Park's Blog

Re: cognitive dissonance

It's tough trying to understand something when the activity is early days, lots of changes are happening, and especially when people (in this case me) are making mistakes. Moving the Subject Index was merely a goof. Just like now when I went to fix it and moved this page (Jack Park's blog) to the root. Thankfully I noticed that just when I pushed the "Move Page" button, panicked a bit, then moved it back. Also moved the Subject Index back to where it's intended to be. I'm with you on the idea of developing best practices and an editorial contract.

Andy, those "mistakes" are all part of the learning process. What's really cool is that we get to do this at a free site where we can potentially come to a much better understanding of where we are going and where we need to go (which, I suspect, is a "wicked" issue). I don't view them as mistakes; they are acts that create learning opportunities. I used to hear stories about the "blind leading the blind". There may be an analogy sitting there to harvest.

Oddly enough, it's an aspect of my thesis project, this cognitive dissonance thing. How to reduce it? How to make it so that people who visit this site somehow are made to "feel right at home" just surfing the front page? How to provide opportunities to navigate the issues we discuss no matter what cognitive style a viewer applies? In my project, I pay just a bit less attention to an inventory of cognitive styles, more attention to creating a knowledge organization system that fully supports clients that satisfy the range of cognitive styles. What is interesting about both Ning and Deki Wiki (and all the other CMS/Social platforms) is that they combine their CMS with the HCI. For instance, this wiki is both its own HCI platform and the CMS behind it. That's why I suggest in my blog the notion of "fine grained addressability". Each blog entry, each agenda item, each requirement, each use case, just about everything we do here entails or creates individual subjects; each should have its own page in the wiki. By doing that, we allow others to wire up relationships to other subjects more easily. Once you do that, you can then wire up a faceted navigation scheme not unlike http://dmoz.org/ and ask everyone to add links in that index to their page, as many different places as it might fit in the index. That was the idea behind the Subject Index. edited 13:49, 8 Jun 2008

I agree with all of that, Jack. To me, the big challenge is creating a UI that allows for easy maintenance of finely grained content ('cause it gets spread all around) *and* easy assembly of that content into new aggregates. Ning and Deki Wiki (and at the small scale TiddlyWiki) have made some good steps in the right direction. Still, building useful, nontrivial aggregates is a serious programming task.

This is a big topic and I'm delighted it's part of your thesis work.

Jack, I really enjoy reading your posts here, however, now there are many I don't know how to respond in this comment section. Your "Stories are sacred" bit informs me that I shouldn't add comments directly to your page, yet responding down here is so far away from the content and requires me to go to some length to specify which post I'm responding too.

I am giving serious though to refactoring my blog to just an index and giving each "post" its own page. This means your comments will be much more relevant. It also means that each post will be directly addressable for linking elsewhere or including in a topic map. Not sure how to move each comment except to ask each author to move comments as needed. Right now, that's just you and me.

I'm happy to move my comments and recommend that you restrict page access (from the "More" menu) so people don't edit the page content. The latter idea I'd like to see become policy. That is, if you create a page, by default anyone can edit and/or annotate the content itself (like default Wikipedia behavior). If you don't want that to happen, make it clear by restricting access (visually you get a lock icon next to the page title, functionally users can view by not change the content).

Jack, re your list of links to blog posts... hmm, having a title or brief description would be nice... further hmm, hey, that's what an RSS feed does! Does DekiWiki have such a tool (make page, label as "this is one of my blog posts", and DekiWiki adds it to RSS feed, and also has in place the Park's Blog page set up to receive and display feeds....)? edited 16:52, 22 Jun 2008

Mark, if you look under the Tools menu at the top of the page you'll find an "RSS feeds" link. Deki Wiki only does so much in the version we are using. Worse, not all the feeds work (even getting past the password protected site issue). I've asked the MindTouch folks about that and am waiting on a response.