[humanmarkup-comment] curriculum for the science of knowledge

[psp <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

**Please excuse the cross posting, we are trying to create a formative
process for a virtual curriculum to support "a science of knowledge".

Please respond only to

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KMPro

and forward to whom ever you feel is appropriate.

**Dr. Paul Prueitt
**Founder (1997) www.bcngroup.org
**703-981-2676

**

Dr. Richard Ballard
Founder, Knowledge Foundations Inc

Dick,


You said in your note to me (see full text below):

"A
student or employee would be hard put to reproduce from their own experience
what is asserted or to argue the truth or predict the consequence of what is
said from instruction alone. The teacher suggests and the student goes forth
to test what is asserted."

see:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KMPro


Certainly the value from the teacher is largely a question of belief and
faith.  But students need to follow.  There is a social dimension to this
that builds communities and provides for stability.  And there is the
possibility of a teacher changing the life of the student.

So it is difficult to "rationalize" the monetary value of education.  The
process that I am proposing seems to me to be very doable, if various
parties that I need help from would pull with me rather than waiting and
watching.  I was very close about four months ago, I had income to spare and
an audience... but things fell apart.

Distance learning and a knowledge base for addressing the rather profound
ignorance of people, in the mainstream, about the foundational aspects of
science and mathematics has been a life long *ideal* that I have carried...
kind of like a cross.

It certainly has not benefited me financially, as of yet.  I have resolved
to change this, by making the BCNGroup Foundation a reality, and the
BCNGroup virtual course and virtual conference session a reality.  The money
is there, and the infrastructure is there if

1) KMPro happened to strongly support by providing the technology (which is
suspect they are ready to do)
2) Several of the scholars in the Einstein Institute forum would
unconditionally help
3) Fourth Wave Group would come back into the picture (perhaps this is
important)
4) a new force (Michael Choi) would take over the marketing of OSI's
distance learning framework
5) we are lucky..
etc..


We could, I mean the BCNGroup or OSI, which ever corporation (one for profit
and one not for profit - and both never used for anything as yet) begin the
receive $200 payments from all over the world within a few weeks.  (In
certain counties this payment would be reduced to reflect the economic
status in that country).

Damn it, the product is there, the work has been done, everything is in
place.  The question is about whether or not those who can contribute now
rather than talk about February or June or 2003.

Let the revolution begin!

***

Regarding your statement

"course work is very hard on ontological
commitments"

But I am not proposing a machine intelligence deliver knowledge to the user,
but rather that a machine intelligence break down and re-compose topics.
This is quite different form say the Plato system which is suppose to wisely
answer questions directly.  I have felt that this notion is a fool's folly.

What I propose is a routing and retrieval system with humans very much in
the loop and governing how the immediate discussions are occurring between
teachers and learners.  But the environment is virtual and the discussion is
indirect in many cases.

http://www.ontologystream.com

The indirect communication is a produce of concept aggregation so that the
teacher "learns" that, for example, 46 out of the 250 students are talking
about x.  This notion is in the bead game design as the Master telling the
story (being told by the students) again, but at a more informed level.  The
de-aggregation and the re-aggregation of topics in a virtual discussion
would provide something that the face to face environments often do not
offer.

This will be a big win, when the BCNGroup Virtual System is deployed as
infrastructure.

In fact, I feel that the infrastructure that is presently available for
deployment could directly compete with brick and mortar universities (and
even High Schools).  I have long predicted the collapse of Dewey type
educational philosophy, with the advent of broad band capacity and a true
many-to-one communication channel.

(I have to make a remark about the new discussions between several members
of BCNGroup Founding Committee and Nordic Quantum Computing Group on the
notions about "physical theory of quantum information channels" and how this
formalism is reflected in the underlying many-to-one concept de-aggregation,
re-aggregation algorithms (that are simple and demonstrated). )

****

I need to ask that every one who knows distance learning organization have
them contact me.

703-981-2676

I have to find a way to cover **first quarter 2002 expenses**, so the press
is on for funding or gifts, or enlightenment.

***





-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ballard [mailto:rlballard@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2002 1:15 AM
To: psp
Cc: Robert E. Shaw; Wojciech M. Jaworski
Subject: RE: "growing" an organic knowledge base for the science of
knowledge


Paul:

Very sympathetic about what you are aiming to do and would like to follow
rather than lead over the next 3 months. My load is impossible for now
through March, hardly better thereafter.

The problem of transferring knowledge from a course to a knowledge base is
generally not economic, except for the teacher/author and that implies a
long period for amortizing such cost. The problem is (this is difficult to
say) there is not much knowledge per se in what a teacher says, there may be
great value to the student, but much of that is faith in what is said. A
student or employee would be hard put to reproduce from their own experience
what is asserted or to argue the truth or predict the consequence of what is
said from instruction alone. The teacher suggests and the student goes forth
to test what is asserted. The instructional process is not that test, though
"problem sets" and examination questions offer carefully contrived exercises
in that direction.

>From the perspective of knowledge theory, knowledge begins with a set of
questions. Most courses come down strong on what are the major questions of
this field and then go on to summarize the state of the field and the
important personalities in the field. These focus on questions asked and
answered, more rarely on unanswered questions and those most active in still
pursuing solutions and the directions they have chosen.

These discussions are framed to provide the second condition for knowledge
definition, "expectation". The teacher offers just enough carefully
constrained examples of the answer forms produced by professional
practitioners today. Their aim is to set standards on what questions every
well educated professional ought to be able to answer and how they might
express such answers.

Beyond questions and answer forms courses work very hard on ontological
commitments, particularly in first and second order logical forms, to the
level of conditional sentence structures and the basic notions of
compositional completeness. Academics have a particularly rich set of
relational forms, but apart from mathematical sciences, law, rhetoric, ...
their uses of mediating structures are limited to categories, compositions,
flows, decision options, ... there favored examples are often hundreds of
years old.

This does produce a reasonable sensitivity, appropriate language, and an "I
will know it when I see it" competency. Students feel aware and able to make
some judgments and are, for a brief time, keenly aware that there are deeper
things they still need to know. They are ready to learn, but know very
little. Writing a book, the editor and publisher know better what their
customers want and need, and work hard to get it. So there is some hope a
textbook will provide something useful for knowledge modelers to work with,
but not much.

For a knowledge base, using a source collection of 60-180 books and a dozen
or two databases. We may give modelers one or two text books> If they are
having trouble adapting to the knowledge base's primary subject area, we may
assign them to modeling the first 1-2 chapters of the textbook. Our
objective is the same as the course teacher, to give them the same sense of
confidence and subject awareness, but we are careful to forcefully pull them
away. They can spend a full modeler-month per chapter and come away with
little more than pages of definitions, relationships they will never see,
and a taxonomy or two.

Teachers hope their experience is "summative", based on years of experience
and feedback from the field. Project managers, unfortunately, try to lead
from being in the middle of the battle. They produce "PowerPoint"
presentations that suggest what seems to be the issue of the moment, and
then point out the direction and rationale for moving now (next few weeks)
in this particular direction. They are especially eager for us to have a
complete collection of their briefings. Same goes for high level management
and consultant "marching orders", the endless quests for the "value line" or
"bottom line" or whatever. We have learned to politely box these. With just
a little time they start to look as relevant as a 100 year old newspaper.

Our continual need is to get them to reaffirm or confirm in writing, those
questions that will contractually define our delivered knowledge base.
"PowerPoints" cause them to revisit old questions that never got answered,
and question creep, like mission creep, can become then a vexing problem.
----------------------------
I would be interested in a series outlining the profound changes that
characterize the Mark 2 -> Mark 3 EditForm shift after March when we start
nailing down the Mark 3 EditForm grammar. As I noted before I don't want to
teach and defend something that made sense 12 years ago, even if it might
appear to be ahead of what everybody else is using today. My goal in
teaching is to question, learn, and confirm the ideas of my "then current"
inventions. It is always a forward, never backward step. Somehow my students
know it, they can hear it in my voice and enthusiasm. Some miss the fact
that the invention I am talking about happened right there and then in front
of their eyes, but my regular staff lives for such moments, as do I.
----------------------------
I promise to be very involved in courses toward the end of 2002, when the
Mark 3 browsers are nearing completion. By then we will have very exciting
Mediating Structure views and issues to talk about, maybe "trace operation
agents" as well.

[Forward this wherever you would like.]

Dick



-----Original Message-----
From: psp [mailto:beadmaster@ontologystream.com]
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 7:08 PM
To: KMPro@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Katarina Auer; Topicmaps-Comment; Jean Delahousse; Intranet-Km;
Humanmarkup-Comment; Nan Gelhard; Cameron Jones; Art Murray; Abdul
Halim; George Lakoff; Jerry Zhu; Kevin Johnson; Richard Ballard; Raymond
Bradley; Paul Werbos; Vfrizzel; Axel P. Mustad; Chris Starr; Christian
Wohlgensinger; David Loye; Dgrey25; Inc. Fourth Wave Group; Jack Ring;
Jason Kays; James Lewis; James Clarke; John Scott; Kukahone; Kurt Cagle;
Laurence H. Williams; Daniel S Levine
Subject: "growing" an organic knowledge base for the science of
knowledge



Dick (Ballard)  would you make a comment about the possibility of using a
Mark 2 engine to encode the curriculum developed during virtual course
presentations and then the possibility of "growing" an organic knowledge
base for the science of knowledge, as envisioned in:

http://www.ontologystream.com/distanceLearning/learningSystem.htm

Is this possible?