Address of a location in a boundary less world

If we are interested in a border less world, what kind of address we shall give to a friend who wants to visit? Or deliver a letter to someone?

Currently the postal departments all over the world use a very hierarchical way of locating a place.  First we name a country, then a state, district, town, street, building and if you live in an apartment, the flat number, and then of course person’s name. All this sounds very logical and politically correct.  But in a world where there are several possessed boundaries.  When such political boundaries do not exist, how would you locate yourself?

In the current modern techno-savvy world, we can simply use latitude and longitude of the place. Perfect! But the lat-long numbers are  difficult to remember.

If we link lat-long to a landmark, and if the landmark has a unique number, and if the landmark is not a political boundary, such as e.g. a tree that lives longer than most buildings and roads we build, we have a better system of locating ourselves.

For example, I can say that I work close to tree 355, live close to tree 400.  We can also give directions, e.g. turn right at tree 320, stop opposite tree 455.  Since there are many many trees the numbers will go on increasing, which may become difficult to remember.

We recently started a citizen science project to map the trees, map all the trees, in India. It is in this context that I realized that the platform that we have built assigning serial numbers to the trees and to the planting sites.  Then it occurred to me we can use these numbers as another way of giving address to ourselves and the sites we inhabit.

tree 51 at metaStudio

I meet visitors at my office and eat my lunch, drink tea/coffee at tree 51 of http://trees.metastudio.org/.

If you want to create such landmarks and try to grab a smaller easy to remember number for your address, join at http://trees.metaStudio.org/ and map your tree anywhere in India.  If you live in any other part of the world, please send us a request by naming the locality where you want to create a landmark tree, we will create a tree mapping site for you.

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metaStudio and loom

This is the third post on metaStudio featuring the special features of gnowsys-studio. 

This post features a space for creating an online threaded discussion forum.  There are a number of threaded discussion forums, and  this one adds to that family of web apps that facilitate communication among a group of people.  Here is a link to one of the threads Leviathan and the air pump, where we use this feature for running a small graduate course.

The loom of gnowsys-studio is designed to do the following things:

• Create a thread on a broad topic
• Under each thread create twists.  A twist is a discussion trigger, it can be question, it can be a sub-topic of the thread.  It can be anything about which you want to seek responses from the community. If you use it to understand a topic, clear doubt, ask for help or offer help etc.
• Under each twist, members can submit replies. 
• Each respondent can choose a color of their choice for the text as well as the background. This will help to recognize the person’s messages easily in a long discussion thread.
• The threads and twists can be classified using tags. Users can also rate them. The responses can be rates as well. The average score will be computed based on the ratings.

Thread’s description can be edited collaboratively.  twist can be edited, but messages once posted cannot be edited.  You can delete a message though. Whereever you can edit, the editor we provide is the same.  See the post on orgmode editor.

We have been using loom for discussions for undergraduate and graduate classes. The picture below gives you a glimpse of how a thread constructed in the loom looks like:

While sending the responses you can add a picture, use hyperlinks, write mathematical equations, embed a video, SVG images, animation etc.  Therefore, it can used for a very rich technical dialogue in a community as well. 

We will be extending the loom architecture for comprehensive continuous assessment

 

 

metaStudio for semantic networks and concept maps

This is the second post on metaStudio featuring the special features of gnowsys-studio.

The site allows collaborative construction of semantic networks between the wiki pages.  Users can define and use the relations between pages.  The graph produced is published in SVG which allows navigation of the graph by mouse click.  When Control + Click is used the graph reloads on the same page showing the additional nodes in the neighbourhood of the selected node. This way, a merged graph can be created.   Explore more pages at the site.

 

metaStudio, Emacs and orgmode

We have been developing a semantic platform for collaborative construction of knowledge networks of open educational resources.  We have reached some level of stability and so would invite members of the community to visit and explore the site.  The link to the site is: beta.metastudio.org

Here I will keep publishing a series of posts featuring some special features and a link to where the feature can be seen or a screenshot of the feature. In this post we feature a simple online orgmode editor implemented for collaborative editing of text.

Online Emacs Orgmode Editor

The site uses a very simple wiki style text editor that uses orgmode style markup (actually markDown).  The typed text is processed directly by orgmode vida emacs on the server side script.  The orgmode text as well as the automatically exported html are stored in the database.   This editor is limited only by the knowledge of the user about orgmode use and the html export limitations of orgmode.  It can have images, embedded videos, embedded java applets, or just about anything that we need to publish on the web.

The main highlight is the easy of use and very low learning curve.  Students and teachers who have never been exposed to any wiki or web authoring have picked up the editing methods with least training.

• Mathematics equations in metaStudio using orgmode

metastudio orgmode editor

• Embedding video in metaStudio using orgmode

metastudio embedding video using orgmode

my work in ten hundred words of science

I have recently posted what my job is without using any jargon.

http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/post/41307339297/our-job-is-to-help-make-children-learn-and-to

• “

  Our job is to help make children learn. And to picture what they learn. We make children learn about the world around us. Explain what happens in the world around us. Find out the reasons for each happening around us.

  Children know something. When they learn new things, the old things they know find a friend with the new things. Old ideas join with new ideas. But, the new thing does change the old thing as well. We want to picture this change when children learn. In other words, the form of what children know changes when new things get into their heads. Making the picture of these changes is our job. We want to show this changing picture to the children, so that they get to know what they have learnt. This will help them know what they know. This will help us to know what they know. This will help parents to know what they know.

  We use computers for this work. We make the computers make the pictures for everyone to see the learning. We tell computers how to make pictures, so that computers will tell us when there is a change in what we know.

  We help children work with other children. We work with them as one of us.

  When this becomes possible we will call a party and tell everyone. We are looking for friends who could work with us. Tell everyone of what we are doing. Join us.

  ”

  — Nagarjuna. This is to describe the work of http://lab.gnowledge.org/ and its collaborative platform http://beta.metastudio.org/

  • January 23, 2013 (5:27 pm)

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