Learning salon organized through the notebook

Posted on August 11, 2012 by admin

To be translated from the Chinese version

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New Feature: note translation

Posted on August 1, 2012 by admin

Now, you can provide translation for your notes and have the appropriate language displayed for different viewers. You probably have noticed that our site menus support two languages viewing: Chinese and English. But now you can also view the notes in different languages. Notes owners intending to provide the alternative language can provide translation for the note in the note editing page. You can provide alternative language translation for both note title and note desc.

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The three entrances into notebook

Posted on July 27, 2012 by admin

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.

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One page introduction to the site

Posted on July 23, 2012 by admin

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.

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Learning based on activities + teaching based on Significant Experiences

Posted on July 22, 2012 by admin

to be translated from the Chinese version

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How to use notebook to learn and think more effectively?

Posted on July 22, 2012 by admin

not written yet

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New Feature: Knowledge Frames

Posted on July 15, 2012 by admin

This has been continuous development over a long period of time. Now the Knowledge Frame features are available for you. Knowledge Frame is what I have enjoyed using when in my middle school and it is very effective for learning.

With current implementation of Knowledge Frame, you can put existing notes into a frame, or you can write snippets directly inside a frame. Knowledge Frame can be displayed like a tree and you can reorder the sequences of notes inside the frame. You can also see related frames. You can also view the simple text or print version of the frame and copy it to your blog writing editor and continue writing on it and publish it as a blog post.

There are some other features. Be sure to check this out!

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Open courses based on Significant Experiences

Posted on July 6, 2012 by admin

中文版

As the article Knowledge Engine says, Significant Experiences are the source of our knowledge. All our knowledge comes from our Significant Experiences. Significant Experiences are experiences that are constructive to your life, they can make your different from the past, can increase your understanding of the world. Knowledge engine based on Significant Experiences will also bring revolutionary changes to teaching. Recently I experimented with a new way of course teaching: open courses based on Significant Experiences. Although this is the first time effort, I feel that this way of course teaching has many advantages, and it reaches the core of learning and teaching.

This is an online course for Xiamen Wuqi School. The format of the class is to discuss this knowledge frame “My growth in the middle school“. We discuss each note in the frame one by one, not spending more than 10 mins on each note. Because the students in Wuqi School are those so called “peasant workers”, most of them only have middle school diplomas, and they are from the countryside. They came to the city to work in the factories. They are very eager to change their lives so that they don’t have to work their whole lives on the production line doing repetitive mechanical work. So I feel it is suitable to choose my growth in my middle school for them. (Of course, we can teach growth in college later)

Because the first few notes in the frame are about mountain climbing, so most of the discussions at the beginning are about experiences in mountain climbing. Because there were so many of them in one class, each of them expressed some of his/her true experiences, and we can get the various aspects of mountain climbing experiences out. So we get a quite full collection of mountain climbing experiences. They even helped me to recollect some of my past experiences. Below are the experiences shared by the students in their own words (original in Chinese, translated by me):

  • in mountains, I think very clearly
  • I like to read, think, and plan things in the crispy fresh air
  • I like to go into the mountains. There is smell of earth and nature there
  • the air in the mountain is the best, so is my mood
  • I feel very relieved and trouble free, feel like flying
  • I like mountain climbing very much. I like the beautiful view when looking down from the very top of the mountain. It opens up your heart and your mind.
  • it is really a different feeling when I first climbed to the mountain top
  • although the mountain climbing is tiring, seeing all the beautiful scenery that you cannot see make you really feel worthwhile
  • I have a feeling that all other mountains are in my view and become smaller
  • I remember when climbing Beichen mountain, it was really tiring, making you want to give up. But when you got to the mountain top, all your exhaustiveness went away
  •  I felt exhausted when climbing to the highest point of the mountain. But when I look down  feeling that all mountains are at my foot, I felt very happy
  • I can see the most beautiful scenery at the mountain top
  • I feel the process of mountain climbing is just like making efforts in our study and work. Although it is tiring, but once you get to the mountain top, you feel very happy, feeling all your efforts got payback
  • I can enjoy quietly all by myself
  • I feel lonely and afraid when climbing alone. I like to go with friends so we can talk along the way
  • life is in the movement. The more friends to go together, the better I feel
  • When I feel down, I like to go climbing alone
  • It is different feelings. Sometimes I want to go alone. Sometimes I go with friends. When you climb alone, you feel purely of yourself. When with friends, we can play together and encourage each other
  • I will try to find lower mountains to preserve my energy because when climbing mountains the thoughts can fly around and it is very good to adjust your mood there

They have so many rich experiences. This really makes my feel happy for them. But when they are facing human life and society, they are not that clear in their minds. There are a lot of confusion. If the students can bring their experiences when climbing the mountains into their thinking of their life and society, reflect and analyze, identify their important experiences, and find their real interests, it will really help them to establish their value system when facing society. (This actually should be a natural process when a person grows up. But school occupies too much of their time, and makes them unable to focus on their growth when they are transitioning from the childhood time to adult life. If they can focus on what they are really growing on, I think most of them can draw their childhood experiences in nature to think of how they should face adult life and human society. But after a long time of school study, they kind of got used to live an adult life without really thinking of anything, and their memory of those great childhood fun when playing in the nature and with friends becomes vague.)

This is the summary of this class. In the attachment is the class discussion. (It is all in Chinese now.)

This is the very first teaching of open course based on Significant Experiences. From this first class, my feelings on this format are:

  • teaching based on Significant Experiences is easy to operate, and it is also easy to conduct online
  • open courses based on Significant Experiences make the teachers have to return to what really means to be a teacher, e.g. the teacher has to have rich experience in the subject s/he teaches
  • the kind of class requires the teacher to dig the students’ experiences from various angles. For example, I ask students to compare which is more fun, to go by yourself, or to go with friends. The teacher should be those that have rich experience in this field, so s/he can easily help the students dig their experiences from many different angles and depth levels, and make the students’ experiences collide together. Without rich experience in the domain, if the teacher only has textbook knowledge, it will be very difficult for the teacher to teach courses based on Significant Experiences.
  • going back to experiences makes discussion having a better foundation. Discussion based on experiences recognizes the equality of each participant, and acknowledge that everyone is equal in his/her experiences of life. If we can fully appreciate the experiences behind the other person’s views, there won’t be so many quarrels and fights. Maybe the other person expressed his view in an extremely exaggerating way, but he must have some experiences behind his arguments. The root of many quarrels and fights is that people ignore others’ experiences and why they say so, or that they draw a conclusion too quickly, forgetting where  their knowledge comes from and wanting to force other people to accept their opinions.
  • the discussion is open instead of conclusive. It is inspiring and exploratory. Learning is a cycle of “explore, experience, and express”. （http://www.opensourcelearning.org/?p=57&lang=en）Knowledge Frame is also a format of knowledge. It is more open and closer to the source of knowledge. This is quite different from document-centered knowledge format such as blog and wiki. Blog is more conclusive expression of knowledge. Knowledge Frame is more open and closer to the source representation of knowledge. So Knowledge Frame based on Significant Experiences is more suited to teach this kind of class.
  • by recollecting your own experiences and knowing other people experiences in a relatively focused domain such as mountain climbing, students get the chance to practice on self-reflection. When students learned the skills and formed the habit of self-reflection, it will help them dealing with problems that come up in their real lives and find their own value system
  • the current mainstream class teaches things that are just textbook knowledge, which you pretty much can read by yourself. And such mainstream classes are not able to teach things that are deeper. Open courses based on Significant Experiences can teach things that are hard to teach in the traditional classroom, the kind of knowledge that doesn’t exist in the books. This is the core area of learning and it is not covered by modern education.

The open courses based on Significant Experiences is still in experimentation. We need to do more experiments. And we welcome you to join this experiment.

Knowledge Frames included in this blog:

p.s. It takes too much time writing an article. If all knowledge can only be shared when they are published as blogs or books, we don’t know how long we can have all the knowledge expressed, not to mention that knowledge itself is under constantly restructuring. Making it into blogs or books, you don’t see the process in the middle. Knowledge sharing by the Knowledge Frame, can share knowledge earlier and easier, and we can have many discussions from time to time on this Knowledge Frame (through online courses, or salons). It is a little like writing books online by cooperation, such as the book Thinking in Java. What Knowledge Frame lacks is that it is abstract and personal. But by attaching course/salon discussion, related frames and external links behind each frame, we can make abstract knowledge vivid and fun again.

This way knowledge can be abstracted out from real life, and go back to to its concrete and vivid form again.

This is all online courses I taught at Wuqi. (in Chinese)

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What have you learned today?

Posted on July 6, 2012 by admin

中文版

If you feel not sure what to put inside the box titled “What have you learned today”, here are some helpful information for you.

I would say there are about two types of info you can put inside the box to note down what you have learned.

One type of knowledge is your Significant Experiences. Significant Experience means experiences that are constructive for your growth. They help you have a better understanding of things or yourself. Or they can be helpful to other. These experiences are big enough that you cannot ignore them.

The other type of knowledge is useful facts to you. For example, you might be interested in some industry data, and when you come across them in your reading you want to record them. These data can help you analyze things later. So you can put these inside that box too.

Due to modern school system, we are often confused with what is learning, what is knowledge, and what is education. I feel that is why people get confused when they need to enter what they have learned today. But it isn’t actually that hard to learn what is really knowledge. Hope this notebook can help you to find out what learning really is and start effective learning in your daily life. Don’t be afraid that you might make notes of many unimportant things, One major feature of the notebook is to help you filter out those notes that are not going to be used much by you. Learning itself is to get rid of a lot of things daily.

Posted in Scientific Study, selflearning, User Manual | 3 Comments

list of hot-keys available

Posted on June 21, 2012 by admin

中文版

Hot-keys are implemented for the notebook site. So far the following hot-keys are available:
alt-m: display more (currently used in notes list display page)
alt-l: display less (as above)
alt-s: save (on add snippet page)
alt-h: hide right side menu
alt-r: show right side menu

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