A small group of the faculty and instructional technology staff have been thinking hard about how to reinvent -- or at least re-present -- the intellectual life of students and faculty on campus. Martha Burtis has started the discussion here. She's getting us started trying to nail down what, exactly, it is that we are all trying to get at in capturing/representing/describing/other the intellectual life of our students. Jeff McClurken has weighed in here, and here I go....

This thing, which so far has gone under the name "Ronco" (as in slicing and dicing...but we're looking for a non-trademarked alternative), is a something for students and faculty to describe and map the relationships and connections between the various pieces of their intellectual life. So, for example, it needs to mark out the individual nodes in their intellectual life (courses, particular class meetings, readings, parties, etc.), as well as the connections between them. We'll therefore need both basic metadata about those nodes (date of a class meeting or party, bibliographic info for readings, etc.) and the more complex nature of the "connection" (quotation marks to signal the ambiguity of the term for now). Basic metadata is needed for tracking the sources of ideas, as well as for producing a chronological history of one's intellectual life. The "connections" would typically relate two (or more?) nodes through some spark of an idea--probably half-formed, but good fodder for more development. Probably, then, a "connection" would include a short summary, perhaps also pointing to a blog entry (or entries?) that develop that idea. Question for discussion: If I make one connection between two classes, then two weeks later elaborate on it, is that really a second connection between the same two classes AND the original connection?

Here's what I imagine a "connection" between a blog post and a course (in green) would look like, linked up with the owner (creator) of the "connection" and that owner's own blog post elaborating on it. I should note that a Course here is the very broad entity that has a teacher, students, and many meetings over a semester. An individual meeting of the course would likely need to be a distinct node, but related to the general course.

I'm clearly thinking more in terms of the underlying model for the information and how to relate them. That's partly because that's where my mind tends to be, and partly because the tools for display could very well come from other places, especially SIMILE.

Role of Tagging

Tagging has played a large part in the discussion so far, mostly, I think, because it tends to be the first thought in organization mechanisms. I see two distinct roles for tags. First, is the usual role a la delicious or flickr -- a quick folksonomic way to describe the resources. A "connection" here would also be taggable. I think, too, that the we should keep track of the owners of tags. So a tag in that sense is distinct from a "connection" here. A "connection" is would get at the idea; a tag would be a one word or phrase description of the idea. That'd allow the tags to help navigate through the connections, as well as anything else that could be a node.

The other role for tags would be something that is already implicit in many usages of tags, especially on delicious: the role of filter. "for:jgroom" is not a descriptive tag, it is a tag to filter the content (maybe 'direct' is more accurate than 'filter') toward a particular person, jgroom. The practice of a group, say, the attendees of a conference, choosing one tag to use for all the posts and images on flickr related to the conference often seems more like a filter-tag than a descriptive tag: the tag is often so obscure that it only serves a descriptive purpose to those who attend the conference, and seems in general to be an arbitrary mechanism for filtering content. Such filter-tags would likely play a large role in the organization of the system. How, exactly, will likely have to be the topic of a later post.

The Name

It's funny that this is also kicking up so much mental dust, but the name for this whatever-it-is is under lots of discussion (see Jeff's suggestion). For something completely different and non-acronymic, here's another for the ring:

Cuneiform

As in both "It's so pre-alpha it's cuneiform" and "an early system of recording, organizing, and transmitting knowledge."