- improve educational metadata and organization in Noosphere. E.g., add metadata
fields like “educational level”, perhaps “difficulty”, or others. (School kids shouldn’t have to sift through research-level materials.)
- add the ability to write entries in a math-Wiki-like syntax (make it easier to
contribute based on content knowledge, not !LaTeX knowledge). This could be converted to !LaTeX on the back-end.
- add editorial discussion areas, where things like pedagogy can be discussed
more extensively without unnecessarily increasing noise in the communnity.
- bi-directional content sharing, to propagate Noosphere content between
instances of Noosphere and other collaborative DLs (with multiple “Planets” coalescing, this could be framed as an effort of wider import to the NSDL).
- general improvements to Noosphere (code cleanups), easier deployability
- other studies of the educational potential of PM and related projects
- Better support for creation of free books, papers, and expositions.
(Compare PlanetMath engine interbred with wikibooks idea.)
- improve ratings/reputation system to enhance quality of output. perhaps
implement something like card-based system?
- put in provisions to use, encourage, and benefit from real-world identities.
- put in collaborative filtering to aid in selection of highest-quality entries.
- bi-di content sharing (also useful for development of FEM).
- infrastructure for developing HDM (and other translated version of PM content)
to PM
- do experiments on the learning potential of working on HDM (hire students to
participate and then test them on their knowledge?)
- other studies of the educational potential of PM and related projects
- infrastructure for literate programming
Comments? (But feel free to modify above section directly).
Personally, I think that the third and fourth items in the “PM/Noosphere” section are the most interesting. The more purely technology stuff is just harder to get excited about. (Bidi content sharing is very technological, but is also social too, since it relates to the way in which digital libraries fit into a larger social context.) Thus, I get a more gung-ho feeling about these items than I do about the other items listed here. And of these two items, bidi content sharing seems likely to be the most “radical”. (See synopsis.) But the “editorial discussion areas” could perhaps be expanded expanded into a broader topic – how to get people more involved in discussions online, and how to make these discussions “count” for education. I imagine something less like editorial discussion and something more like “chalk talks” (but with !LaTeX). Maybe this would be something to talk to Oscar about. Running a little bit with this idea, I added to the PM/Noosphere/HDM section the idea of just doing some more studies on Noosphere as an educational tool. Translations, which I also added, are not in and of themselves revolutionary - but they are multiculturally-friendly, which is something the NSF likes. However, we’d want to actually do translations, lest the work suffer from being “too technological” (as ranted about above). –jcorneli Fri Mar 25 04:39:31 2005 UTC
I moved the "educational potential" studies to PM/Noosphere, since HDM is pretty
long-term. –akrowne Fri Mar 25 20:47:04 UTC 2005
:: It would probably have been better to copy, not delete, since PM/Noosphere/HDM is meant to be inclusive of all three, and these sorts of studies can be conducted from different points of view. I restored the original item under PM/Noosphere/HDM too. This is brainstorming, so there are no right or wrong answers. I don’t think being long term should weigh against a project, if there are immediate steps that can be taken. It may be that we aren’t quite ready to take those steps for HDM (which, if true, should weigh against it, for this proposal) but I think we can certainly conceptualize to some extent what the steps would be. –jcorneli Sat Mar 26 17:38:17 2005 UTC