give me the books and a curriculum and tell me to come back at the 
end of the year for the exam. I would have learned much more at school 
without the distraction of all the 'lessons'. 
 

>
> Not sure if things like Common Core are all that helping. Maybe as a 
> guide, an entry point, but not so much as the holy grail of what's out 
> there to learn and how, especially seeing how some methods of teaching math 
> in it seem to be mindblowingly ridiculous.
>

The common core alone wouldn't be such a problem without the tyranny of 
standardised testing. The basic idea behind it, as far as I know, is to 
teach mathematical thinking ahead of rote facts but it's often being 
implemented by teachers who only know the old methods and the results are 
spectacularly ham-fisted. We will end up with some (more) very confused 
kids.

I think it will be possible to do away with group testing altogether when 
we have a trusted network against which people can validate their own 
progress. For example, if I have been taught French by my personal 'Digital 
Aristotle', it will already know, and will report honestly, how fluent I 
am, without the need to take a test.

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[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Richard,

I believe Khan Academy provides an excellent example of this type of 
integrated learning environment with much of the features as discussed by Danny 
Hillis in this talk. Of course, he seems to go a few steps further, talking 
of something like an open protocol to which an institution like Khan 
Academy would be but one node a student can hook up with, like a travel 
agent for packaged vacations. ^_^ personally, I'm more of a guy going 
places and discovering what's there, not much of a need or desire for all 
the packaging, be that learning or traveling.

I believe the greatest challenge in this networked knowledge approach is 
the question of whether and how to unify and consolidate all the different 
knowledge bits and their representation. Just as there are a bazillion 
things to learn, there are a bazillion different ways to go about learning 
supposedly the same thing, let alone representing that, not to mention the 
mountains of people and institutions working on achieving exacly that, each 
their own way.

This rather visual map through which to navigte with colored places for all 
the things you've already managed to visit (and those you are about to) 
very well shows what's kinda missing in this traditional school 
environment... an approach where students have a way to look back and get a 
feel for how individual progress bars they can fill depending on their 
talents and interests rather than being forced up and down a supposedly 
unified class curriculum.

Not sure if things like Common Core are all that helping. Maybe as a guide, 
an entry point, but not so much as the holy grail of what's out there to 
learn and how, especially seeing how some methods of teaching math in it 
seem to be mindblowingly ridiculous.

Best wishes, Tobias.

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[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Richard Smith]

Hi Jed,

It's an idea I've also been playing with for some time now. I've approached 
it lots of different ways and ended up with dozens and dozens of TWs that 
approach the problem in slightly different ways.

This is 
 what 
I'm working on at the moment. It isn't anything like finished, so please 
don't judge it too harshly - hopefully you can see what I'm getting at.

There are many super-space-age things that I can imagine doing with TW in 
the future, but to begin with I am interested in offering an "open-source" 
alternative to traditional, proprietary text-books. I would like it to 
replace them based on merit, not price alone. This might seem a little 
mundane but I think it will offer a very good platform from which to then 
evolve towards a proper "learning agent"/AI whilst collecting input from 
teachers everywhere.

I'd be very interested to see what you made. Did you write original content 
or collect it from the web? Is it possible for others to re-use the content?

Regards,
Richard

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[tw] Re: OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"

[Jed Carty]

I have been trying to figure out how to do something similar to this using 
tiddlywiki. He articulates the idea much better than I had, but I have a 
tiddlywiki that I am building for my phd dissertation (in electrical 
engineering) that has all the background for math going back to algebra and 
the various theory using splitting everything up using the wiki. I think 
that we could create a small version with a very restricted scope to see 
how it would be implemented. Something like basic math or English grammar 
or similar that can be used to demonstrate the concept.

I would post what I have but it has all my dissertation work in it so I 
shouldn't put that up publicly online. I will see about taking out the 
knowledge parts of it and posting that later.

On Friday, November 14, 2014 5:19:27 AM UTC-7, Richard Smith wrote:
>
> Hi TWers,
>
> As you may know, I am very interested in educational (micro) content. I 
> just came across this excellent talk by Danny Hillis which pretty much 
> crystalises my own opinion about the kind of learning system that we need 
> to build.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKcZ8ozCah0
>
> I think that much of what he is describing can be achieved with TiddlyWiki
>
> Regards,
> Richard
>
>
>

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