Mind improving tool announcement

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 1:58 PM, qwerty <ganqqwerty at bk.ru> wrote:
> Hello, everybody. I'd like to present you our project in OLPC.
>
>  Tool that we develop improves such system thinking skills as
>  generalizing, abstracting, decomposing.
>  The idea is to make the application as intuitive as possible with the
>  help of ideas of mind mapping and modeling software.
>  At first, children choose the topic of current modeling session. They
>  can take one of existing topics or create their own one.
>  After that, children use tool palette to create objects and
>  relationships between them in the context of the topic.

I took a look. So far, I seen an enhanced mindmapping tool with
crosslinking and backlinking, and I take your word for it that there
is much more. I like the graphical UI so far.

>  Each topic is represented by ontology so relationships and objects are
>  elements of topic ontologies.

Where do these ontologies come from? Who creates them, and how?
Ontologies imply various purposes, even epistemologies and ethical
systems. The ontology of nations supports many political and economic
purposes, while denying others, and has often been used to justify
war, although it could in principle be used just as well to justify
international cooperation. The ontology and epistemology of Free
Software or of Constructionist education are quite different from
those of proprietary software and the long tradition of
Prussian-style education, with its insistence that the correct answers
are those that you memorized from the textbook.

>  Relationships can have properties (transitive, symmetric, functional,
>  inverse functional), and object can unite into classes.
>  When map is created in the workspace, children can ask questions about
>  it (about existing objects and their relations with far-away ones).
>  Ontology ideas are very close to the system thinking.

Piaget and Vygotsky asked how children construct their epistemologies
and ontologies out of their experience.

> With the ability
>  to represent properties, classes, individual
>  concepts etc in a simple and funny way this tool will be suitable for
>  entertaining and educating children.
>  We don't know yet what ontology language to use, it could be RDF or OWL.
>  Does anybody know something about similar projects? Or may be somebody
>  wants to join us?
>  At the moment we are working in a group of three.

I'm interested in asking questions in the hope that I and you will
come to understand what your project may mean.

>  Our UI Prototype here:
>  http://kkv.spb.su/doku.php?id=etc:teach:diplomants:projects:2009:olpcmind:artifacts:inception:requirements:uiprototype
>  Other artifacts are only in Russian, we will translate it, if it's
>  necessary.

Хорошо, спасибо.

>  Yura
>  _______________________________________________
>  Devel mailing list
>  Devel at lists.laptop.org
>  http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay