Talk given to the World Future Society, 2007.

1. Federating Cultures:
Human Knowledge, Teachers, Students
Jack Park

2. The Opportunity…
"Discovery consists of seeing what
everybody has seen and thinking
what nobody has thought.“
– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi,
in Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

3. Steps (Big Picture)
1. Plan core
knowledge
organization.
2. Implement
museum.
3. Grow
knowledge
interactively.
Core Concepts
Virtual Museum*
Interactive
Knowledge
Garden
*Image: Ohio University in SecondLife

4. Plan
• As discussed in Linda’s talk
– Build a concept map that
illustrates the concepts to be
displayed in the museum

5. Implement the museum
• Create presentations for
each concept

6. Interact with the exhibits
• Treat the exhibits as a
knowledge garden
• Answer questions
• Suggest new concepts to exhibit
• Grow and tend the garden…

7. Pedegogic Processes:
Gowin’s V
After: Novak, J. D., & D. B. Gowin. (1984). Learning how to learn.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
What learners
already know
Questions about the subjects of museum exhibits…
New concepts
and dialog added
to museum

8. Tools To Facilitate Learning
• A framework that
federates many ways of
interacting
– Based on Topic Maps,
Wiki-like structures, and
Web 2.0-like tools
• Tagging/Annotating
• Dialog mapping
• Storytelling

9. Tagging
• People create bookmarks of web pages
(Subjects) with Tags
– Tags identify those bookmarks
• Reminders
• People create new Tags or use Tags
made by others
User: sue23 Tag: WebSearch
URL: http://www.google.com/

10. Annotation
• Like Tagging, except…
– User places typed link between two web
pages (subjects)
– e.g “A argues against X”
User: sue23
TypedLink: Argues Against
URL: http://.../abc URL: http://.../xyz

11. Dialog Mapping

12. Storytelling
“…stories are a powerful means to
understand what happened (the
sequence of events) and why (the
causes and effects of those
events)” – John Seeley Brown in
The Social Life of Information

13. What We Are Doing Now

14. Periodic Table Metaphor 1
Empty cells
predicted
elements to be
discovered

15. Periodic Table Metaphor 2
Bay Area
Science
Collaboratory
Empty cells
suggest
missing
information

16. The Opportunity Restated
• We see the opportunity to create a
platform for learning, creativity, and
problem solving from existing open source
resources
– Combinations of
• Subject Map-based federation framework
• Web 2.0/3.0 user interface applications
– Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, …
• 3-D user environments
– SecondLife