Summarization of our findings

Posted on March 22, 2013 by admin

We want to summarize our finding here, so you know what we have achieved through our work. We want to be brief here in this essay so that you can quickly grasp it.

We tried in many domains of education and did various experimentation. Our goal is to find out on a deeper level what is knowledge and what is learning, and how that understanding can help us building software for education or learning in the internet age.

What is Knowledge?

So here is what we find out about knowledge. We summarize as below:

  • Knowledge is of big blocks. Knowledge is understanding of the whole, otherwise it is just information.
  • Knowledge is flowing. When different knowledge comes together and condense, it forms a concrete matter or thing that we can recognize as a human being. So anything in real life must contain multiple dimensions of knowledge.
  • Learning is to interact with these various things, to extract out one particular dimension of knowledge, and to accumulate drops of experience in that dimension of knowledge. Thus learning cannot and should not be separated from daily activities. We should learn in real life, and learn by doing it. So learning activities must be very scattered and everywhere, and one core ability of learning is to extract out that dimension of knowledge from various scattered activities. We need to know how to break down.
  • Then we put all our Significant Experiences together, try to achieve an understanding of the whole. Here we need another core learning ability, which is to summarize and to comprehend.
  • The key of learning is reflection. The above two activities of thinking (breaking down and comprehending) are the two basic forms of reflection.
  • Knowledge needs to be applied. After you gain the understanding of the knowledge on the whole, you will not be limited by the literal expression of the knowledge, and you will be able to “see” knowledge flowing everywhere in real life.
  • Since there is no need to separate learning and daily activities, surely learning is naturally driven by what you are interested to learn.

Above we briefly summarized our understanding of knowledge and learning. For more of our understanding of what is knowledge, you can view our frame (a frame is an outline that includes several notes or other frames) What is Knowledge. Below we want to list some daily phenomena to show how they are anti-learning and anti-knowledge.

Anti-learning and anti-knowledge phenomena

  • People often pride themselves on possessing a large amount of information, and others often get intimated by them.
  • People got confined by the literal expression of knowledge, lack of true understanding of it, and cannot recognize knowledge in other forms.
  • School teachers generally lack experiences in the subject they are teaching. They cannot tell which ones are more important in the textbook, and often waste students’ time by reading from page to page.
  • When in school, people are very diligent in keeping notes. However, once out of school, they seldom make any notes.
  • If schools cannot teach people courage, at the very least, they should be able to teach students on self-reflection. However, after so many years in school, many people still don’t know how to reflect.
  • Whenever people think of learning, they think of going to school, or paying money to take courses. They think of getting a degree of certificate.
  • People tend to think that learning is the duty of the kids (shouldn’t it be a right?).Only kids need to learn. Adults don’t need to learn anymore. We already learned painting and geography at school, we don’t need to learn them anymore.
  • Since knowledge is always taught instead of being explored out of one’s own needs and curiosity, people lack the ability to explore knowledge.

There are too many of these to be all listed here. But I think you get what I mean.

The learning in the internet age

Internet has already changed how people learn. When we talk about how internet changed our world, on a deep level, I think the overall change is to bring us closer to the core values of human being. Of course, that is a big topic. But when people talk about the agile programming methodologies and compare that to the traditional ones such as waterfall, I think it is of that kind of change. When it comes to learning, we can also say that learning in the internet age is becoming more agile, instead of waterfall.

The traditional education is waterfall style instead of iterative. Learning at the internet age, is to meet the needs at hand quickly, and keep getting feedback along the way. The traditional education, however, has a grand design at the very beginning, and you don’t get feedback for a very long time.

The traditional education is separated from experiences, while learning in the internet age is all about gaining experiences quickly.

Thus learning activities in the internet age must be scattered and everywhere. We cannot demand people to just come to our place to learn. That would be too wide a range to cover and too costly. This is the pitfalls of many online education efforts. However, reflection after those scattered activities is the place that we can focus on. Especially, because learning activities are scattered and everywhere, learners need some learning software to help “pull all the strings” and coordinate all the learning efforts. If we say software is to digitize human world, this is what learning software in the internet age should digitize.

Here let me give an example of such kind of learning at the internet age. I use Linux, for work and for life. And I am learning shell programming. So as I am using Linux every day, I will encounter issues, for which I can quickly find solutions on the internet. So I learn little by little about various aspects of shell programming. After some time, I may have accumulated quite many of them. Then I put them together, and try to figure out the rules of shell programming and understand the essence of it. You can also find a book to read it very quickly at this stage. So you can see this kind of learning is very fast, with little waste of time. You also get to train your reflection and abilities to explore knowledge.

So what does the above help us design learning software for the internet age?

First of all, it has to be based on Significant Experiences, since Significant Experiences are the center of all the things above.

Secondly, learning should not be separated from daily life and work. People accumulate Significant Experiences through their daily lives and work.

Third, through simple editing operations, people work on Significant Experiences and accomplish the task of reflection. The result is a dynamic streaming structure, e.g. knowledge.

So any knowledge related cooperation, such as peer learning or teaching, should be based on the Significant Experiences. For example, teaching can be done by giving feedback to Significant Experiences directly.

Hence our work on Knowledge Engine. For that, please read our Knowledge Engine essay and other essays to know what we have done.

If we say software is to digitize human world, then the profession of software programming is about how we digitize various domains of human world. We have domain driven design. Actually the methodologies of agile programming and practice of lean start-ups are also about how we do that work of digitizing various domains of human world.

When we come to online education, we see over and over again that people often treat online education as a place to take tests for a degree or certificate. There are many learning activities in people’s lives that were not captured by these online education software.

Only in the recent years, we get to see breakthrough apps such as khan academy, MOOC, and so on. These breakthrough apps didn’t come from learning theories of education school professors. They also have no real technology breakthrough. They could have happened 5, 6 years ago or even earlier. Their birth is just because someone suddenly realized with all what we have been doing, why not…

Yes, the innovations in the online education field mostly come from thinking outside the box of traditional education system. We are happy to see that now even the mainstream media in America realized this and called for re-think our education from ground up, and really dig into what is learning and what is knowledge, and design software around it.

I was turned off by the elearning research in the academic world about 10 years ago (my research paper only got published 4 years after I wrote it. Well, personally I don’t really care much about publication.) and decided to pursue the research outside of the academic world. Now I am glad to see that people start realizing what is really wrong with our education.

So here is what we share with you our work at Open Source Learning. We would like to get your feedback. If you are willing to join our efforts, you are more than welcome.

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Mentored

Posted on March 18, 2013 by admin

中文版

I always believe that one important aspect of future learning/education is that everyone can become a teacher. To be more specific, people who really have rich learning experiences and domain knowledge — usually those accomplished professionals — should be able to teach and guide learners effectively in their spare time. Thus we will really change the profession of teaching, and bring out the true value of “teaching”. We can see now that many websites are making efforts in this direction. Some allow individual teachers to host a class online and teach students like in a classroom. Some connect individual teachers and learners so that the teachers can teach offline face to face. But all these current efforts have serious drawbacks. They didn’t fully leverage the power of internet, and they cannot compete with the current mainstream teaching, e.g. the classroom teaching in schools.

What 3exps.org is trying to bring about is something that is dramatically different. Let’s say, someone who wants to learn something, for example, software programming, photography or management, post his request. People who think they can teach can answer the request by commenting or giving a simple learning/starting plan for the learner. For example, what good books there are, what areas the learner need to learn, what kind of path that he will go through. Or the teacher can share with the learner the learning material he has organized with the notebook. Based on these infos, the learner can decide who can be his teacher. He can have one or several teachers. So the teachers can give out specific areas that the learner can try. The learner has to make notes of what he has learned in the process and questions he has. The teachers need to provide feedbacks and guidelines in time. The teacher can also share his learning materials. The charge of service might be free for the starting period. Then the learner need to pay to get continued service.

This way the teacher knows where the students are in their study and the teacher is able to provide very effective and timely guidance to the students. The teacher can also use 3exps.org to record his own learning experiences and learning materials, and provide them later for the students to study. These learning resources are unlike the traditional ones, which are just knowledge that need to be memorized. These new resources include the teacher’s own experiences and reasoning in his exploration of knowledge. The students are supposed to replicate similar experiences and reasoning in their own various daily activities and construct their own knowledge. So the teaching shifts away from traditional way of filling in students with knowledge and starts to focus on guiding students in their exploring and building their own knowledge. The students also get trained to form the habit and skills of self-reflection, which should be the center of learning. Thus compared to other sites, 3exps.org provides a more complete learning experience. And the research work of knowledge engine, provides the technology backbone of the above process.

In United States, more and more learning centers and schools are starting to bring contemplative skills and methodologies back into learning and teaching, and start to have very powerful impact. I think the future learning won’t be like the current schools, where the students are supposed to grasp (quite often memorize) the knowledge in the book and pass the tests. Learning will not be separated from real life. Learners learn to solve their problems or to live a better life. Teachers are those who are able to guide the students in that process, helping students bring their experiences and reasoning together to reach some systemic knowledge and understanding. With 3exps.org and knowledge engine, we hope we can start to explore a systemic way to do this.

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Recap the design of notebook

Posted on March 15, 2013 by admin

While I was doing my elearning research in my graduate school back in 2002-2005, it was center of my research topic what should be the basic unit of knowledge or so called learning object. When twitter came out, I realized actually the short snippets limited by number of characters can be a very ideal candidate for the basic unit of knowledge. We enforce the length of the snippets so it can only represent a small unit of thought/experience. Based on these small units of thought/experience, we can probably construct knowledge and thus learning software can be very different because of it.

As a life long learner myself, it has become quite natural for me to base my learning on my past experiences, and I have trained myself to form a discipline to reflect on those experiences regularly to advance my learning. As I was visiting my hometown and seeing my old childhood friends and neighbors, I realized how people generally lack the habit and skills of self-reflection. They have a lot of experiences in various fields. But they don’t know how to reflect on their past experiences to gain a better clarity on their lives, for example, what they really want and how to make their lives happier. This lacking of skill in learning (self-reflection is surely a core skill of learning) is quite universal. Personally I strongly believe learning is essential for one’s happiness of life. And it is sad to see so many people badly affected by the lack of learning skills.

As I was doing research on elearning, I have seen various ideas in the elearning field. I am glad to see that recently there start to emerge some new ideas that are moving towards bringing real learning to people. But I think we still need a breakthrough in how knowledge is represented digitally and how it is shared thereafter

As for myself personally, I am always learning many things in my life. So it is a challenging task to manage all the learning efforts very well. So I am dreaming of a tool to help my own learning as well.

So I decided to make such a tool.

The initial goals:

Making it very easy and convenient for ordinary people to note down what they have experienced right on the spot. So they can keep doing whatever they are doing and only review what they noted at night time or at weekends.

And when they are reviewing the notes, they should be able to review it very quickly, adding tags, rank importance, deleting notes or archiving notes that are not important now, doing bulk edition, and so on.

It should be easy to put notes into a frame and share it with others.

For an individual, it can be an personal content generation tool. So you have your own content at one place, and you can share with some groups or publish to the world as you like. You can push notes or frames into twitter or import tweets from twitter. You can build a post from a frame and push it to various blogs of yours. You have your data (preferably on your own desktop or network storage you trust), and you choose how you want to share it.

Build up knowledge on top of these notes, share with other people and learn together. Or more formally, you can open courses and teach others.

Later, I realize these notes are just like some basic data and I can build various apps on them. So there is this learning area, which is to pull up all notes related to a learning area (for example, software programming), and have them well organized: grouped into resources, examples, news, blogs, videos, tutorials, and so on, and you can view them through frames or tag trees. You can also ask questions or add project directly in it.

Also I realize with a lot of notes, a top-down structure might be needed to allow quick access. So in addition to frames, tag tree are designed.

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New Feature: @someone

Posted on March 14, 2013 by admin

中文版

The new feature to mention someone using @ is implemented. Now you can @ people in your notes or in your comments. For example, if you put @leon in your notes or comments, the user leon will be notified of the mentioning and will be able to see where you mentioned him.

For now, on the front UI, we didn’t implement the automatic suggest box when you enter the username to @. The reason is @ is a quite social function, and we are not very sure right now we want to make the site very social and noisy. Learning needs a quiet environment or mind, doesn’t it? So we want to wait a little and see how people like using this feature. Once our thoughts with it mature, we will implement it as it should be.

By all means, you can start mentioning someone by using @.

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Comtemplative learning tool and future learning

Posted on February 21, 2013 by admin

中文版

Recently I did some research on how comtemplative methodologies and skills are used in educational setting. I am glad to find out that many adcademic and research intitutes are engaged in bringing the comtemplative methodologies and skills to learning and teaching. There are a lot of research going on. Some have developed courses that are taught in ways that are centered around comtemplative learning. Some used comtemplative practices to help students achieve active and deeper learning.

But I haven’t found any of them leverage the power of software and internet in doing all these, not mention doing it in a systemic way. I think that is why the research here at open source learning is very unique. Furthermore, my approach is more about solving the problem. Even though I tried to have a whole understanding of learning and teaching on the theoretical basis and tried to build up a theorectical system, it is still for the purpose of solving the problem. Also to me, contemplative or feeling of the space, is not just helping learning, actually it is the center of learning and that is the original face of learning.

Below I will talk a little of how this comtemplative tool and corresponding learning platform can combine practice/experience and knowledge building in a systemic way.

It is a self-learning tool. It can be used by individuals to help them learn by themselves. It can also be used in school for teacher-led courses. You can also use it for peer learning in a learning group.

For example, in the case of teacher-led courses, the teacher can outline the knowledge in the subject area. Sample phenomenons or experiences in this area, and how students can practice in their daily lives to experience various aspects of it. The students can also view the teachers’ personal learning notes to get an idea of this learning area. The teacher can also show the kind of tags students can use to make notes of their learning experiences. And then students should try various things on their own in their daily lives to gain experiences in various aspects of the area. In the course sessions, the teacher can have the students show and tell what they have explored. The simplest form of that is to go through each experience s/he has collected and explains it. More complex forms can be making knowledge frames from the notes made. The teacher should help the students analyze their experiences and teach them how to synthesize them. So basically learners are still playing the major role of learning, and they do self-learning. The teacher only leads them to explore the field.

So the teachers should be those who really have learning experiences in the field, and have a complete map of the knowledge. S/he should be able to describe the knowledge or the things to be learned in the area, and s/he should be able to break it into several small modules that students can practice in and accumulate related experiences. The students can try whatever resources out there to learn by themselves. But their learning experiences and collected learning material can be reflected in this twitter-like snippet knowledge system. By promoting the students to form a habit of self-reflection and consciously exploring knowledge and gaining the skills, students learn the important skills of how to learn.

So with this twitter-like snippet system, the way of teaching in school will be dramatically different from the past. The twitter-like snippet knowledge system makes it easy to carry out the kind of teaching where the students are at the center of learning and exploring by themselves and the teacher can guide the students in combining their experiences from practice together with construction of the knowledge system in the area. We hope that more people can try this and together we can come up with more standard and systemic ways of doing this kind of teaching.

Of course, such usage in school is mainly for people who haven’t learned how to learn, which currently includes quite a lot of people. For those who are very strong learners and know how to learn by themselves, they can form learning groups and learn topics together through peer learning. This twitter-like snippet system will also have features to support and facilitate that kind of learning.

The ultimate goal is for people to be able to learn in real life. People can be engaged in whatever they want to do in their lives. They only need to spend a very small portion of their time to contemplate on what they experienced daily or weekly, and be conscious of the knowledge system they are in. Teacher and students will be more equal. The teacher is merely an early learner who has more learning experiences, probably has gained the full picture of the knowledge and is able to tell where the student is. Learning is never separated from life.

I have two master degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science from US schools. Neural system and brain have been my most favorite parts in my study of life science. I have been doing work on elearning and education for more than 10 years. I am also a long time Buddhism practitioner. I am looking for future collaborators to work on this research together. So if you are interested, please contact me.

p.s. the above is writtle in a rush. Please allow time to refine it.

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WIKI+Twitter

Posted on February 18, 2013 by admin

Here we propose a new representation of knowledge. Simply put, it is wiki+twitter, which we call WikiNote here at osl. You can take a look of the site: http://3exps.org/wiki/index.cgi/WikiNote

Wiki has been invented particularly for knowledge cooperation. It has the following features:

  • It is easy to edit and create a new page. You don’t need to upload to a website as you often need to do with non-wiki sites.
  • Anyone (normally)  can edit.
  • It is visioned. It keeps a history of all the edits.

So wiki means quick editing cooperation on the web. However, any knowledge comes from experiences, especially Significant Experiences. In the writing of the wiki, people are working with their experiences internally in their minds. However, that process is not captured by the software. And once the wiki page is written, no one can see those Significant Experiences, and thus the Significant Experiences are lost in the process. For the learners, it becomes difficult for them to try repeating those experiences to achieve the same understanding of the knowledge represented via wiki. Furthermore, since no Significant Experiences are captured, no one can cooperate based on those experiences. And we know people share experiences. Many of them are similar. These are the building blocks of knowledge.

So to better represent knowledge, we propose adding twitter to the picture. So we have the twitter-like snippets here at Knowledge Engine, and we are going to attach that to the wiki. So when people view the wiki page, they also see the Significant Experiences that are shaping and driving the knowledge. They can further cooperate by working on those Significant Experiences directly, producing knowledge together. Teachers can also join the efforts, by providing feedback on those Significant Experiences directly. Actually they are not teachers, they are just more experienced learners. They learn together with other learners, and their role of teaching emerge naturally. Thus we bridge the gap btw learners and teachers.

 

 

 

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Real life learning powered by knowledge system based on twitter-like snippets

Posted on January 27, 2013 by admin

Below is a tentative writing of a short introduction of the Knowledge Engine and the learning platform supported by it. It is difficult to put many things into short paragraphs. So I will keep working on it in the following two days.

The goal of this project is to experiment and explore whether using twitter-like snippets as the foundation of learning process and building blocks of knowledge will cause a fundamental change in people’s learning. Actually it is not to change people’s learning per say, but to bring out the true face of learning. Indeed, when we look at how internet has changed our society, it is more in the way of bringing out what people have been doing rightly all along and spreading that to other people.

So in what ways can this twitter-like snippets change people’s learning?

What’s in the center of learning is the ability to feel of oneself and feel space (society, for example) around oneself, e.g. the self-reflection habits and skills. What compulsory schooling has done the most to damage people’s natural learning capacity is to destroy people’s ability to feel the space. With our early users, this twitter-like learning platform has proven to be able to restore or strengthen people’s ability to reflect and to feel of themselves, which has changed their learning completely in a very fundamental way.

Learning happens everywhere. People’s learning needs in real life are very rich. Only by satisfying people’s need to learn in real life, can people learn how to learn. Skills and knowledge needed in the industry cannot be well grasped and understood without a strong capacity of real life learning, not to mention to apply and explore knowledge creatively, which is highly demanded by future economy. Knowledge built on top of twitter-like snippets and constructed from people’s daily learning experiences can really foster the real life learning and can truly make learning mobile and happening in-time just as how it is naturally in real life.

How about the learning-teaching relation? We think that self-learning should be the basis, and the final goal of teaching is to let go so the learners can learn by themselves. When presented with good knowledge structure and rich learning resources, learners know how to learn best by themselves. Knowledge Area (a term in the platform) built on top of twitter-like snippets and constructed from people’s daily learning experiences provides such knowledge structure and learning resources. And they are from teachers who really have rich learning experiences in this area. By giving those teachers the flexibility and convenience to open courses on the platform and to become teachers, we empower everyone to become a teacher and thus change the profession of teaching fundamentally. This is the market force we rely on in this new system of education, and where we build out business model.

With our experimental work, we have proven or partially proven above hypotheses. We are sharing our work with the public. The envisioned future may happen in one platform. Or it probably will manifest itself in more forms. We hope people who deeply care about education can also see this future and join us together to bring this future to us sooner.

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Demo videos added

Posted on January 7, 2013 by admin

We put on demo videos in the “new user guide” page to demonstrate how you can put buttons on your browser bookmark bar so it will be convenient for you to collect bookmarks or web scraps while browsing.

You can see the demo videos here: http://www.3exps.org/forNewUsers/

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New Feature: New menu bar at the top

Posted on December 1, 2012 by admin

Now the site has a new interface for the menu at the top of the site. With more new features and corresponding new items added to the top menu, it became messy and not straight-forward. In the past, with fewer focal points, the old menu is brief and concise. But with more features, I am afraid that it is getting people confused. So the menu (at the upper left) is re-organized into 3 spaces: personal, social, square. So “personal” is your personal learning space where you make your learning notes and organize them. “Social” is you go out and interact with your social friends and groups. “Square” is the public square where you can discover new things, for example, make new friends, find good teachers, find people to form a learning group to learn something together, or find learning salons to join. These are new things you can view and do in the public square. Check them out!

If you don’t like the new top menu, you can keep the old one. If more people keep the old one, we will re-think if we have guessed wrong of what users want. 🙂

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New Feature: More apps in public square

Posted on November 30, 2012 by admin

In the past, we have been quite conservative in sharing user notes, groups and so on with the public. So we didn’t make many public pages to help public find out more of content on this site. However, with suggestions from some users, we think it might be good to allow the public or registered users to discover new things in the public square.

So we made the following available: Learning Salons (this was here before); Learning Groups (here you can find which learning group interests you and you want to join them learning together); Learning Areas (here you can find areas of learning that you feel interested and see what knowledge others have collected in these areas); Power Learners; Knowledge Frames by all users (Knowledge Frame is summarized knowledge. So see what knowledge other people have discovered in their lives)

Hope you enjoy these new apps/pages in the public square, and tell us what you think and like/dislike.

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