Beyond the Discussion Thread

Text can be thought of as words created of letters, but they, by definition more than that, the word text derives from the concept of weaving. Text is push-thought. But, to become valid in society, ideas (push-thoughts) need to move into some kind of context.

"Textual knowledge is that relevant to understanding of grammatical aspects of the language"

"Contextual knowledge means the awareness of inter-sentential relationships and the cumulative impact of all preceding text"

Going beyond that, many define further steps ideas can take into their environments, usually referring to them as something like extra-contextual. Language moves from statement units into a context of surrounding statements, and finally into a social environment to gain real and relevant meaning.

"elements that exceed lexical definitions, sentential rules, and compositional principles" exist in "social structures, cultures, expectations, values, behaviors, and language use." Link

In constructively, the extra-contextual environment is thought of as situational. Situational learning goes a dimension beyond contextual learning. It describes the environment a student experiences as she heads out into the sea of discovery, having been released from the initial community of learning, which is usually made safe with scaffolding. She is truly at sea; her learnings lead to discoveries which in turn create many questions, confusion, frustration, and self-doubt. The process of mastery in new areas of learning is fraught with risk and difficulty.

Situational discovery provides ideas so new that no scaffolding can possibly support them. Situated learning is where significant contributions can evolve; where truly revolutionary ideas and solutions to perennial problems can be discovered and developed. Possibly, the ideal work group size for situated learning is two, to provide mutual support. More than two may result in a desire to turn back into safer areas of learning. And, a solo learner will have to weather the emotional stress of self-doubt unassisted. In project science, it is the responsibility of the teacher to help situated students create structures for inquiry, which may, or course, evolve into newly situated confusion. The teacher will have to develop a sense of humor about all this.

Teachers assist students in their project development by helping them analyze new questions, and mysteries, to help them better design inquiry paths as their situated learning reveals to them questions they never knew existed. In project science, the primary goal is building knowledge development skills first, then achieving significant understandings as contributions to community knowledge.

At a certain point, a discussion will ideally revert into individual efforts again because the supports provided by group discussion no longer help the creation of new ideas and significant change. Questions will arise as the result of attempting understanding; the process of inserting thoughts into the group context, hopefully, will raise questions which will lead to significant new discovery. As efforts become situated in the environment, where true impact can be experienced, relationships may develop with the information target audience, hopefully creating new potentials for generalized perception, action, and societal influence.

In the Information Society itself, as separate from human society, ideas spawn into the cytoplasm of contextual interaction. They become situated with each other: clustered into community by commonalities. So, where is the risk? I imagine it is in releasing into the Information Society cytoplasm thoughts whose ideas are so original that they can find no thoughts to link with. But, this seems highly unlikely; the power of the Internet is to link all of humanity. With six billion humans out there, there must be someone thinking the same things; the cytoplasm is safe.

When is a thought, or idea, best set free? Should it be released as an embryonic idea, or an idea that developed within the context of a discussion (the zone of personal development), or an idea that evolved as the result of risky situational discovery. Could it be that within the process of the empathic delivery of influential information, newly developed information becomes the basis of the initiation of a new comprehension, empathizing, and knowledge delivery. Knowledge building is the process of the creation of embryonic ideas.

The actual cumulative effect of the community may ultimately be to spawn embryonic ideas based on questions developed form successful previous knowledge building, an extension of the classical scientific corollary. Resolving political injustices, the activist task, is in effect the process of creating meaning that can be effectively used to construct society's knowledge tree.

The Information Society, now operating far beyond the fairness ideals of two-way communication envisioned by the Humanist engineers Lewis Mumford and Buckminster Fuller, can now allow activists using thought-linking to arrange their concerns into a matrix of ideas which are not criticisms but beneficial suggestions. This is an improvement of the traditional activist role of complainer. It is possible that a fully sophisticated knowledge structure can be analogized by anybody looking at a snowflake. This structure can be laid down on top of the topography of society, which happens to be the surface of the planet, to create a matrix of interactions that are wholly beneficial and based on trust: a resolution to the pain caused by the inequity of what is called free trade.

The features that make humans beneficial (very likely the ideas developed innocently as children become situated in society), can be accessed easily through linking. Contextual Ideas neighboring to originally and locally developed ideas are already familiar because linked ideas have commonalities. When ideas are linked, thoughts can evolve conceptually based on incremental differences. As people traverse through a (or the) matrix of linked ideas, no great leaps are necessary. People accessing information already have mastery of much of the neighboring information, neighboring ideas can be easily mastered allowing easy travel onto other sightly distant neighboring ideas.

Possibly a strong validating feature in contextual linking, is consensual linking. As in a web based friendship, possibly from a real-life friendship, is the idea of permission in friendship. On Care2 (http://www.care2.com), you ask permission from another member to be his friend. It is rare that friendships are rejected, but the process requires consent. In real life, people seeing things in each other that they like simultaneously mutually bond. Delays within Internet communication systems, as well as difficulty in perceiving emotions through the Internet, prevent instantaneous bonding. But, once online friends are introduced in real life, that bonding often occurs.

Linking takes contextual statements from paragraphs, and bigger documents; and creates from many linked statements, the thought basis of highly synthesized documents. Servers are used to link contextual text, consequentially; but, only the human can reflect on text within context, giving it meaningful linking attributes.

As part of the service process of idea linking (something has to do the linking, it might as well be a public domain free system) matched linking profiles would trigger messages seeing if mutual linking is possible. Mutually consensual linking will certainly reinforce the validity of ideas within common areas of comprehension. Opposing ideas, defined by mutually opposing linking profiles, will very likely never connect, though a daring linking server might try to interrelate opposing ideas in an attempt to seek a resolution between them. This may, instead, result in conflict. Still, within the area of idea comparison, and knowledge construction, idea differences never result in anything illegal. The worst type of Internet conflict is the flame-war, the online trading of insults: hardly something to worry about.

Societal knowledge thus built and tested in the activist context as well as the linking process, including consensual linking, would likely be unassailable by the lies of deliberate disruption and free of corruption--a significant improvement over the arbitrary law-making and enforcement process under which we now labor.

It is only in the journey into unexplored areas that comprehension and empathic understanding may be difficult. This may be because many problems have remained unresolved. The journey into discomfort, pain, and even death (the realm of the activist) is fractured and unsupported. The human mind becomes nearly unable to process successfully, yet activists go there anyway. The new model exists to assure the support of an expansive community in this emotionally dangerous area of situated societal discovery.