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WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email correspondence

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Ron Newman

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

Regard motivation and opportunity, I keep hearing anecdotes, like dropping a shipment of tablets, with no explanation, no instructions, manuals in English, in an African village where no one speaks English...and five months later they are teaching themselves English and have hacked the tablets in some way. And an apparently accurate report of a large (paid) MOOC in South Korea that provides tutoring for kids already in school, whose top teachers make upwards of $1 million US, whose very top teacher makes $2 million, and who sign autographs like rock stars at public appearances.

Ron

--
Ron Newman
MyIdeatree.com
The World Happiness Meter
YourSongCode.com

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:11 PM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

All of which is true, Owen, but I'm afraid you're making the natural mistake of extrapolating from your own interests, experiences, and high capabilities. The people like you and others on this list are in the world at large a set of measure zero, albeit a set we don't want to neglect or fail to nurture, and MOOCs are a way for an exceptionally bright rather poor kid in Pakistan to educate herself or himself. The vast majority of US college students do not have the discipline and burning desire to know that may be required to succeed in distance learning.

Bruce

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Jochen Fromm-5

Re: WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick,

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, there are already
many existing systems which "turn email into readable text".
These systems have been around as long as the Internet exists.
The come in the form of mailing lists, newsgroups, forums,
and or as a hybrid between email and web forum.

The Usenet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet ) allowed people
to discuss topics in "newsgroups". Posts were submitted to the
newsgroups by email, organized in readable threads available
on the web, and it was possible to follow the discussions in
news readers.

Yahoo Groups, Google Groups are a hybrid of email
and web discussion group as well. They offer mailing list
functionality, i.e. people can discuss issues on a mailing
list via email, and support web access to the discussions
as well.

All of these systems and applications turn email discussions
into readable text.

Jochen

Am 19.01.2013 18:35, schrieb Nicholas Thompson:

> EVERYBODY,
>
> This material is way too good to be packed down into the midden of old
> email. SO! Once again, I am going to ask this group a question I have asked
> before: how can we develop conventions (or write a software program) that
> will turn email correspondence into readable text. The three main problems
> are (1) headers (2) redundancy and (3) larding (which Steve Does here).
> Larding is the practice of distributing ones response in the text.
>
> I suspect some simple conventions and a word macro would do the trick, but
> believe me, if you try to rescue one of these interchanges, it is VERY hard
> work.
>
> Nick
>
>

Edward Angel

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Bruce Sherwood

MOOCs have had two great benefits. First they have shaken up the universities, which hopefully will lead them to address the educational issues they have avoiding dealing with for a long time. Second, they do provide access to people who would otherwise have none.

Nevertheless, I see them as an experimental and temporary phenomena. As Bruce and others have noted, they are far from perfect. Some of these problems may be solved in time but others I doubt can be solved. Most striking is that none of the entities providing MOOCs have a sustainable business model. They are being supported by foundations, such as the Gates Foundation with the Khan Academy, or as experiments by some of the richer universities, such as MIT and Stanford. That is not a sustainable model. Second, MOOCs, while helping some highly motived students who lack other resources such as the examples of a few bright students on Pakistan that we often see referred to in the media, they do not address the unmet needs of most poor students, both in the US and elsewhere. If we are serious about providing equal opportunity, MOOCs are a tiny part of the solution.

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jan 21, 2013, at 12:11 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

All of which is true, Owen, but I'm afraid you're making the natural mistake of extrapolating from your own interests, experiences, and high capabilities. The people like you and others on this list are in the world at large a set of measure zero, albeit a set we don't want to neglect or fail to nurture, and MOOCs are a way for an exceptionally bright rather poor kid in Pakistan to educate herself or himself. The vast majority of US college students do not have the discipline and burning desire to know that may be required to succeed in distance learning.

Bruce

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm not surprised MOOCs have a high dropout rate: they're designed that way. You sign up for 2-3 of them and stay in the one you like most.

MOOCs are likely to have a great impact on the firewalled papers problem (JSTOR etc) by providing enough clout to build their own open repositories.

And even tho MOOCs are the buzz now, there is also a lot on sites like Kahn Academy which are not courses in the usual sense but a learn on your own pace site. In its own way, it may be even more revolutionary and one of the heros of the JSEverywhere revolution has gotten involved (John Reisig https://github.com/jeresig). John's work is likely to have a huge effect on the actual course-ware world.

-- Owen

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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Ron Newman

My spin on the MOOC's is that they set teachers free to teach rather than wasting everyone's time posing as authorities dispensing lectures. Most teachers cannot be authorities in all the courses they teach, and very few people are really good lecturers. Though we're doing undergraduate and graduate courses right now, the model is going to spread through the education system.

The next stage in the development of MOOC's should be organizing tutorial lesson plans to accompany lecture series. These should identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them. These are "Cliff Notes" for facilitators, people who want to help other people learn. Teachers do not need to be experts in the material content of the courses they're facilitating. They need to be experts in getting people through courses. They need to be good at learning things, or relearning them, faster than their students. They do not need to pose as omniscient authorities in the subjects that they teach.

The stage beyond that would be providing second tier support to answer those questions which the prepared materials fail to cover, which the clever facilitator isn't able to work out. Wikipedia sans wackos.

What we're doing is redistributing the labor of education in a way that the internet now allows us to do. It's going to be really interesting when we get to the seminars where two or more lecturers start presenting contrary views of a subject in opposition and response to each other.

-- rec --

Nick Thompson

Re: WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

Jochen Fromm,

Which would require us to migrate FRIAM to a forum, right?

I hear that gmail is more forum like in how it keeps mail. I should look
into that. Perhaps it's just a matter of my receiving my mail in a
different mail handler.

N

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 12:50 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email
correspondence

Nick,

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, there are already many existing
systems which "turn email into readable text".
These systems have been around as long as the Internet exists.
The come in the form of mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, and or as a
hybrid between email and web forum.

The Usenet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet ) allowed people to discuss
topics in "newsgroups". Posts were submitted to the newsgroups by email,
organized in readable threads available on the web, and it was possible to
follow the discussions in news readers.

Yahoo Groups, Google Groups are a hybrid of email and web discussion group
as well. They offer mailing list functionality, i.e. people can discuss
issues on a mailing list via email, and support web access to the
discussions as well.

All of these systems and applications turn email discussions into readable
text.

Jochen

Am 19.01.2013 18:35, schrieb Nicholas Thompson:
> EVERYBODY,
>
> This material is way too good to be packed down into the midden of old
> email. SO! Once again, I am going to ask this group a question I have
> asked
> before: how can we develop conventions (or write a software program)
> that will turn email correspondence into readable text. The three
> main problems are (1) headers (2) redundancy and (3) larding (which Steve
Does here).
> Larding is the practice of distributing ones response in the text.
>
> I suspect some simple conventions and a word macro would do the trick,
> but believe me, if you try to rescue one of these interchanges, it is
> VERY hard work.
>
> Nick
>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Bruce Sherwood

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

I very strongly disagree with the notion that facilitators need not be content experts. In many domains it is crucial that a good facilitator have a rather deep knowledge of the material AND experience in getting people through courses. Without deep content knowledge It is impossible to "identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them".

We provide very extensive supplementary materials to help physicists use our intro textbook, equivalent to "tutorial lesson plans". These resources even include a complete set of videos of lectures, clicker questions, demos, lab materials, etc. But these materials aren't sufficient if the person doesn't have a deep grasp of physics.

I'll mention that in the "Course for HS teachers" section of matterandinteractions.org there is an article about a sophisticated distance education version of our course which I developed and taught for in-service high school physics teachers, to give them a contemporary perspective on intro physics. This course is still being offered by colleagues at NCSU.

Bruce

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

Bruce --

I didn't mean to dismiss content expertise altogether. It's impossible to even begin to make sense of a technical subject without some content expertise. And you would hope that people who enjoyed facilitating a subject would continue to deepen their understanding of the subject, and that will make them better facilitators.

But I don't know where you draw the line on "deep content knowledge". Did you ever cancel your lecture course because there wasn't sufficient depth in the tutorial leaders? Did they need graduate degrees? In my college, the best students from the previous session of a course were the ones who led tutorials in the next session, it was a liberal arts college and there weren't any graduate students or postgraduate fellows around.

-- rec --

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

I very strongly disagree with the notion that facilitators need not be content experts. In many domains it is crucial that a good facilitator have a rather deep knowledge of the material AND experience in getting people through courses. Without deep content knowledge It is impossible to "identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them".

We provide very extensive supplementary materials to help physicists use our intro textbook, equivalent to "tutorial lesson plans". These resources even include a complete set of videos of lectures, clicker questions, demos, lab materials, etc. But these materials aren't sufficient if the person doesn't have a deep grasp of physics.

I'll mention that in the "Course for HS teachers" section of matterandinteractions.org there is an article about a sophisticated distance education version of our course which I developed and taught for in-service high school physics teachers, to give them a contemporary perspective on intro physics. This course is still being offered by colleagues at NCSU.

Bruce

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Barry MacKichan

Re: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Ron Newman

Interesting...

Here are some ideas to think about or shoot down.

Is there a role for different types of arrows between entities? I can imagine writing something and wanting to indicate that it is in response to (a particular paragraph?) of a particular email, but I might also want to point back to the beginning (message or paragraph(s)) of this particular thread, which may be embedded in a larger thread, as in the case of an idea originating in a response to another message. I might also want to refer to background material. I might want to assign importance or weight to arrows, as in 'I am responding to this message, but it also has some relevance for this other message.' The most general case is that of assigning an attribute to an arrow, but you'd have to be careful about making it too complex.

Some sort of 'force-collapsible' display (e.g., http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/force-collapsible.html or the WordFlex iPad app) would make browsing interesting.

The Mac app DevonThink has 'see-also' and 'classify' operations that attempt to find similarities between text bits that seem to be based on vocabulary similarities (they claim it is 'AI-based'). That would be a possible direction eventually. This similarities could provide additional weighted arrows between nodes. They have some server-based products, but I am not familiar with them.

If you're a fan of crowd-sourcing, people could add weighted arrows to make explicit connections that they find. Nodes could gather weight or importance based on 'reviews' consisting of an integer.

Most of these suggestions make printing a result impractical, but perhaps online interaction would be enough. You could choose which part of the graph to look at by clicking on a node to see its neighborhood. Sizes of nodes could reflect their weight. You could select what subset of arrows you want to see.

--Barry

PS.

All the data of an email (except attachments) are transmitted together. To see all of it together in a file, save the message as a file. (On a Mac using Apple Mail, select a message, choose File/Save As..., and you'll get the file. Mail programs parse this to separate the content and header information for you.

On Jan 21, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Ron Newman wrote:

I'm willing to donate a FRIAM license of MyIdeaTree (drag and drop building of network graphs from links). I'd learn a ton about usability from that. The email / blog content would have to be located on the web somewhere.

Ron

Russell Standish

Re: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:01:21PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Thanks, Owen.
>
>
>
> I fooled around with the problem a bit more yesterday and immediately
> encountered a problem I hadn't expected. It was easy to collect all the
> emails from one them in one place, but NOT easy to get an email, with it's
> headers, into text. Apparently in email (unlike in the forums where I have
> tried this before) the headers are kept in a separate file.
>

I don't know what email client you use, but the unix mbox format has
email with headers all in one file, which can then be processed by
other tools (eg perl scripts, procmail, ...).

mbox is used by Thunderbird, Seamonkey and a variety of other email
clients (I personally use mutt).

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Preserving email correspondence

Uh, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not a Unix user.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Russell Standish <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:01:21PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Thanks, Owen.
>
>
>
> I fooled around with the problem a bit more yesterday and immediately
> encountered a problem I hadn't expected. It was easy to collect all the
> emails from one them in one place, but NOT easy to get an email, with it's
> headers, into text. Apparently in email (unlike in the forums where I have
> tried this before) the headers are kept in a separate file.
>

I don't know what email client you use, but the unix mbox format has
email with headers all in one file, which can then be processed by
other tools (eg perl scripts, procmail, ...).

mbox is used by Thunderbird, Seamonkey and a variety of other email
clients (I personally use mutt).

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--
Doug Roberts
[hidden email]
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

Bruce Sherwood

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

My mistake in reading your note was to have in mind the local professor, not undergrad or graduate teaching assistants. In our own implementation of a giant course, we did quite a lot of training and support of the TAs, and we structured lab and problem sessions in such a way that the TA needed only to be an assistant and helper, with activities that put much of the responsibility for learning on the students.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

Bruce --

I didn't mean to dismiss content expertise altogether. It's impossible to even begin to make sense of a technical subject without some content expertise. And you would hope that people who enjoyed facilitating a subject would continue to deepen their understanding of the subject, and that will make them better facilitators.

But I don't know where you draw the line on "deep content knowledge". Did you ever cancel your lecture course because there wasn't sufficient depth in the tutorial leaders? Did they need graduate degrees? In my college, the best students from the previous session of a course were the ones who led tutorials in the next session, it was a liberal arts college and there weren't any graduate students or postgraduate fellows around.

-- rec --

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

I very strongly disagree with the notion that facilitators need not be content experts. In many domains it is crucial that a good facilitator have a rather deep knowledge of the material AND experience in getting people through courses. Without deep content knowledge It is impossible to "identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them".

We provide very extensive supplementary materials to help physicists use our intro textbook, equivalent to "tutorial lesson plans". These resources even include a complete set of videos of lectures, clicker questions, demos, lab materials, etc. But these materials aren't sufficient if the person doesn't have a deep grasp of physics.

I'll mention that in the "Course for HS teachers" section of matterandinteractions.org there is an article about a sophisticated distance education version of our course which I developed and taught for in-service high school physics teachers, to give them a contemporary perspective on intro physics. This course is still being offered by colleagues at NCSU.

Bruce

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Russell Standish

Re: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

But the tools I mentioned are also available on Windows. The main
things to avoid are webmail and the P.O.S. called Outlook.

Cheers

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 03:34:53PM -0700, Douglas Roberts wrote:

> Uh, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not a Unix user.
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Russell Standish <[hidden email]>wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:01:21PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> > > Thanks, Owen.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I fooled around with the problem a bit more yesterday and immediately
> > > encountered a problem I hadn't expected. It was easy to collect all the
> > > emails from one them in one place, but NOT easy to get an email, with
> > it's
> > > headers, into text. Apparently in email (unlike in the forums where I
> > have
> > > tried this before) the headers are kept in a separate file.
> > >
> >
> >
> > I don't know what email client you use, but the unix mbox format has
> > email with headers all in one file, which can then be processed by
> > other tools (eg perl scripts, procmail, ...).
> >
> > mbox is used by Thunderbird, Seamonkey and a variety of other email
> > clients (I personally use mutt).
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> > Principal, High Performance Coders
> > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
> > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> >
>
>
>
> --
> *Doug Roberts
> [hidden email]
> [hidden email]*
> *http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins*<http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins>
> * <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins>
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-672-8213 - Mobile*

> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Ron Newman

Re: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Barry MacKichan

Barry,

Yes, arrows can be of different types. Colors are now supported in the UI. Styles (dotted, etc.) are supported in the backend, only awaiting an afternoon to put in the UI to select the style you want.

Weighting of arrows is also supported, currently being saved in the shared database, similarly just needs a selection form in the UI. A heavier weight on the arrow between nodes causes those two nodes to be laid out closer together, indicating relevance to each other.

Size of nodes is currently selectable, I'm sure you saw that.

If by attribute of an arrow you mean labeling of it, that can currently be done by clicking the asterisk next to the arrow.

Branches are minimized by clicking the minus sign (tiny) at the head of the arrow.

Nodes may be clustered by dragging to the upper right to the tiny icon that's there, just below "Summaries". So there's some support for arranging similar topics together.

Yes, I'm a big fan of crowd sourcing, in fact, that's the motivation behind this. If you haven't installed the button on your browser to insert links to websites in a graph on the run as you browse, that's worth doing (Tools menu).

Printing is practical up to a certain size, but .pdf export (Tools menu again) is better, because it retains the active links. Also, embedding a clickable graph in a FRIAM website is possible, though that's public to the world.

Ron

--
Ron Newman
MyIdeatree.com

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting...

Here are some ideas to think about or shoot down.

Is there a role for different types of arrows between entities? I can imagine writing something and wanting to indicate that it is in response to (a particular paragraph?) of a particular email, but I might also want to point back to the beginning (message or paragraph(s)) of this particular thread, which may be embedded in a larger thread, as in the case of an idea originating in a response to another message. I might also want to refer to background material. I might want to assign importance or weight to arrows, as in 'I am responding to this message, but it also has some relevance for this other message.' The most general case is that of assigning an attribute to an arrow, but you'd have to be careful about making it too complex.

Some sort of 'force-collapsible' display (e.g., http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/force-collapsible.html or the WordFlex iPad app) would make browsing interesting.

The Mac app DevonThink has 'see-also' and 'classify' operations that attempt to find similarities between text bits that seem to be based on vocabulary similarities (they claim it is 'AI-based'). That would be a possible direction eventually. This similarities could provide additional weighted arrows between nodes. They have some server-based products, but I am not familiar with them.

If you're a fan of crowd-sourcing, people could add weighted arrows to make explicit connections that they find. Nodes could gather weight or importance based on 'reviews' consisting of an integer.

Most of these suggestions make printing a result impractical, but perhaps online interaction would be enough. You could choose which part of the graph to look at by clicking on a node to see its neighborhood. Sizes of nodes could reflect their weight. You could select what subset of arrows you want to see.

--Barry

PS.
All the data of an email (except attachments) are transmitted together. To see all of it together in a file, save the message as a file. (On a Mac using Apple Mail, select a message, choose File/Save As..., and you'll get the file. Mail programs parse this to separate the content and header information for you.

On Jan 21, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Ron Newman wrote:

I'm willing to donate a FRIAM license of MyIdeaTree (drag and drop building of network graphs from links). I'd learn a ton about usability from that. The email / blog content would have to be located on the web somewhere.

Ron

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Ron Newman

Re: Preserving email correspondence

P.S., I forgot to mention, there's an API for all of this, to generate graphs programatically should that become applicable.

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Ron Newman <[hidden email]> wrote:

Barry,
Yes, arrows can be of different types. Colors are now supported in the UI. Styles (dotted, etc.) are supported in the backend, only awaiting an afternoon to put in the UI to select the style you want.

Weighting of arrows is also supported, currently being saved in the shared database, similarly just needs a selection form in the UI. A heavier weight on the arrow between nodes causes those two nodes to be laid out closer together, indicating relevance to each other.

Size of nodes is currently selectable, I'm sure you saw that.

If by attribute of an arrow you mean labeling of it, that can currently be done by clicking the asterisk next to the arrow.

Branches are minimized by clicking the minus sign (tiny) at the head of the arrow.

Nodes may be clustered by dragging to the upper right to the tiny icon that's there, just below "Summaries". So there's some support for arranging similar topics together.

Yes, I'm a big fan of crowd sourcing, in fact, that's the motivation behind this. If you haven't installed the button on your browser to insert links to websites in a graph on the run as you browse, that's worth doing (Tools menu).

Printing is practical up to a certain size, but .pdf export (Tools menu again) is better, because it retains the active links. Also, embedding a clickable graph in a FRIAM website is possible, though that's public to the world.

Ron

--
Ron Newman
MyIdeatree.com

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting...

Here are some ideas to think about or shoot down.

Is there a role for different types of arrows between entities? I can imagine writing something and wanting to indicate that it is in response to (a particular paragraph?) of a particular email, but I might also want to point back to the beginning (message or paragraph(s)) of this particular thread, which may be embedded in a larger thread, as in the case of an idea originating in a response to another message. I might also want to refer to background material. I might want to assign importance or weight to arrows, as in 'I am responding to this message, but it also has some relevance for this other message.' The most general case is that of assigning an attribute to an arrow, but you'd have to be careful about making it too complex.

Some sort of 'force-collapsible' display (e.g., http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111116/force-collapsible.html or the WordFlex iPad app) would make browsing interesting.

The Mac app DevonThink has 'see-also' and 'classify' operations that attempt to find similarities between text bits that seem to be based on vocabulary similarities (they claim it is 'AI-based'). That would be a possible direction eventually. This similarities could provide additional weighted arrows between nodes. They have some server-based products, but I am not familiar with them.

If you're a fan of crowd-sourcing, people could add weighted arrows to make explicit connections that they find. Nodes could gather weight or importance based on 'reviews' consisting of an integer.

Most of these suggestions make printing a result impractical, but perhaps online interaction would be enough. You could choose which part of the graph to look at by clicking on a node to see its neighborhood. Sizes of nodes could reflect their weight. You could select what subset of arrows you want to see.

--Barry

PS.
All the data of an email (except attachments) are transmitted together. To see all of it together in a file, save the message as a file. (On a Mac using Apple Mail, select a message, choose File/Save As..., and you'll get the file. Mail programs parse this to separate the content and header information for you.

On Jan 21, 2013, at 11:07 AM, Ron Newman wrote:

I'm willing to donate a FRIAM license of MyIdeaTree (drag and drop building of network graphs from links). I'd learn a ton about usability from that. The email / blog content would have to be located on the web somewhere.

Ron

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--
Ron Newman
MyIdeatree.com
The World Happiness Meter
YourSongCode.com

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Owen Densmore

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

Administrator

In reply to this post by Edward Angel

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

<snip>

Most striking is that none of the entities providing MOOCs have a sustainable business model. They are being supported by foundations, such as the Gates Foundation with the Khan Academy, or as experiments by some of the richer universities, such as MIT and Stanford.

Er.. isn't that exactly what profs have to do: win grants from NSF and others?

-- Owen

Owen Densmore

Re: Preserving email correspondence

Administrator

In reply to this post by Russell Standish

Right. When we were messing around with SFX's sys admin model, I found archives for both friam and sfx and found that with a fairly small effort (l1/2 hr say) could convert them between various formats. This was needed for an experiment to save the early friam material and to get sfx onto Nabble.

So yes, given vast amounts of mails, it isn't too difficult to convert them into other formats.

-- Owen

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Russell Standish <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:01:21PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Thanks, Owen.
>
>
>
> I fooled around with the problem a bit more yesterday and immediately
> encountered a problem I hadn't expected. It was easy to collect all the
> emails from one them in one place, but NOT easy to get an email, with it's
> headers, into text. Apparently in email (unlike in the forums where I have
> tried this before) the headers are kept in a separate file.
>

I don't know what email client you use, but the unix mbox format has
email with headers all in one file, which can then be processed by
other tools (eg perl scripts, procmail, ...).

mbox is used by Thunderbird, Seamonkey and a variety of other email
clients (I personally use mutt).

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [hidden email]
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Edward Angel

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

Not as far as teaching is concerned. That should come from tuition and the state for public universities. At least it used to. In a typical large university only about 20% if the budget comes from teaching (tuition plus state support). That is very different from when we were students.

The problem in the universities is to a large degree because they have become research centers dependent on grants rather than educational institutions. So you can argue that this new model of the university is also unsustainable. The major task of any new faculty member in engineering or science is generate grant funding. Every faculty member is now a profit center. Publication or more importantly quality of publication has become less important (although in many cases large grants do go to the best researchers).

My old dept at UNM is typical. The teaching load for most faculty is down to one course per semester. If you couple this with salaries, all of which are available on the UNM website, and state funding formula, it is easy to see that education in not the major task nor the source of funding.

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Jan 21, 2013, at 5:01 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

<snip>

Most striking is that none of the entities providing MOOCs have a sustainable business model. They are being supported by foundations, such as the Gates Foundation with the Khan Academy, or as experiments by some of the richer universities, such as MIT and Stanford.

Er.. isn't that exactly what profs have to do: win grants from NSF and others?

-- Owen
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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Preserving email correspondence

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

On 1/21/13 3:34 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:

Uh, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not a Unix user.

Unix tools are not the best for this kind of task.   One would better served with a programmable editor or e-mail client that can traverse lines and work in terms of sentences and paragraphs.   One editor that is well-suited to this, and can work in batch Emacs.

Consider if someone is writing on a portable device and enters narrow text with this form..

Let's extract a
sentence that crosses
several
lines.

Line oriented (Unix) tools will require assembling up until the "." is reached.    In Emacs, to append a sentence to a list `l' it's easy:

(setq l nil)

(defun grab-sentence ()
(interactive)
(push
   (let ((start (point)))
     (forward-sentence)
     (buffer-substring start (point)))
   l))

Yielding a list with one string:

("Let's extract a sentence that crosses several lines.")

On second call, the list grows to two elements, and so on.

But that's just a baby step. Then one needs to categorize text by its owner. One way to do this is to read chronologically from top to bottom, and assume that first occurrence, especially if there is no leading ">" is the author named in the last From line. Even the quoting conventions change depending on what mail program is used. Some people like to tag with names or initials as delimiters, others quote passages with quotation marks, others (like Emacs users), have tags per line like Nick>, others just simply ">", ">>", as quoting levels, still others use richtext cues like boldface.

What's needed is a sort of content-addressable memory (e.g. a hash from text to author).

And for goodness sake, stop pretending that the mailing list is anything like a collaborative essay. It is not, there is no central purpose. No one has agreed on anything. A mailing list is a set of people approaching a topic from their own point of view, and in the process redefining what the topic is. It's not a blog, which is one person's point of view, with some attached comments.

Marcus

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Preserving email correspondence

Um, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not an Emacs user. Quite the opposite, probably.

On Jan 21, 2013 6:33 PM, "Marcus G. Daniels" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 1/21/13 3:34 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:

Uh, I'm gonna guess that Nick is not a Unix user.

Unix tools are not the best for this kind of task.   One would better served with a programmable editor or e-mail client that can traverse lines and work in terms of sentences and paragraphs.   One editor that is well-suited to this, and can work in batch Emacs.

Consider if someone is writing on a portable device and enters narrow text with this form..

Let's extract a
sentence that crosses
several
lines.

Line oriented (Unix) tools will require assembling up until the "." is reached.    In Emacs, to append a sentence to a list `l' it's easy:

(setq l nil)

(defun grab-sentence ()
(interactive)
(push
   (let ((start (point)))
     (forward-sentence)
     (buffer-substring start (point)))
   l))

Yielding a list with one string:

("Let's extract a sentence that crosses several lines.")

On second call, the list grows to two elements, and so on.

But that's just a baby step. Then one needs to categorize text by its owner. One way to do this is to read chronologically from top to bottom, and assume that first occurrence, especially if there is no leading ">" is the author named in the last From line. Even the quoting conventions change depending on what mail program is used. Some people like to tag with names or initials as delimiters, others quote passages with quotation marks, others (like Emacs users), have tags per line like Nick>, others just simply ">", ">>", as quoting levels, still others use richtext cues like boldface.

What's needed is a sort of content-addressable memory (e.g. a hash from text to author).

And for goodness sake, stop pretending that the mailing list is anything like a collaborative essay. It is not, there is no central purpose. No one has agreed on anything. A mailing list is a set of people approaching a topic from their own point of view, and in the process redefining what the topic is. It's not a blog, which is one person's point of view, with some attached comments.

Marcus

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Merle Lefkoff-2

Re: "Academics" and other Stereotypes

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

Roger that, Roger! I think there will be a lot of pushback on your statement, because I find that it is very hard for academics to give up the illusion of expertise.

BTW, here is my "expert judgment" about the facilitation issue. Sometimes you need to know some content, sometimes you're really better off in the realm of the "not knowing" so that you can give your all to the emergent group process.

On Jan 21, 2013, at 1:03 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:

> My spin on the MOOC's is that they set teachers free to teach rather than wasting everyone's time posing as authorities dispensing lectures. Most teachers cannot be authorities in all the courses they teach, and very few people are really good lecturers. Though we're doing undergraduate and graduate courses right now, the model is going to spread through the education system.
>
> The next stage in the development of MOOC's should be organizing tutorial lesson plans to accompany lecture series. These should identify the key points of lectures, how to gauge whether someone has grasped the points, how to recognize the common misgraspings which occur and correct them. These are "Cliff Notes" for facilitators, people who want to help other people learn. Teachers do not need to be experts in the material content of the courses they're facilitating. They need to be experts in getting people through courses. They need to be good at learning things, or relearning them, faster than their students. They do not need to pose as omniscient authorities in the subjects that they teach.
>
> The stage beyond that would be providing second tier support to answer those questions which the prepared materials fail to cover, which the clever facilitator isn't able to work out. Wikipedia sans wackos.
>
> What we're doing is redistributing the labor of education in a way that the internet now allows us to do. It's going to be really interesting when we get to the seminars where two or more lecturers start presenting contrary views of a subject in opposition and response to each other.
>
> -- rec --
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