undesigned

Last night we listened to the hilarious Ze Frank. Amongst the laughs I gleaned a few principles which I think apply to things I care about.

• Playing with something is a better way to begin learning about it than to be told all about it.
• When people begin creating things they begin learning the language of design.
• It is OK that most of what people create is no good, at least they are learning the language of creation.
• The tools you create shape what they can and do create.

After returning from the hotel last night we sat and brainstormed about what we are and can create based on what we are doing. A lot of the discussion centered around defining the problem. Here are some possible problems:

• What are future educational scenarios and how can we help shape / facilitate them?
• How do you form successful online communities (ones that have lots of members who regularly contribute and gain value from the community)?

I woke up thinking about these questions.

Can we create a space where people can pose and solve problems?

Can we glean principles from Ze Frank, MySpace, and the MathForum’s problems of the week that could help make that space successful. Why do people like MySpace?

• (Power) They can create what they like
• (Show Me) They can show it to their friends
• (Feedback) People can comment on their pages

I’m personally interested in creating such a space and online community for math, science, and technology.

I envision a place where people can pose and solve problems using interactive models. Connect this to current news involving math and to the history of math discoveries. Provide tool sets that let people quickly create, play with, and adapt with interactive models. Provide podcasts that engage learners in problems, invite them to work on those problems, see how others work on those problems, and pose their own.

COSL’s interests are of course much broader than math, science, and technology. They are all topics. So what is generalizable to all topics. I think a space people can pose and solve problems. Here is an idea that came out of thinking about that general problem.

What if you had a catalog of every problem that you had ever worked on?

What if that catalog additionally included links to web resources you accessed when trying to solve it, and any notes you made about your efforts and potential solutions? What if you could share that catalog with your friends and with communities that cared about the same problems?

It seems like that would be valuable, but how would such a thing get created. What if you had an agent that monitored (and stored for your private use only) a record of all of all of your searching and browsing activity. The agent analyzes those activities and clusters them based on concerns. It allows you to annotate those clusters with tags, notes, and explanations so that they can be more useful to you and others. It organizes and ranks web resources based on how long you spent at those pages, how often you came back and so on. It lets you contribute those problems and answers to relevant communities. It recommends relevant web resources, communities and users.

Posted on May 19th, 2007 by joel
Filed under: problem solving