Cognitive Maps and Other Learning Hacks

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:00:00 -0700

I am reading Andy Hunt’s excellent book, Pragmatic Thinking & Learning. I’ve been waiting for it to come out, and I’m glad I have it. I’ll review it formally when I’ve finished it. Meantime, I’d like to submit some related material that has been critical for me to be able to write Tegu, to this point. The main ideas are:

Cognitive Maps
Mind Maps
Collaborative Thinking
Systems Thinking
Systems Dynamics and Archetypes
Non-monotonic Thinking or Focusing on the Essential

Cognitive Maps

A cognitive map is, on the surface, a note taking tactic. With practice, you’ll learn that it’s much more. The essential elements to capture from every worthwhile article or chapter are:

Citation
Terms and Definitions
Statement of the Author’s Message
Discussion of Concepts
Questions about the Concepts
Association of the Material to Other Knowledge
Application of Material
Assessment of the Author’s Presentation

It’s a thorough outline. I use both templates in my word processing software and a simple Rails application to capture that information. When I have material that is dense, far-removed to things I’m comfortable with, or critical to understand, I don’t hesitate to pull out the big guns. I actually sleep better at night knowing that I have big guns for the big problems.

Cognitive maps assist me with much more than just organize data, however. They ask me to practice moving between expansive and analytical thinking. I have to massage the material in many ways using different parts of my brain, finally signaling to myself and others the relative position of this new knowledge in the overall hierarchy of beliefs that I hold in my mind. That’s a very powerful effect that I just can’t leave to chance alone to produce for me. It is not enough to understand another person’s thoughts, I have to be responsible with that newfound knowledge.

Mind Maps

This is a tool that I use at least once every day. If you don’t have Free Mind, go get it. Now. Thanks. I’ve used Free Mind for presentations, making arguments, taking notes, organizing classes, exploring possibilities, keeping todo lists, storing documents, making a browsing history, and defining ontologies. This is a very versatile tool.

Use this tool for expansive thinking. What if this doesn’t work? What if I try that? How do these relate? Can these ideas possibly exist in the same universe? It turns out that the fast nature of taking these kinds of notes is very useful. The visual and tactile experience I have with my ideas gives it deeper meaning and usefulness. This kind of thinking uses the creative resources found on the right hemisphere of my brain, as well as relieves a lot of the workload in the frontal lobes (determining priority and relevance).

Other parts of the brain can also be engaged with this tool. When decomposing a problem, I am using analytical tools, the left hemisphere. I am creating a linear view on the problem set. Mind maps are also very useful for this kind of thing.

Collaborative Thinking

Most people know what I’m talking about if I mention brain storming. You sit in front of a white board and call out ideas, which are written down and evaluated later. This is a watered-down version of what I’m talking about. There are other approaches that are very useful. Just consider, that the higher the intelligence quotient of the people in any given room seems to be negatively correlated with the decisions they are capable of making together. It takes a little organization to get ideas onto the table and evaluate them properly. Here are some approaches worth looking into for your own use:

The Delphi Method, an approach of bringing expertise into a situation and removing political hierarchies as filters against the ideas
Brain Writing: a process of taking general ideas (such as those generated from brain storming) and developing them serially in the group-each person develops an idea on a piece of paper for a few paragraphs, puts it down, and continues on another’s thoughts.
ICM: a process of prioritizing the issues at hand.

There are a few other collaborative thinking issue that I mention below.

Systems Thinking

This is both an art and an empirical deliverable. The trick is to see an element in its environment, to figure out the implications of how something effects what’s important. There are many really useful methodologies that have been developed to deliver this from the likes of Thomas Edison and the Rand Corporation. I will likely write a few articles just on this, because it has everything to do with how Tegu should be used.

Here is a pragmatic approach to get started with this.

Define the Problem
Explore the Possibilities
Setup the Environment
Develop the System
Maintain the System

Again, the important thing here is what’s happening cognitively. We’re approaching a problem with different cognitive tools that open us to fresh and thorough thinking.

Systems Dynamics and Archetypes

System dynamics are like a bathtub: the water comes in through a faucet, sits in the tub, and drains. This can be applied to just about everything. What should happen when looking at the dynamics of a system is the recognition of archetypes. Peter Senge outlines many of these archetypes in his classic business book, The Fifth Discipline. What changes in my thinking is when I see a Winner Take All or Tragedy of the Commons archetype being played out, I change my approach to the process all together.

One of the spinoffs from Tegu is a gem/Tegu plugin just for this. There will be articles on how to use this both as a cognitive tool and a programming tool.

Non-monotonic Thinking or Focusing on the Essential

Another spinoff gem/plugin is a truth maintenance system called non-monotonic reasoning. This is the way that we typically think. In fact, that last sentence is a very good example of non-monotonic reasoning. We are able to generalize and infer meaning from some basic rules without needing to fact-check every rule in our minds:

Birds typically fly
Roasted birds typically fly
Sunday dinner is typically roasted bird
Sunday dinner will not likely fly away

The cognitive tool here is making expectations explicit. Writing them down when I’m stuck helps me see where I’ve extended my thinking in fallible ways. Since this is also a piece of software on my hard drive, there will also be some pragmatic discussion about using this in our systems.

So there you have it: tools to clean your thinking and solve problems faster. Explicitly use a few of these ideas, and problems seem to present their own answers more quickly. I’ve had to use concrete approaches to each of these ideas in order to bring Tegu along as far as it’s come.

Getting Started

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:21:00 -0700

This isn’t an article on getting started with Tegu. Not yet. This is an article about getting started with blogging. See, I have about 15,000 lines of code that I’ve written. Some of it needs a lot of refactoring and tests. Some of it is really quit ready. Some of it is being spun off into other gems that will work as plugins for Tegu. That’s a lot of work. It’s going to be released. Soon. I’ve promised. And still promise. I’m taking advantage of nobody needing an immediate bug fix, to run more test code, to think through some edge cases, to make sure that at least I’m happy with a few major issues. This isn’t very Agile. Andy Hunt tells me (through his new book, one I’ll review soon) that this means I’m not using the right side of my brain. I’d argue that I’m using even less than that sometimes.

Meanwhile, there’s this blog. This blog is where I’ll demonstrate how to run some basic machine learning or system-centric ideas with Tegu. Kind of a live teaser for what I’m doing in the labs right now. Part of my prep work is to take the machine learning course at Stanford, and concretize it for Tegu users. So, you should expect a series of articles on that. There will be articles on installing and using Tegu. There will be articles on basic systems ideas, such as dynamics and nonmonotonic reasoning. I’m flying to San Francisco in a couple of weeks to listen to the Rapleaf people talk about Hadoop, an important clustering resource for Tegu. So there should be quite a bit of concrete information found here. There’s also the Google Group, which will be ever-more interesting as people get their hands on this technology and take it for a spin. Finally, I’ll post the Lighthouse and Gitgears links here when they’re appropriate and useful for issue tracking and the git source respectively.

If you’re just wanting to get your feet wet, you can check out a video taken of me at the Lone Star Ruby Conference. It’s pretty rough. Hal Fulton’s comment to a friend of mine, after my talk was, "so what does it do?" Good question Hal. I was too nervous, too involved in the project to get that answered. I’ll get it right.

So, welcome to my blog, at least. There’s a lot of exciting and worthwhile things on their way.

Tegu in Action :