Cut-and-try process sounds so much less technical than copy/paste. It sounds friendly like mistakes and learning are allowed, and like curiosity and making art. I know everybody loves it, when they first find out about copy/paste, but I wonder if such a little change in language could shift perception from just being able to rearrange and fix mistakes to what I think Engelbart might have intended here: people becoming aware of the process of their own thinking as a form of sculpting. It might unconsciously relax a lot of people who feel anxiety about expressing themselves?

That's funny, because would't that mean to also think in these abbreviations? Because I usually even if I don't say them aloud "voice" my thoughts at least inside my head. Not sure I am that much of a fan of speed and efficiency to give up wanting to think in words and sentences.

"A typical shorthand system provides symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, which can allow someone well-trained in the system to write as quickly as people speak." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

The other thing is even with today's voice capture and dictation systems ( if they work without hiccups) still, isn't the essential part that makes anything worth reading afterwards the pretty slow procedure of editing? I guess I don't think the real challenge with augmenting human intellect is speed.

the entire scaffolding... Like being able to look inside their brains and how it works. I know that for me the greatest teachers have always been the ones, who were able to explain to me how they think. The ones who not only told me why they reached their conclusions, but how they got there. I'd love this.

Wouldn’t that be grand!
 Finally an attractive job description for people, who are great at following and gathering information and by linking it, creating new knowledge. Even though they might not be able to summarise this new found knowledge in their own words?


But unlike curators today, they could be freed of having to meet a popular taste.
The more obscure and unknown the trails, the better.
 Trails that could be used by others to make them their own. 


Don’t know if anyone will get this detour:
 But do you remember Soulseek? It used to be a network to share music. Yes, it probably wasn’t really legal. But it was awesome. You opened up the folder with your music collection on your computer to others, who likewise granted access to theirs. I absolutely loved it.
 Never again did I have access to such wealth of interesting new music, because what you get was truly individual taste. I used to search for not well known artist I loved, and then in the libaries of others, who loved this artist too, I found more likewise obscure but beautiful music. 
It was fantastic.


Trust me, Spotify is not the same.

(Just checked, Soulseek still exists. But they updated their terms quite a bit..or... I never read them before. Everybody I knew was using it like I described. I think I might have stopped using it after moving back to Germany from Argentina years ago, where copyright wasn't such a big deal. One of the reasons, I am sure, it was Argentina, where I learned what amazing things the web could be used for.)


I love the image of trails. 


When I research a topic on the web, I often feel like an adventurer exploring a wilderness of articles and pages as I keep on “walking” and finding my way.

And oh, how I wish I had a memex!

A memex to keep track of all the treasures I find and to build a map of what I would like to remember and to be able to find again.

I’ve tried what seems like everything. I used bookmarks and all kinds of tools to organize bookmarks. I even had a blog for years, where I used to post everything that seemed worth keeping. Adding my thoughts, or just to save it, because I knew it would be helpful with something else, some other time. But I lost so many things.

My mind definitely works by association. Often I remember something suddenly, a connection that for others might seem to not even fit the topic. I would love to find the link, I know I saw somewhere. Find it for myself, because my brain, just told me, it wants to enter that thought trail. But besides, often, because I would like to make this ‘LINK’ understandable to others too, and I might not remember or be able to express, what exactly excites me about it. Other sometimes it’s just that this link contained facts I would need to make my point in an argument.


But while my mind loves to associate and making links, it is not good at all at remembering names. So the search box often is of no help. And even searching on that long gone blog (or Evernote today) stops being all too useful after one passed the number of a couple hundred posts. The reason is, I struggle with indexing and tagging in a useful way. Trails I keep in “notebooks” on Evernote but associations and linking trails, I guess, would have to be accessed trough a organized use of tags somehow.
 And I never figured out how to do that right.


But I believe if I had a memex and everything would be stored and never lost, I wouldn’t give up hope to find it. I’d keep digging because I know it’s there. And probably the memex could help me with the tagging too? Learning from how my brain works?


I get sad when I think how much time I spend trying to organize bookmarks and links in all those apps and tools that don’t even exist anymore. Or I remember giving up on MOOCs after learning that all the knowledge we students gathered in the forum of a course was deleted, with the argument given that new students would be able to cheat…


I get even sadder when I think, that all this trailing seems to be possible already, but all it is used for is surveillance and making money.

I wonder and doubt that school children, when they are introduced to word processors, often get invited to grasp and start exploring the possibilities of the capability expanding writing machine. 


I left school in Germany 1995 and till then had never written anything on a computer. But when I finally did, I still felt ashamed about my “messy” writing/thinking process. A process, which transformed from countless notes and rewrites of scratched out text on paper to having many digital documents open at the same time and copying and pasting like crazy. Not only my own writing but gathering text and ideas from others to help me with my own thoughts and how to express what I want to say.

At least in Germany, we still tell children that knowledge is worthless, if it’s not stored in your own head. We make them believe that the important part of using your intellect, is not about using knowledge and making new connections, but about “being original.” While, on the other hand, learning is represented as just being good at memorising facts. That’s why, till today, one of the biggest concerns is plagiarism. I was told that even without an assignment being an official test, kids still sometimes are prohibited to make use of wikipedia. This idea about knowledge is also reflected in that people often take it as a cue to dismiss your reasoning as unfounded, when (to back up an argument) you take out your phone to search for facts, you know about but can’t recollect.

(Of course in Germany young people are often seen as not being able to think for themselves at all - one example is the recent attack on Greta Thunberg and the #FridaysForFuture protesters by Angela Merkel, who insinuated them being marionettes controlled by “external influence” 
https://twitter.com/jdoeschner/status/1097089168365228032 ). 



This article argues that a digitalisation of German schools is too expensive, will only make children play games and chat during lessons and is therefore unnecessary… It’s from 2018.

“The claim that smartphones in the hands of children and adolescents are primarily instruments of the knowledge society is adventurous.” (*smart phones because since nobody wants to pay for computers in schools “the solution” proposed by the school minister of North Rhine Westphalia is that school children should bring their own devices)
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/digitalisierung-der-schule-grosser-unfug-15519960.html

We sadly seem to be extremely far away from even imagining collectively augmenting human intellect.

I wonder and doubt that school children, when they are introduced to word processors, often get invited to grasp and start exploring the possibilities of the capability expanding writing machine. 


I left school in Germany 1995 and till then had never written anything on a computer. But when I finally did, I still felt ashamed about my “messy” writing/thinking process. A process, which transformed from countless notes and rewrites of scratched out text on paper to having many digital documents open at the same time and copying and pasting like crazy. Not only my own writing but gathering text and ideas from others to help me with my own thoughts and how to express what I want to say.

At least in Germany, we still tell children that knowledge is worthless, if it’s not stored in your own head. We make them believe that the important part of using your intellect, is not about using knowledge and making new connections, but about “being original.” While, on the other hand, learning is represented as just being good at memorising facts. That’s why, till today, one of the biggest concerns is plagiarism. I was told that even without an assignment being an official test, kids still sometimes are prohibited to make use of wikipedia. This idea about knowledge is also reflected in that people often take it as a cue to dismiss your reasoning as unfounded, when (to back up an argument) you take out your phone to search for facts, you know about but can’t recollect.

(Of course in Germany young people are often seen as not being able to think for themselves at all - one example is the recent attack on Greta Thunberg and the #FridaysForFuture protesters by Angela Merkel, who insinuated them being marionettes controlled by “external influence” 
https://twitter.com/jdoeschner/status/1097089168365228032 ). 



This article argues that a digitalisation of German schools is too expensive, will only make children play games and chat during lessons and is therefore unnecessary… It’s from 2018.

“The claim that smartphones in the hands of children and adolescents are primarily instruments of the knowledge society is adventurous.” (*smart phones because since nobody wants to pay for computers in schools “the solution” proposed by the school minister of North Rhine Westphalia is that school children should bring their own devices)
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/digitalisierung-der-schule-grosser-unfug-15519960.html

We sadly seem to be extremely far away from even imagining collectively augmenting human intellect.