Explore, Experience, Express

中文版

This is about the mobile version of the online notebook.

No mobile app is developed currently. For mobile devices (pads or phones), if you visit the site from these devices, you will have an adapted site for you. Your home page will be a very simple note input box where you can make notes very quickly. You can make notes quickly on the mobile device even without internet access. (The notes you made is stored locally on your phone first and will get synced to the server once there is an internet connection.) You can save this page as a shortcut on your desktop/main screen or you can set it as your home page to allow easy access.

中文版

Entry 1: Structured twitter

The default entrance to the notebook is your snippets page. After you login, you are directed to this page. From this entrance, this site looks like a twitter to you. So you can make notes on this notebook like in twitter.

But compared with twitter, because notebook is for learning, so there is some major differences:

First, snippets is more knowledge-like. Although you can make any kinds of notes in notebook, we encourage you to make notes that are more rich in knowledge. Actually on twitter, we can see that some people’s tweets are more rich in knowledge, and you want to save their tweets, and go over them often. (If you are not sure what kind of notes to make in the notebook, you can take a look of those people’s tweets that are well-known for being rich in knowledge.)

And this leads to the second difference: it is easier to find notes that you want and easier to mange your notes. First of all, note has some extra structure info, such as tags, and vote. These can help you find notes in a field quickly. Furthermore, notebook has knowledge frames and tag trees to help you better organize your knowledge.

Because snippets are knowledge, and knowledge is stuff that you want to go over again and again. So when you have made thousands of notes in your notebook, you still can find and manage them. Also because knowledge is changing, so notebook provide many functions to help you change your notes and modify your knowledge structure. With twitter, you cannot change it.

Because snippets are knowledge, notebook provides functions to filter out trivial notes to form knowledge. This is what twitter is lacking. So you can make notes here like on twitter, and have them well-managed along the way.

Entry 2: knowledge Frame

You can set it up in your setting page to use “knowledge frame” as your default home page. In that case, you will enter knowledge frame page after login. From this entrance, notebook appears to you as many knowledge frames (or you can say knowledge bags). You manage your knowledge through these frames. When you want to summarize something, you can build a frame. You can write snippets in it, or put bookmarks or scraps in it. You can put tags and vote on each note in the frame. These individual notes can be put into other frames as well. Then you will have related frames.

My knowledge frames
Note: this is my public frames, so you cannot edit them. But you can edit your frames in your personal notebook.

Entry 3: Tag Tree (brain structure tree)

You can set it up to have Tag Tree as your default home page. You will then be directed to Tag Tree after you login. Tag Tree show your knowledge structure so you can visit notes under each tag in the tree and the notes there will be sorted by the relevance, which is related to the position of the tag in the tree. This way, you can always keep such a knowledge structure in your brain, and find the accumulated notes in a field very quickly, to know what you have learned, and what to do next.

Here is my tag trees. (You need to login to see the notes under each tag in the tree.)

What is more, you can put “Add a bookmark” and “Add a scrap” two buttons on your browser bookmark toolbar to use them as buttons to collect bookmarks and scraps when browsing on the web. See the new users guide.

Here is the 中文版 Note: due to a friend’s request, I made this one page introduction. I believe a good site shouldn’t need documentation, and the code speak for itself, and the users will find things naturally on the website. But for now, there are still a lot of development tasks, and no much time to tune the interface. So here is the one page introduction. What you do at this site? After you login, you should see your snippets page, where you can make notes of what you have learned everyday. You can go to the “for new users” page, follow its instruction to add “Add a bookmark” and “Add a scrap” two buttons to your browser tool bar. So you will have these two buttons to add bookmarks or scraps when you are browsing online. Snippets, bookmarks, and scraps can all be packaged into a knowledge frame. Furthermore, you can make Tag Tree (e.g. knowledge tree) to help you navigate your notes. You can share your notes, knowledge frames, and tag trees. You can share them to twitter, facebook and so on with one click (binding with these sites are not implemented currently). Or when you answer questions on Quora, you can put up your notes as the background knowledge. If you like writing blogs, you can make a knowledge frame into an article. Knowledge frame helps you collect experiences in a domain, and put them into a blog article, and push them to various blogging platforms with one click (one click sharing not implemented yet). If you feel that you have accumulated enough knowledge and it is mature enough, you can open a course to teach students. Or you can join learning groups that interest you and learn with other peers. Once you start off making notes, you will learn how to use the system on the way. Don’t worry that you might make trivial notes. One major function of the system is to help you filter out the notes that are not rich in knowledge and are not going to be used much in the future. Learning itself is to get rid of insignificant things every day. Comparing with twitter, twitter is only for people to talk online, to socialize. You won’t review the words that you said. It is also very difficult to browse your old posts on twitter. But knowledge is something that you will go over and over again in order to form new knowledge to guide your action. So when you are making notes, you should keep in mind that the notes recorded should be things that you will use often (This notebook also helps you to filter out what you thought important but later proven to be just random thoughts). As for knowledge, it has to have some structure, which in represented by tags and vote in our system. The notebook helps you to form good structured knowledge and effectively accomplish the learning process via simple editing operations. With this structure, you can build up knowledge frames or tag trees, and do many things related to knowledge, such as sharing, publishing, and teaching. So this notebook is more rich in knowledge than twitter. When you are unsure what kind of notes to make in the notebook, you can take a look of tweets from people who like to share knowledge. This should help you know what kind of notes to make: what have you learned today? This is the three entries of the notebook. It should help everyone to understand the notebook. Here is the official blog, which is the one you are reading now. This is project documentation. Here are some big knowledge frames: About learning About thinking Here are all knowledge frames Knowledge frame is a bottom up organization of knowledge. Tag tree is to let users easily organize s/his brain structure, and access his knowledge, so it follows a top down approach. For example, here is my tag tree. When browsing notes in tag tree, notes under a tag will be sorted by relevance (need to log on to see relevant notes for each tag). This site is to support activity-centered learning and experience-centered instruction, e.g. learning in real life. I hope in the future, learners can take advantage of all kinds of resources for learning, learn much more of what people currently deem as knowledge, learn through peers, and the self learning time vs. instruction time ratio should be more than 6:1. The function of the teacher is more about finding suitable books, and give some instruction, to make the learning curve less steep. So this has a higher demand on the teacher’s professional competence, and less demand of the teacher’s control of the classroom. The whole learning process can be centered around the notebook. All these are application of Knowledge Engine. I coined the word Knowledge Engine to help people to better understand what kind of potential it will have on future knowledge based society. How the notebook will impact on the industry of elearning? Simply put, we need to give students a tool to help them to learn continuously in real life, give professionals who really grasped knowledge a tool to easily teach students. We need a tool to build up public knowledge in a better way, to have the students participate in meaningful social projects and demonstrate their ability (like open source software movement) and to let the students build up their online portfolios. All these are still experiments. There are more experiments to do. The notebook is going to be an educational site itself. By joining this project, people can learn all the knowledge (such as learning, education, knowledge management, consciousness, software programming) related to this project and learn by doing it. So hope people can join us. Similar works around the globe. I build this site in the hope that it will help people who are already strong learners to learn better with this tool, unlike other education people who focus on students who are very lacking learning abilities. Also I hope good professionals from various walks are able to teach a large group of students online, and they are able to teach something that are difficult to taught. I also hope people can learn how to learn through such a tool. The root problem of modern education is that education is isolated from life. We are trying to return learning back to life.