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Waves made by sound. Fox tracks. Events in the natural world create patterns, specific and literal. The designer works to distill meaning from events in the life of the mind. A trail of symbols and systems forms in the wake of her work. Examine first the imprint of the fox’s running foot, the coarse displacement of the snow. Then the eye encounters the structure of the individual flakes of snow, the blue shadows, the scintillating light. Design evokes the radiance of meanings in which it participates.
What is the meaning of color? Of a point, a line, or a plane? Of a vortex, a fractal, any sort of radial pattern? With no evidence other than the personal and anecdotal, I believe the human race is increasingly thinking in visual ways, and that persons of the highest visual evolution are increasingly able to recognize and describe common design patterns. We’ve seen this happen in many disciplines over the past few decades: art, architecture, urban planning, and programming being a few. Of course no one can argue that we daily absorb and act on great richness of visual information.
As human beings, we are naturally language makers. It makes sense that as we are beginning to communicate in a more global way, and that we are developing a language to do so. This language consists of universals, whether arbitrary or natural, of structure and form, which when completed will provide a vehicle for communicating and manipulating meaning. That this language is primarily visual also makes sense, for it derives from visual experience.
The syntax of visual language, when worked out, will be as deceptively simple as the rules which govern the flight of birds, or the workings of our dopamine cells which, it is theorized, increase or decrease their firing rates in response to errors in predictions about the world around us, predictions based on metaphorical information input to the brain: sensory input and memories of sensory states.
Yet because the radial reciprocity of the code is so complex, we haven’t yet drilled down to the matrix of energy states which underly visual phenomenon. Art and psychology, physics and metaphysics all have their theories; what we’re lacking is a Unified Field Theory of graphical/textual communication.
- What are the agents in a social learning network?
- What are the roles played by these agents?
- What are the interaction types they engage in?
- What are some structures of interaction?
- What design elements make the community palpable?
- What welcomes the newcomer?
- What sustains engagement?
- How can we measure engagement? Shared meaning? Cognitive play?
- What difference does it make when interactions are perceived as coming from peers, from authorities, or from the user interface itself?
- What makes a kid play with the same toy over and over again?
Or, here’s another way to phrase it:
- What is the structure of interactions between agents which result in ongoing engagement of the learners, the growing of shared meanings and playing with shared cognitive artifacts?
Interactions can be defined as the micro-events that occur between autonomous agents in processes that eventually result in a healthy agents and a healthy network. On the most basic level of life, autonomous organisms solve problems of encounters with the environment through mechanisms such as a selectively permeable membrane, a group of energy currencies such as those used for transport processes across a membrane, a set of catalysts responsible for modulating the rates at which reactions to the environment take place and mechanisms for stabilizing metabolism. More advanced adaptive interactions include motility, multicellular organization, and sensorimotor systems, leading to the development of the mind as a neurosomatic activity which establishes a sense of self in the environment.
Motility is the baseline for the appearance of cognition; in collaborative learning we should expect to see that a knowledge flow which is open and free is the baseline for the appearance of Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon. Online interactions are like non-terminating data processing algorithms, in that they are defined lists of instructions for completing tasks, but the length of the process cannot be determined in advance. If they are well designed, they extend our adaptive interactions in ways that allow us to move, use our senses to touch one another, and organize ourselves into complex systems.
It’s that kind of complex organization that provides a venue for self-realization. As our systems become more complex, they give us the opportunity for increasing individuation.
As de Chardin has said, “union differentiates.”
I really resonated to Johnny Holland magazine’s summary of Ben Fullerton’s talk, Designing for Solitude, at Interaction 10, which ended yesterday. The summary was written by Niklas Wolkert & Brad Nunnally.
“In the past, the devices we used in our everyday life only had a single mode to them. Products of the present are becoming more and more multi modal, providing more unique types of interaction all at the same time. To combat this certain products are going back to this single mode of interaction . . . Allowing yourself to get away from everything, or disconnect, is Ben’s big call to action. There is nothing wrong with BEING connected, just allow yourself the freedom to disconnect too.” Read more
Right now I’m working on a portal for knowledge management for our Orbitz Worldwide Agile process. I have been searching for the best ways of slicing and dicing learning interactions, which of course can be named, ranked and classified in many ways.
Teemu Arina
I am exploring a taxonomy developed by Teemu Arina, who divides socially networked learning interactions into two types, horizontal and vertical:
- horizontal interactions includes:
- peer production
- sharing narratives
- cooperative problem solving
- social navigation
- social networking
- vertical interactions include:
- help desk
- support
- training
- intranet
- documentation
- best practices database
In our Agile environment, we have plenty of horizontal interactions of the nature of peer production, sharing of narratives and cooperative problem solving, although the software tools we use for these interactions can be a little wonky. However there is not much social navigation or social networking. I hope that our upcoming wiki upgrade will encourage Twitter- and Facebook-like interactions, as well as blogging.
It’s the vertical interactions where I am focusing my energy right now, to formalize some of these, see how they can fit into the tools and systems we have, or if we need to provide new tools and systems, and provide navigation structures that help people with these vertical interactions.
By the way, Teemu Arina is a fascinating Finnish speaker, writer and entrepreneur, who focuses on the future of social technologies in management, knowledge work and learning.
You’re itching to draw a Conceptual Graph Structure.
But perhaps you just haven’t memorized the six nodes and 18 arcs and their legal combinations.
Maybe you just don’t want to!
Relax. Just download this Conceptual Graph Structure Visio stencil developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
You’ll be making CGS diagrams of goal heirarchies, causal networks, taxonomies and spatial relationships in a jiffy!
Previous posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures:
http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/28/conceptual-graph-structures-part-2/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer. The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
Hand-drawn Conceptual Graph Structure by Scott Confer
The Secret Sauce
In past posts, I have outlined the components of the type of mental model called Conceptual Graph Structures. There are six kinds of nodes, connected by 18 types of arcs, which indicate semantic relationships between the nodes. I have talked about the basic CGS substructures: taxonomies, goal heirarchies, causal networks, and spatial relationships. I have given you cheat sheets for the “legal combinations” of nodes and arcs for each substructure type.
But let’s say you are on a new project of some kind or another, and all you have to work from is your rough notes from a kickoff meeting, and an sketchy set of project requirements which your project manager dashed off last night between dinner, and his 9 pm appointment to read The Phantom Tollbooth to the kids before bed.
So where do you start?
Take your rough notes and the requirements document and lay them out on the dining room table. Read them both through once, identifying key pieces of information:
- who are the learners, or people who are going to use your work?
- who are the actors (the people who are going to do the work on this project)?
- what is the context?
- what transformation is needed?
- can you pick out any taxonomies (like a navigation system, or a group of roles, for example)?
- does a goal or two jump out at you?
- can you see any cause and effect relationships?
- are there any spatial relationships described?
Now you’ll need a big, clean piece of paper and a pencil. Sentence by sentence, identify nodes (concepts, states, styles, events, goals, and goal-actions) and how they could be connected, using any of the 18 types of arcs. Draw these nodes and arcs on the piece of paper. You’ll wind up with something that looks sort of like the drawing above.
My colleague Scott Confer (who drew the CGS above) calls this method the “secret sauce” of making Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS). It’s a great way to kick-start an Agile project.
Other posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures
http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/28/conceptual-graph-structures-part-2/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/04/conceptual-graph-structures-visio-stencil-download/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
