Open Source Connections toward Progress

[Erik Bellar]

Jamie Heywood: The big idea my brother inspire

"When Jamie Heywood's brother was diagnosed with ALS, he devoted his life to fighting the disease as well. The Heywood brothers built an ingenious website where people share and track data on their illnesses -- and they discovered that the collective data had enormous power to comfort, explain and predict."

(aka - open source medical data base) could be applied into other fields and disciplines... see James Burke and his connections project (could such a model be used for optimizing the democratic political progress?)

[Ed Jewett]

I'll have to watch the TED talk later but certainly what is done here and on other web sites (History Commons, the links here and YouTubes etc.) is also evidence of beginnings. Here are some additional resources:

Architect for Learning: Utilizing The Internet as an Effective Educational Environment, Philip J. Palin and Kari Sandhaas, Saint Thomas Didymus Corporation, Ruckersville, VA (Telelogic Learning Company, www.teleologic.net).

A delightful 35-minute video on “The Global Mind" can be found at http://www.peterussell.com/TV/GB.html.

Try to track down Colby Stuart at the Institute for Collaboration Creativity & Culture in the Netherlands and see what she has done in the field of social and intellectual capital leveraged through networks.

Try to find more about concept mapping [ http://www.ihmc.us/cmaptools.html ] CmapTools is a software suite that facilitates the collaborative construction, sharing and publishing of knowledge models represented as concept maps. CmapTools is used worldwide by millions of users, and is available in over 15 languages. Users of all ages, from elementary school children to NASA scientists and other professionals use CmapTools to express and share their understanding about any topic. Based on a client-server architecture, CmapTools facilitates both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration during the construction of concept maps through CmapServers where concept map-based knowledge models are shared and published as Web pages. The software runs on all hardware/software platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) and is available for free download. To help users learn about concept mapping and its uses, IHMC has also developed the Cmappers.net site.

Other resources are listed in www.iaem.com/documents/SimsandVCOPs1.pdf whose conclusion begins as follows:

"The true value of serious simulation games and the range of other digital learning tools can best be judged by the extent to which they bring people to a higher level of dialogue, discovery, research, learning and collaboration after the game or learning encounter has ended."

In other words, we all still have to get up from our chair and actualize what we need to have happen through face-to-face, spirit-to-spirit human interaction, dancing in the gap of our ma-ai (harmony of distance/space/movement).