when I finally sit down to write a chapter, I’m just building bridges between those islands, and not venturing out into an empty, uncharted sea.

What has become distinctive now is the extreme rapidity of searching one’s own marginalia, as well the ability to see how others read.

By now it should be clear that dialogue mapping is a technique that promotes collaboration

indicates how they might connect up with the rest of the discussion – but connection is neither required nor always desirable.

Conklin refers to the last move – challenging the context of a discussion – as “grenade throwing.”

Once on the map, it is no longer associated with any person – it is objectified as an element of the larger discussion.

In an organisation, these moves have a certain stigma attached to them: anyone making arguments for or against an idea might be seen as being opinionated or egotistical.

Challenging the context of the entire discussion.

Conklin identifies seven types of questions:

A side benefit of interrruption is that it slows downs the dialogue.

Conklin emphasises that it is OK to do so as long as it is done in the service of listening. Another important point is that when capturing a point made by someone, the technographer will need to summarise or interpret the point. The interpretation must be checked with the speaker.  Hence validation – and the  interruption it may entail – is not just OK, it is absolutely essential.

guess at the intended meaning

n real-time, on a shared display which  is  visible to all participants.

skilled facilitator

the man who coined the term wicked problem.

(Issue Based Information System)

fragmentation

the traditional, process driven world is partially  blind to the non-technical aspects of complexity.

how would our education system change to take advantage of this new external symbol-manipulation capability of students and teachers (and administrators)?

assess

a quick and rough scaffolding than a carefully engineered structure

we would recommend turning loose a group of four to six people (or a number of such groups) to develop means that augment their own programming capability

industrial engineering (e.g., motion and time study)

and later it is easy to merge their contributions

data

There are, of course, the explicit computer processes which we use, and which our philosophy requires the augmented man to be able to design and build for himself.

He maintained that about ten percent of the little steps we took all day accounted for ninety percent of the progress toward the goals we claimed to pursue -- that is, that ninety percent of our actions and thoughts were coupled to our net progress in only a very feeble way.

From what we've been through so far, you might expect it to be like that. What I did, though, was to treat the matter as a process that I was going to execute the process of giving you a lecture demonstration.

perhaps you know about 'teaching machines?'

If he is interested in only one type of appended substructure, he can request that only the cues associated with that type be displayed.

It is a lot like using zones of variable magnification as you scan the structure

Joe picked out one of your sentences, and pushed the rest of the text a few lines up and down from it to isolate it.

So far the structure that you have built with your symbols looks just like what you might build with pencil-and-paper techniques

You are quite elated by this freedom to juggle the record of your thoughts

He's a nice enough guy, but he sure gets preachy.

I want you to notice first how hard it is for a person to realize how really unquestioning he is about the way he does things.

3. Single-Frame Manipulation

only here the proofreader is always looking at clean text as if it had been instantaneously retyped after each designation had been made.

The text would all still look as neat as if freshly retyped.

Joe could reinstate it instantaneously with one stroke of his left hand.

light pen

He claimed that he could comfortably rattle off about 180 words a minute -- faster than he could comfortably talk.

Some of these signals were used as abbreviations for entire words. It seems that, for instance, the 150 most commonly used words in a natural language made up about half of any normal text in that language.

At any later time (until he chose to discard that particular abbreviation from his working vocabulary) the typing of the abbreviation term would call forth automatically the "printing" on the display of the entire object string.

Synonyms or antonyms could just as easily be brought forth. This also seemed sort of trivially obvious, and Joe seemed to know that you would feel so. "It turns out that this simple capability makes it feasible to do some pretty rough tasks in the upper levels of the capability hierarchy -- where precise use of special terms really pays off, where the human just couldn't be that precise by depending upon his unaided memory for definitions and 'standards,' and where using dictionary and reference-book lookup in the normal fashion would be so distracting and time-consuming that the task execution would break down.

that is, assemble a bunch of symbols before your eyes in order to portray something which you have in mind.

1. Background

(human scale of large and simple)

It is plain that even if the equipment (artifacts) appeared on the market tomorrow, a good deal of empirical research would be needed to develop a methodology that would capitalize upon the artifact process capabilities.

the value of some sort of copying device

Right off the bat I noticed that there were two distinct groups -- some ideas were about what the memo ought to accomplish, what time period it should cover, when it should be finished, what level and style of presentation should be used, etc., and some ideas were about the subject of the memo.

It's not unreasonable to assume that establishing a link would take about three seconds, and tracing a link to the next card about three to five seconds.

needle sorting

An Existing Note and File System

An example of this general sort of thing was given by Bush where he points out that the file index can be called to view at the push of a button, which implicitly provides greater capability to work within more sophisticated and complex indexing systems

in a way that makes them maximally available and useful to the needs of the human's mental-structure development

His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

numerous

of a desk

at random

and something is bound to come of it.

Anything that might have so general an effect upon our mental actions as is implied here, is certainly a candidate for ultimate consideration in the continuing development of our intellectual effectiveness.

Existing means of composing and working with symbol structures penalize disorderly processes very heavily, and it is part of the real promise in the automated H-LAM/T systems of tomorrow that the human can have the freedom and power of disorderly processes.

Also, the kind of generous flexibility that would be truly helpful calls for added symbol structuring just to keep track of the trials, branches, and reasoning thereto that are involved in the development of the subject structure; our present symbol-manipulation means would very soon bog down completely among the complexities that are involved in being more than just a little bit flexible.

and by indirect imitation.

If by some magical process the production workers could still know just what to do and when to do it even though the superstructure of contractors was removed from above them, no one would know the difference.

This situation is typical for any of us engaged in reasonably demanding types of professional pursuits, and yet we have never received explicit training in optimum ways of carrying out any but a very few of the roles at a very few of the levels.

At a still higher level of capability, the executive capabilities must have a degree of power that unaided mental capabilities cannot provide. In such a case, one might make a list of steps and check each item off as it is executed.

enables

insofar as their actual physical construction is concerned.

toward a certain over-all professional goal

Essentially everything that goes on within the H-LAM/T system and that is of direct interest here involves the manipulation of concept and symbol structures in service to the mental structure.

interna1

What the computer actually stores need be none of our concern

if the concept is given an explicit "handle" in the form of a representative symbol.

we see the near-future course of the research toward augmenting the human's intellect as depending entirely upon empirical findings (past and future) for the development of better means to serve the development and use of mental structuring in the human.

(a) development of a garden

at that time

We feel reasonably safe in assuming that learning involves some kind of meaningful organization within the brain, and that whatever is so organized or structured represents the operating model of the individual's universe to the mental mechanisms that derive his behavior.

(or whatever it is that is organized within the human mind)

"symbol structuring"

of the basic physical processes

hierarchical

or the use of special drugs.

Many of the branching paths in the decomposition of a given higher-order capability will terminate in the same basic capability, since a given basic capability will often be used within many different higher-order capabilities.

As you proceed down through the hierarchy, you will begin to encounter capabilities that cannot be usefully changed, and these will make up your inventory of basic capabilities.

capability

and a thorough job of redesigning the system calls for making an inventory of the basic capabilities available.

Also, the effort in doing calculations and writing down extensive and carefully reasoned argument would dampen individual experimentation with sophisticated new concepts,

in an environment where the combination of artifact materials and muscle strengths were so scaled that the neatest scribing tool (equivalent to a pencil, possible had a shape and mass as manageable as a brick

If we want to hurry the writing, we have to make it larger.

Actually, it turned out to be simpler to invert the problem and consider a change that would reduce our capability for external symbol manipulation.

The direct effect of the external-symbol-manipulation means upon language would produce an indirect effect upon the way of thinking via the Whorfian-hypothesis linkage.

Under such evolutionary conditions, it would seem unlikely that the language we now use provides the best possible service to our minds in pursuing comprehension and solving problems.

If this is true, and if language is (as it seems to be) a part of a self organizing system, then it seems probable that the state of a language at a given time strongly affects its own evolution to a succeeding state.

lower

It is upon their capabilities that the ultimate capability of the system will depend.

Two-Domain System

native

This term seems directly applicable here, where we could say that synergism is our most likely candidate for representing the actual source of intelligence.

derived ultimately from the characteristics of individual nerve cells

Many of the external composing and manipulating (modifying, rearranging) processes serve such characteristically "human" activities as playing with forms and relationships to ask what develops, cut- and-try multiple-pass development of an idea, or listing items to reflect on and then rearranging and extending them as thoughts develop.

To redesign a structure, we must learn as much as we can of what is known about the basic materials and components as they are utilized within the structure

The realization that any potential change in language, artifact, or methodology has importance only relative to its use within a process' and that a new process capability appearing anywhere within that hierarchy can make practical a new consideration of latent change possibilities in many other parts of the hierarchy -- possibilities in either language, artifacts, or methodology -- brings out the strong interrelationship of these three augmentation means.

throughout the entire capability hierarchy (calling for a system approach).

If it is a complex memo

what we call the executive capability.

a free outpouring of thoughts

For instance, trial drafts could rapidly be composed from re-arranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which you stop to type in.

The memo-writing process may be executed by using a set of process capabilities (in intermixed or repetitive form) such as the following planning, developing subject matter, composing text, producing hard copy, and distributing.

integument

within

No person uses a process that is completely unique every time he tackles something new.

Although every sub-process is a process in its own right

Every process of thought or action is made up of sub-processes.

It is the augmentation means that serve to break down a large problem in such a way that the human being can walk through it with his little steps, and it is the structure or organization of these little steps or actions that we discuss as process hierarchies.

In other words, the human mind neither learns nor acts by large leaps, but by steps organized or structured so that each one depends upon previous steps.

The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices.

for human comfort

and moving the whole structure about five feet,

one of its important precepts is to pursue the quickest gains first,

one of its important precepts is to pursue the quickest gains first, and use the increased intellectual effectiveness thus derived to help pursue successive gains.

If Section II begins to seem unrewardingly difficult, the reader may find it helpful to skip from Section II-B directly to Section III.

that compare to those made in personal geographic mobility since horseback and sailboat days.

In the first (search) phase of our program we have developed a conceptual framework that seems satisfactory for the current needs of designing a research phase.

like most systems its performance can best be improved by considering the whole as a set of interacting components rather than by considering the components in isolation.

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations.

Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.

In so far as feasibility is concerned, speech production poses less severe problems of a technical nature than does automatic recognition of speech sounds.

In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type.

Computer-Posted Wall Display

Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.

It is clear that, working within the loose constraints of predetermined strategies, computers will in due course be able to devise and simplify their own procedures for achieving stated goals.

Men appear to think more naturally and easily in terms of goals than in terms of courses.

By examining the storage at a given level, one can determine what thus-far similar items have been stored.

The trie memory scheme is inefficient for small memories, but it becomes increasingly efficient in using available storage space as memory size increases.

5.3 Memory Organization Requirements

trie memory

Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern

part indelible memory and part published memory.

Published memory will be "read-only" memory.

but it will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.

or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants

SAGE System

It seems likely that the contributions of human operators and equipment will blend together so completely in many operations that it will be difficult to separate them neatly in analysis.

I could find nothing comparable to a time-and-motion-study analysis of the mental work of a person engaged in a scientific or technical enterprise.

At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses.

Bloggers can bundle, but making Tweets look like Tweets is actually pretty difficult for normal people and even for geeks like me.

Now, how does that mother build an online scrapbook of all the items that were poured into the system?

1. Search would INSTANTLY improve. (I need a whole blog post on why this is so).

Imagine I was talking about a real time event. The news is already 30 minutes old. We need a new system for real-time curation of what’s happening on my Twitter stream.

Seth Godin doesn’t have comments on his blog.

Of course, once you update you need to redistribute.

Blogs are pretty bad at this. If I come back in two hours and update this post you probably won’t see the update. In fact, not only can I update this post, but everyone who leaves a comment underneath is really updating it too.

If you give me #7 without giving me #1 first your tool will suck and you won’t be used by curators.

Real-time

Real-time curators need to bundle.

Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation.

by avoiding to work under tight time constraints and quantity-driven production goals.

Attention to details empowers the curator to appreciate first and before others the traits and patterns of outstanding work.

order

concept mapping

Can we self-organize our research, discover, summarize, and prioritize what is known through theory and practice, then propose, argue, and share a tentative resource guide for peeragogical groups?

my third step was to elevate students to the status of co-learner

we discovered that four students work better than six for a semester-long project

to take more responsibility

The more I give my teacher-power to students

without necessarily visiting the site where you publish.

flood

Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.

As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void.

exchange

anytime and anywhere.

As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value.

There are many ways of making knowledge explicit.

Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public.

phonetic signs, introduced to transcribe the name of individuals, marked the turning point when writing started emulating spoken language

Writing was used exclusively for accounting until the third millennium BC, when the Sumerian concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions

lay audiences

One of the most important events in the shaping of early print culture was the successful rebellion of the Netherlands. In their small, semi-autonomous provinces, numerous printing presses sprang up that operated relatively free of censorship, and provided an outlet for authors, even within areas held by the Counter-Reformation.

Studies of Renaissance and early European print culture generally remain unrelated to work on the Enlightenment tradition and eighteenth-century thought.

she remained dissatisfied with the continuing split between the history of ideas and the history of book publication.

business

allowed

Laying inherited scientific works side by side for the first time also pointed up discrepancies and contradictions. At the same time, the new ability to convey maps, charts, and pictures in a uniform and permanent way meant that older theories in cartography, astronomy, anatomy, and botany could be checked against new observations.

it was possible for manuscript readers to imagine that the past minds of antiquity had possessed a much more complete understanding of the world, which had been fragmented and degraded over time.

scattered and incomplete

the most important feature was not that the literature was new, but rather than readers for the first time could see multiple texts together and compare them.

She also emphasizes her belief that historians have underestimated the role of the printing press

cooperating in a new, more cosmopolitan environment

The passage of time no longer inevitably brought with it a lessening of knowledge.

reversed

could now focus their efforts on revision

tremendous difficulties in preserving the knowledge

fundamentally changed the mentality of early modern readers