Idea Mining

In "Idea Mining" we ask students to extract generalizable ideas, patterns, or data from research they complete, media they watch, or experiments they perform.

This is not the same as summary. Here we ask students to identify and write up a single re-usable idea, one that they themselves abstract, that might be linked from many places.

For example, they might read one of the "Conference Trip Reports" written by Jakob Nielsen, one of the early researchers on hypertext usability.

In it, they would look for a single idea and make a page for it. For instance, if they read

Davida Charney from Pennsylvania State University was planning a study of the reading strategies used by hypertext readers. These readers face the problem of loss of discourse cues. Traditional text which contains many such cues... showing how the previous relates to the next.

They might make a page called Discourse Cues and summarize how non-linear reading requires a different sort of writing because of the lack of cues such as "As we were saying..."

Why "Idea Mining"? Because of the way the idea has been extracted the idea can be

- developed independently, as other information is found

- linked from many other pages, because the treatment is concise

In this way, the page becomes a building block for more complex ideas.

Here's another example. If you were to read:

There remains the navigation problem of getting lost in hyperspace. Hypertext gives us a goto link which we know from software engineering gives "spaghetti." Van Dam noted that it could be that we have also discovered the equivalent of if-then-else in the form of hierarchies, but we also need new forms of flow of control in structures that users recognize.

You might make a page called Getting Lost in which you reference this article, but also detail personal views about how you get lost in federated wiki, and to what extent that is an issue.

Others can extend this article with more current research, or alternate views.

Pages can be made for any concept from Intersectionality to the Quadratic Formula. Examples are also welcome, as is data.

Students should be encouraged to invent their own names for things where none exist, for example a student looking at educational technology in schools could title the "iPads vs. Chromebooks" debate the Chromebook Wars, or talk about the dangers of technology treated as the Spoonful of Sugar that makes the medicine go down.

These community-created terms then become (along with the disciplinary terms) the terminology and jargon of the class. Students are encouraged to build facility with using these terms to analyze situations and theories.

For example, responding to a presentation on the use of IF-AT scratch cards in Project-based learning, a student might ask "Isn't that just a Spoonful of Sugar approach?"