Federating Cultures:Human Knowledge, Teachers, Students

Jack Park

The Opportunity…

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.“

– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, in Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

Steps (Big Picture)

1. Plan core knowledge organization.

2. Implement museum.

3. Grow knowledge interactively.

Core Concepts

Virtual Museum*

Interactive Knowledge Garden

*Image: Ohio University in SecondLife

Plan

• As discussed in Linda’s talk– Build a concept map that

illustrates the concepts to be displayed in the museum

Implement the museum

• Create presentations for each concept

Interact with the exhibits

• Treat the exhibits as a knowledge garden

• Answer questions• Suggest new concepts to exhibit• Grow and tend the garden…

Pedegogic Processes:Gowin’s V

After: Novak, J. D., & D. B. Gowin. (1984). Learning how to learn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

What learners already know

Questions about the subjects of museum exhibits…

New concepts and dialog added to museum

Tools To Facilitate Learning

• A framework that federates many ways of interacting– Based on Topic Maps,

Wiki-like structures, and Web 2.0-like tools

• Tagging/Annotating• Dialog mapping• Storytelling

Tagging

• People create bookmarks of web pages (Subjects) with Tags– Tags identify those bookmarks

• Reminders

• People create new Tags or use Tags made by othersUser: sue23 Tag: WebSearch

URL: http://www.google.com/

Annotation

• Like Tagging, except…– User places typed link between two web

pages (subjects)– e.g “A argues against X”

User: sue23

TypedLink: Argues Against

URL: http://.../abc URL: http://.../xyz

Dialog Mapping

Storytelling

“…stories are a powerful means to understand what happened (the sequence of events) and why (the causes and effects of those events)” – John Seeley Brown in

The Social Life of Information

What We Are Doing Now

Periodic Table Metaphor 1

Empty cells

predicted elements to be

discovered

Periodic Table Metaphor 2

Bay Area

Science

Collaboratory

Empty cells suggest missing information

The Opportunity Restated• We see the opportunity to create a

platform for learning, creativity, and problem solving from existing open source resources– Combinations of

• Subject Map-based federation framework• Web 2.0/3.0 user interface applications

– Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, …• 3-D user environments

– SecondLife