Farewell information science, we hardly knew yee

I'm sitting here, staring out a window and trying to think of anything, anything to put down in my crappy 3-page remnant of a dissertation proposal. I've got hundreds of pages of old papers, notes, pages in my research wiki, scrawled little bursts of insights stuffed in plastic paper protectors surrounding me in piles, and even a 18-quart storage box in the basement.

Goddammit, almost every part of my being wants to just ditch the whole thing, drop out of the PhD program, and go find something else to do, like build a wind farm in the Adirondacks or something like that. I have a crushing teaching load this semester. I remind myself that I'm feeling burned out, and the whole instinct to run off to the mountains is just a symptom of that. But it's been a rough week, as I caught up on 3 weeks of grading in one week, getting ready for midterm exams calculating attendance, and preparing to post midterm grades.

But I do want to finish this, if nothing else than to have something to show for my 5th year in the PhD program. Working full time has drastically slowed down progress, but there are distinct benefits from leaving the insular world of the typical dissertation student- when time marches ahead of the young struggling academic toiling away in a near vacuum.

And I'm still struck by the history bit, the lectures where I talk about the sea change of the 1940's, when both the atomic age and the computing age both emerged from secretive military research in Los Alamos and other places, and the ideas that there was nothing inevitable about either discoveries- all the atomic development on Earth was directly stolen from this project, and all modern data processing came from this as well- everything else since was merely derivative.

And a lot of information science as a field of study has similar roots- the 1940's, and the Web is nothing more than the byproducts of this same lab. And it's been slow going since then. There's nothing inevitable about the march of progress- either some person invents it, or it just doesn't get invented at all. I don't know why, but I suspect that topics like information science are for some reason just a little beyond the ability of the brain to really comprehend- and all we can do is chip away at little topics of it here and there.

Which makes it too cool to really give up, I guess...

Learning 2.0 - in a nutshell

I've got this link to Education for Well-Being. Just follow the link- any comments made here would just be a distraction.

Relearning trees and graphs

I'm showing a video in class about the Augment system from 1969, during the heady days of the first moon landing, the second-to-last Beatles album, and the birth of Sesame Street- in short, the year that planted the seeds for a generation of AADD sufferers- when it hits me.

Why did we as a technologically driven society forget how to make outlines?

Seriously, Word sucks for outlines, whereas PowerPoint, the tool for sharing bulleted lists with millions of roomfuls of suffering victims, seems completely unaware of an outline as anything more than a line of text preceded with a little circle. Other "idea processors" I've seen have largely disappeared in the 90's.

Word gives you the option of collapsing a node so that all the dependent items (the stuff listed after the first line but indented) can be moved with it in a group. So what happened to PPT?

Augment solved that problem in 1969. Then another problem- the graph reference, in that dependent items may reference each other, or items in another branch. XML has some awareness of this idea, though it's left up to the determined programmer to do anything with this relationship. Why don't we just have a graph tag, in addition to the list item tag?

Or at least have a decent editor for trees and graphs? Are people just confused by the term "graph"? Would it make people happy to call it "shrub" or something else related to the "tree" metaphor?

Problems this would solve:

• web links that are a lot smarter, maybe even self-organizing and self-describing.
  
• visualization tools that make data easier to understand-
• the ability to build smarter, reusable content for learning and teaching
  
• trees are a special case of graphs, which means that in reality, a real tree is just a brutally clumsy simplification of a data modeling problem that really begged for a graph
  
• the ability to see concept maps in their native habitat

In short, the ability to first: correctly process an outline (a tree) as such would be helpful, and a needed prerequisite for the ability to model a graph. I wonder if the lack of tools for outlines points to a decay in our collective ability for structured thinking. Not to mention, the lack of graph modeling tools points to an inability to interpret data from more than a single perspective (if even it exists).

I've heard this called "system thinking" and dressed up in Grad school under a variety of disciplines. But there's always a common basis to all systems, the recognition that all ideas can have more than one parent- it's a rare tree that has more than one trunk, but all living things have two biological parents, once you get past creatures more advanced than pond slime.

So as it turns out, an outline is good at describing a single point of view of information, but a graph would tell a more complete story. Unfortunately, we as an industry have forgotten how to build tools that help us organize and understand the complexity of information.

Digital TV Acceptance Model

So, After dragging my feet about getting a DTV tuner for the TV, I finally got one before the coupon expired. It took all of about a minute to hook it up (actually longer to cut through the tape over the box and all the various contents). A few minutes to figure out why it said "No Signal", a few minutes to get it to find the stations in range, and then, Digital TV.

It's kind of cool, at least for the first few minutes. Then after realizing that there wasn't anything that good to watch, I turned it off again.

But I'm wondering, what's being broadcast over the air that's worth grabbing? Data feeds? Anything worth hacking into? I'm frankly too busy to have looked at the technology at all, other than occasionally looking at the $40 FTC coupon that used to be stuck to my fridge door.

But, aside from having another thing to plug into the outlet strip, and trying to figure out how to manage yet another input device for the TV, I'm wondering a bit about the conversion process itself. How did people decide to convert? Who bought the converter box, versus who just bought a new TV?

And now that the DTV transition seems likely to push back from Feb 17th (less than 2 weeks) to mid June, I'm really starting to wonder whether anyone's studying the decision process about how to adjust to the new circumstances. But, I've got a dissertation proposal to write about a much different topic..