Gathatoulie

And of these shall I speak to those eager, That quality of wisdom that all the wise wish And call creative qualities And good creation of the mind The all-powerful truth Truly and that more & better ways are discovered Towards perfection --Zarathustra.

Friday, May 7, 2010

symbols and sense-making

I am very taken with this symbology, and furthermore, I
think I see an intuitive way to connect it to several
small projects I have in mind:

∫ EXPERIMENT

PlanetMath.org is just one example of a tool that has more
content contributors than coders, and more feature
requests than anyone knows what to do with. Good
documentation is part of making hacking easier. Towards
this end, I'm planning to build PlanetComputing.org to
document the software used on PlanetMath (and many other
projects).

∂ MOTIVATION

There are various techniques for dividing content into
thematic clusters (useful for supporting simplification
behaviors needed for sense making), and for annotating
data with new relationships (useful for supporting
interconnection behaviors). I will explore these in
various applications, e.g. applying them to the streams of
data identified above.

/ CONTROL

Marking up complex and changing relationships between
objects is standard in e.g. computer animation and
computer games; it is interesting to think about how these
ideas can work in other domains (e.g. to assist with
learning).

+ INTERCONNECTION

Content may still be king, but application programming
interfaces make up the board on which the game is played.
I plan to use an existing standard for mathematical
documents (OMDoc) and other API-building tools to help
make the PlanetMath.org collection of mathematical
resources interoperable with e.g. OU's SocialLearn
platform, contributing to the development of a public
service to STEM learners and practitioners worldwide.

* PRAXIS

Data about social interactions is all interesting and
potentially useful, but data about "live" social
interactions is becoming increasingly available in forms
that are suitable for large-scale computational analysis,
and real-time use.

- SIMPLIFICATION

To be a resource, something has to be used. The insight
of e.g. category theory or behaviorism seems to be to
asking "how is it used?" instead of "what is it?". My
sense is that the only useful sense of "identity" is
created in the dynamics of interaction.

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