Earlier
this week I wrote about wikis as a potential tableau of the human mind,
navigated by auto-generated mind-maps. I've been thinking more about
this, and specifically more about the fundamental unit of wikis (and
the Internet as a whole): the page.
It
seems to me that, rather than the unfathomable Windows nested-folder
'content management system' of our hard drives, a wiki-and-mind-map
tableau of the My Documents and My Messages and My Links folders on
your hard drive as a surrogate for 'everything you know that you can
write down' would need to unfold
as a huge tableau of pages. The mind map navigator would become what
its name suggests -- a map of this huge tableau, this 'virtual
visitable place'.
This
idea of the MyDocs + MyMessages + My Links part of your hard drive as
'everything you know that you can write down' (hereinafter referred to
as EYK-TYCWD, pronounced eck-ti-quid) is important. As Dave Snowden is fond
of saying, we know more than we can say, and we can say more than we
can write down. So this codified, explicit stuff we keep on our hard
drives is not EYK. But it's an important subset, and the best that KM or at least PKM can hope to offer us.
Some
of us write down a lot more than others, for a variety of reasons. Some
people are inclined to write down only what's useful in their 'work'
identities, formalizing their personal/business life split. Some people
don't think much of their own thinking, so most of what they write down
is links to the writings of, or syntheses of, or addresses of, the
people whose thinking they like, the others who 'speak for them', at
least in the written world. Some of us just don't spend much time in or
see a lot of value in the written world at all -- those who prefer oral
or non-verbal communications. So while a wiki tableau of one person's
EYK-TYCWD might be dense, a goldmine of useful and context-rich
knowledge to discover and explore, another person's might be very
fragmentary, or even non-existent. But, we work with what we can get,
and maybe EYK-TYCWD is good enough.
Our short and long-term
memories have different kinds of 'stuff' in them, and this naturally
translates to any tableau of our EYK-TYCWD. In the diagram above I'm
postulating that the most useful parts of our EYK-TYCWD are of three
main types:
- Stuff on subjects of significant personal
interest or expertise: This is the stuff we've thought about the most,
usually over an extended period. We mentally organize this stuff, I
think, by subject, though what each of us calls each of these subject
depends on our mental frames, where our interest or expertise came from
and how deep it is.
- Stuff on projects and events and
experiences relevant to us: This is stuff that is more transient in
nature, which we tend to organize more on a calendar or time basis.
Once the project is over or the event has passed, some of its memories
may make their way into the more permanent 'subject'-organized stuff,
but a lot of it will be forgotten.
- Stuff in messages,
conversations, threads and stories we have originated or participated
in. This stuff is the most transient of all, but, along with events and
experiences, it is the stuff that is most likely to 'change our minds',
to cause us to change what we think and believe or reorganize it
according to a different point of view. If the story is memorable
enough it can pass into our more permanent subject-organized stuff
(arguably it then becomes myth).
Could we design an algorithm
that could parse the EYK-TYCWD on our hard drives into these three
types of knowledge and create a map showing the topography and taxonomy
and landscape of our personal knowledge, values and beliefs, and the
connections between this content? We might need a concept map rather
than a mind map to do this, since concept maps are better at showing
circular and n-to-n connections than the tree-structured mind maps.
Might this algorithm even illuminate us, and help us organize our own
thinking better by showing us a picture of the connections we haven't
already formed with our synapses?
The common denominator of all the end-nodes of the mind map pictured above is that they are flat pages. What is a page,
anyway? It must resonate in some way with the layout of our brains,
since it is ubiquitous in all human cultures. Studies suggest people
are four times more likely to scroll down through a document (even a
long one) embedded in a page of a message than to open the same content
in an attachment. Books and notebooks, still the principal means by
which we store our EYK-TYCWD, are made up of pages.
But
perhaps pages are used more because of limitation of the technology of
storing written information -- the unfolded paper page and the
unscrolled video screen. It is kind of annoying to have to 'scroll
down' to read a whole article or see a whole graphic, or to have to
keep turning pages instead of being able to simply scan the whole and
jump ahead when our mind is racing faster than we can read linear
material. It's even more annoying when someone has to keep flipping
back and forth through the page-like slides of a presentation deck.
PowerPoint uses a 'layout' display to give you a larger picture, and
Flickr and Google Picasa provide similar tableau displays. 'Single
frame' business presentations that show a multitude of images and
slides connected together in a single, wall-size tableau have proven
very effective in conveying complicated and even complex ideas and
proposals. With all these tools it is as if we are trying to escape the limitations of the page.
Perhaps we need a Google Earth type scrolling, panning and zooming tool
to navigate the entire tableau of a map, or of our EYK-TYCWD, though
even this tool takes some getting used to -- it is somehow not
intuitive unless, perhaps, you've been raised on flight simulator video
games.
With the Web, the page has come to mean more a set of
related ideas or concepts than merely the capacity of words that will
fit on a page linearly. But as a tableau it is still lacking -- we
still cannot 'take in' at a glance much more on a Web page than we can
on a paper page (less, in fact, if the paper page is expansive). And it
is still distressingly easy to get lost in a set of pages as we try to
follow a thought from one to another, and then try to navigate our way
back.
Is the idea of the uninterrupted page of text losing out
in a world of on-screen reading, inexpensive graphics, scrollable
screens, learning by doing (and by gaming) and right-brain thinking?
Rather than a left 'pane' to navigate among pages, does it make more
sense to have an entire 'site' or 'document' or 'book' on a single,
huge, tableau 'page' that you would start by viewing at a high,
mind-map Google Earth level, seeing the high-level structure of the
entire site/ document/ book, and the connections between its
constituent parts, and then zooming in wherever (the site or document or book becomes a place) and to whatever level of detail you wanted.
And
perhaps you could even take this construct to a meta-level, where
volunteers (like the ones who maintain wikipedia) could construct
complete 'landscapes' of related 'places' -- an entire slice of
knowledge -- everything (of quality, as determined by the 'tourist
guide'), regardless of author, written about a subject or a project
or an event or a conversation or a message or a meme, from 30,000 feet,
with the links between the (site) 'pages' visible from that height. So
if you wanted to explore (the 'place' called) Personal Knowledge
Management, for example, instead of having to wade through and trust
Google's highest-ranking links, you might select David Gurteen's
tourist guidemap of the subject, take it all in at a high level, and
then
zoom in on the parts that seemed most interesting, or useful, or in
need of elaboration or clarification, to you personally, the stuff from
others' EYK-TYCWD that best complemented (or supplemented) your own
EYK-TYCWD on the subject. And if you engaged that landscape, 'stayed
awhile', you might find David Gurteen added your constructions to his
landscape, to his travel guide, after you'd departed.
Where would you like to go today? |
7:37:38 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
