Explore, Experience, Express

中文版

You can first take a look of the site screenshots.

Life is the primary. Learning is only secondary. We don’t need to be locked away from real life for years in order to learn, like what the school does. We only need to do periodical self-reflection on our significant experiences generated from our daily activities. Knowledge Engine is to help people to capture their daily significant experiences and facts (or infos) quickly. So it looks like twitter. (Actually it was inspired by twitter, realizing that snippets of words with length limit can be used as the smallest unit of knowledge.) Different from twitter though, we can add tags and importance to the notes, or put notes into a frame (you can do these editing operations when you are doing your periodical self-reflection). The notes can be further made into a learning area (the learning area will include its root knowledge frame, raw notes that can be dug in various ways, rich learning materials such as videos, books, blogs, mags, examples, project set, question set and so on).

Some key points in the design of Knowledge Engine:

Quickly capture daily significant experiences or infos. The most convenient is when you can make notes without opening a browser or any app. You can write directly on the desktop of your pc or mobile devices. There is no time delay for entering the note into your notebook. If you have clear tags and importance to add, you can add it then. Otherwise, you can just add simply a note. (Partially implemented now. You still have to open a browser for now.)

Do a lot of bulk editing on one page. Be able to process as much notes as possible on one page. So the interface uses a design that is similar to gmail’s design.

Knowledge Frame, as a basic way to represent knowledge in the system, let people build up frames quickly and share them. Joelonsoftware says that he found many people use excel only as a table to put data in. So I hope frame can be such a thing for people that they grab when they need to put up an outline quickly. It is a very fast and convenient way to share knowledge.

Tagging and importance, these are the basic structural infos for a note.
p.s. I feel that for lives in consciousness all should have these two basic structural infos, so they can form lives on a higher level. (This might has something to do with what I learned from life science. Every kind of cells such as muscle cells, blood cells, or neural cells, although very unlike each other in their shapes, have basically the same elements. ) As for the concept of life, you can read of Christopher Alexander’s books Nature of Order.

Text. Text can be very powerful. We need text to organize human’s consciousness together. We always say that reading can help people open their minds and be a better thinker. Or we say writing can help a person to think more clearly. These are both due to the power of text. It helps people more focused on their consciousness. So the design of Knowledge Engine is heavily centered on text, including the interface. All other vivid stuff, such as videos or pictures, you can add them to your notes as attachment. We use text to organize our consciousness.

I said earlier that Knowledge Engine helps us know better what is knowledge and what is learning. I share below my understanding of knowledge through my work on Knowledge Engine. Here is the knowledge frame: what is knowledge？ There is a course recording on this frame, which I gave to students at Wuqi School (a peasant factory worker school). However, the course is in Chinese. So apologize for not translating them for now.

Here is the slides of my speech at open party.

中文版

Note: Here is the knowledge frame for this essay (in Chinese only).

I had a chance to go to a local city in China to do a survey with public school (there are very few schools in China) teachers, instructional researchers (people who had been outstanding teachers and now more involved in providing teaching guidelines to other teachers), school principles, and some students. I think school problems are fundamentally the same everywhere around the world. I think what I found out in China should also applies to the states.

• Everyone surveyed has a somewhat clear understanding of what school is. Especially the principles are very clear about it. Everyone knows test based teaching is the root of all evils. But only a few have the knowledge and courage to make some change. Here let me share with you what the school principles said of school. One school principle said to his teachers: “No one of you can survive if you get out of the school and get into society. None of you have the skills to survive.” He also said that school is a prison. Another school said that the wall of the school would be torn down in the future, and the that school would disappear too.
• students had a big outcry over the testing. When asked what kind of online system they would like for education, one student answered that if the system has anything to do with testing it will have no future.
• When visiting the classrooms, I learned that the coldness people have towards each other and towards public issues in society is developed when they are in school. Since they are forced to receive education passively and have no any means to change the way of education, they developed coldness and hypocrisy very early on.
• The current system is a huge system that people play various roles. Everyone tries to fit into the roles. There are fixed routines to follow. People have a shared understanding of the system. There are various activities organized routinely to guide teaching. Within the existing framework, pretty what can be done have already been done.
• Information technology has already had a big impact on schooling. Schools need the support of information technology. There are no arguments on this anymore. Teachers already had the habit of searching for course material online. Some schools are quite will equipped with technology, having IT covering various aspects of schooling.
• Within the current education system, people have come up with various ways to improve teaching. They did a lot of work. But only a few teachers had the idea that students should learn more by themselves and that the teachers should teach less. Only a few teachers contemplated what the students should really learn.
• With all the efforts put in, the current situation is still that the teachers are not happy, and that the students are not happy, according to a school principle. This is also shared by many others.
• There are some right efforts within the system that I can recognize. For example, putting more emphasis on library, on reading, especially giving students more time to read during class time. Mentorship is implemented in some schools. There are also more emphasis on self-reflection. All these are good efforts. But it is far from enough.

It is interesting to see that even within the education system itself there is a widely shared view that standard testing is the root of all evils, and to see that right efforts are put more on ability instead of testing score, while in US so many people think standard testing is the way to save American education.