• for: social tipping point - tools, cascade institute, Boolean Causal Loop Analysis, BCLA, Cross-impact balance, CIB, socio-cognitive mapping, cognitive-affective mapping, ideological state-space

https://factr.com/

A social network for "organizing and sharing your knowledge".

https://www.pearltrees.com/

bookmark tool in the vein of pinboard, pinterest, etc.

Autogenerate ALT descriptions from images

https://glasp.co/home

Glasp is a startup competitor in the annotations space that appears to be a subsidiary web-based tool and response to a large portion of the recent spate of note taking applications.

Some of the first users and suggested users are names I recognize from this tools for thought space.

On first blush it looks like it's got a lot of the same features and functionality as Hypothes.is, but it also appears to have some slicker surfaces and user interface as well as a much larger emphasis on the social aspects (followers/following) and gamification (graphs for how many annotations you make, how often you annotate, streaks, etc.).

It could be an interesting experiment to watch the space and see how quickly it both scales as well as potentially reverts to the mean in terms of content and conversation given these differences. Does it become a toxic space via curation of the social features or does it become a toxic intellectual wasteland when it reaches larger scales?

What will happen to one's data (it does appear to be a silo) when the company eventually closes/shuts down/acquihired/other?

The team behind it is obviously aware of Hypothes.is as one of the first annotations presented to me is an annotation by Kei, a cofounder and PM at the company, on the Hypothes.is blog at: https://web.hypothes.is/blog/a-letter-to-marc-andreessen-and-rap-genius/

But this is true for Glasp. Science researchers/writers use it a lot on our service, too.—Kei

cc: @dwhly @jeremydean @remikalir

https://glasp.co/

Glasp is a recent entrant to the social web highlighting and note taking space.

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

great quote

How can social annotation practices take advantage of these sorts of active learning processes? What might be done in a flipped classroom setting to get students to use social annotation on a text prior to a lecture and have the questions and ideas from these sessions brought into the lecture space for discussion, argument, and expansion?

In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.

This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

https://nowcomment.com/

In a category of tool like Hypothes.is. Worth checking out for UI and functionality.

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

Lean Canvas

For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

This looks like a bookmarking service that is billing itself as a digital commonplace book. I'm not sure about the digital ownership aspect, but it does have a relatively pretty UI.

Looks like it works via a Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/commonplaces-your-digital/ckiapimepnnpdnoehhmghgpmiondhbof

The easy way to manage scientific publications and bookmarks

BibSonomy helps you to manage your publications and bookmarks, to collaborate with your colleagues and to find new interesting material for your research.

Evernote's UI/UX is top shelf; slick, elegant; but, is it extensible? Does it bring the X in XMPP?

For example: An empty button could be added to the pop-up. A module that can be customized to inject approved widgets...such as chat/IM, or just a Home button keyed to the school's website.

I once bought a game add-on ($2-3) that came with an extensible button by default. That was a million dollar seller, if memory serves. (See mystical cookie).

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in re-setting my mental clock – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 14:58:05</time>)</cite></small>

Account started on 2021-05-12 at 11:37 PM

A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

Wait? What!? I've been wanting to be able to follow users annotations and I'd love the ability to monitor site annotations!! (I've even suggested that they added Webmention before to do direct notifications for site annotations.)

Where have you seen these things hiding Tom?

Vasiliauskaite, V., & Rosas, F. E. (2020). Understanding complexity via network theory: A gentle introduction. ArXiv:2004.14845 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14845

This webpage, under the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) .gov site, provides an extensive list of technology resources that can be and have been implemented into a variety of employee deveolpment programs. These tools allow for more personalized learning, active participation, collaboration, and communication.In the first section of the site, examples of Web 2.0 tools are listed that can promote collaboration and constructive learning. You can also find technologies that are used in specific sectors, such as the Federal Government and the Private Sector. Clicking on the links redirects you to additional resources on the tech tools, including how to use them effectively and professionally for employee training. Rating 10/10

Hodson relates specific examples of effective technology integration in her classrooms. Although she acknowledges the apprehension both instructors and learners feel, she argues that the benefits outweigh them.

7/10

This presumes that status is the only reason why people would join such a network. It also underlines the fact that the platform needs to be easy and simple to use, otherwise no one enters it and uses it as the tool first before the network exists.

In this passage, the author is claiming that with transhumanism and the growing appeal of technology as tools to advance or "extend" the human body, it can blur the lines between what is considered human and what is considered technology. For example, the author previously mentions social media and cell phone use in today's world. In today's society, using smartphones has become second nature. The author is implying that in the near future tools and technology such as anabolic steroids, laser surgery, advanced prosthetic limbs, etc can also become as prominent to humans as cellphones/social media is now.