Free Software Notes — Crowd-Sourcing the Library of the Future
What FSN means literally, and also what it could mean for our internet-happy society
The internet brings massive potential for knowledge-sharing, collaboration and self-schooling across the globe. There’s an unimaginable amount of data online. Facts tucked away in articles, in .pdf publications, in 50 min YouTube videos with 500 views, in old should-be-deprecated academic web pages, in Facebook posts… you get the idea. These are facts that can make us smarter, better, give rise to fantastic innovations that are not yet even close to seeing the light of day.
As a growing society of internet users, our task is to mine this data. While there is a massive abundance of data and information available, it is largely lacking in its actionability. Whether the data is tucked away in jargon-filled technical docs, or really just publications that require some degree of specialization in any field, there is a lot of information now that people can not actually use productively. This is a problem, but we can work together to change that.
The free software education movement is fantastic right now. There are a ton of really great education hubs popping up online that are completely free. A few great ones that I’ve used are:
Gutenberg.org…. And plenty of others.
These sites and projects offer fantastic resources to us as consumers and as students. If we want to teach ourselves the ability to Full Stack code (full-time remote positions for Full Stack programmers often pay 80k + per year, for reference) we could hop online and start building an online portfolio as a programmer. An online portfolio that looks good and shows you know what you’re doing can act as a resume in itself, without any “official” schooling. If we study well enough, there’s no limit to the expertise we can gift ourselves with.
Beyond resume-boosters, we can learn about History, Philosophy, Culture, Laws… again, you get the idea here. Infinite possibilities come with learning resources.
One thing I noticed is that for most of this movement so far, the resources you’ll find are really well made. edX’s resources come directly from top universities. Codecademy offers a suite of fully interactive programming courses. This seems like it would be a great thing, but I’d like to offer a different view. Maybe it’s not so great that the only materials that we see are top-notch.
Sometimes, I want to just get in some good educational karma after a day and quickly do something that’s good for my mind. I don’t necessarily want to open a Gutenberg novel, or begin an entire course from MIT on how to use Python.
If the majority of educational courses put out on the web are highly professional and full-length, this almost seems to discourage people who are not graphic web designers and/or educational professionals from creating and sharing their own research materials. This would be, using the mining example, like if the only people mining for resources were the ones with vast heavy machinery, when there were plenty of valuable minerals just laying on the ground.
Why save teaching only for the professionals?
When I decided to create some FSN, I was reading through an article on Machine Learning. I was very new to the topic, so I was jotting down notes, memory cues and quotes into a word doc. Then I thought: why put this in a word doc when I can share it?
My first thought was: well, because it would take too much effort to format. If you are an editor or writer on this site, you’ve probably found that Medium is pretty easy to use. Not to mention, I think back to classes I took in college. I always found that when I taught or presented material that I had previously learned to others, it actually helped me learn and retain the information I was teaching far better. Maybe it would work the same in crafting a summary for the material on Medium?
It did. I’ve found that when I type notes into a word doc, I’m a lot of the times just copying and pasting quotes from articles that I’ll never remember past 2 days in the future. Even worse, I’ll read back on the notes later and not even remember what the text meant or why I thought it was important at the time. In college, I was writing a book I called “The Omen” about the relationship between linguistics and the structure of the universe. I had a separate doc for the book where I pasted all of the things I thought were relevant for research. To show you how awful my note-taking can be, here’s a snippet right at the top of the doc:
Wundt — “The resultants arising from united psychical processes include contents that were not present in the components, and these new contents may in turn enter into relation with the old components thus changing again the relations between these old components” [p. 327]
-relations between components lead to new components which allows for changes in the old relations between components (what if the relationships were the components? This should still hold). The component and the relationship such a component has over all other components. This makes sense: the initial causes are a set of components. The set of components can be characterized as relationships between the components themselves and their involvements in their reality (or their involvements with one another). These components in other words are defined individually based on their involvements within the aggregate set of components. So when the causes cause an effect, what we can see this change as is a shift in the relationships between the causal components. The cause is the initial relationships that are defined, the effect is the final relationships that are defined, and the cause-and-effect relation is the change that leads from the initial set of relationships to the final set of relationships.
So, I hope the problem is pretty clear here. I kind of know what I was talking about back then, but this mess certainly takes a bit of a dissection process to go from just words into actionable information. Where do “causes” come into play in this? That’s my first thought. And it takes me a while to figure that out. Even if I was able to translate for myself and dissect the meaning of this, the sheer time it took me to dig through tells me I wasn’t thinking much about my formatting when I wrote this. Here’s a thought:
Why not kill 2 (or 3) birds with one stone?
If I was reading Wundt, I could draft a summary article FSN-style that is simply meant to summarize what I was reading. I’m obviously not going to jump as far as to speak entirely on Wundt’s behalf, but if I can write short quips on parts of Wundt’s theories, I could write out a set of notes that self-analyses and admits its weaknesses. If I wrote notes out in a pseudo-humorous, casual fashion that an 8th grader could read, I must have some understanding of the material. Then, I’m not only taking chunks of text and writing thought summaries about the text as the first thing that pops into my mind, I’m also formatting rough learning material for others who may want to spend a few minutes quickly browsing over some good ol’ classical Psychology. Three birds, one stone:
[Bird 1] I am remembering more about the content I’m reading as I read it. In order to write in a way that others can understand, I know at the very least that I understand what I’m saying.
[Bird 2] In the future I can read back over my notes and recall way quicker what I had learned.
[Bird 3] If I publish it FSN style, if others want to learn from it, they’re welcome to. To be honest, people probably won’t read it, but the other two points were enough to convince me to take notes like this anyway, so why not put it out there just in case it’s useful to someone?
FSN is not professional academic material, but it’s also not just odd rambling, scattered notes either. When writing in this way, you subconsciously train yourself to present information in a useful way. That’s the way you plan on using the information anyway… right? You don’t have to pretend you know what you’re talking about if you don’t; hell, acknowledging you don’t understand parts of what you’re reading might make your “students” feel better about their lack of understanding. Then they know to study that part of the material using other sources that are slightly more legitimate than you are.
Not to mention, the more you create FSN, the more you showcase your own ability to read and understand material overall, even if you don’t perfectly understand all of what you’re reading. And if you get something wrong, maybe someone will leave you feedback at the bottom of the article and help correct you.
Even further down the road: imagine a giant library of FSN. This would essentially be a huge amount of pretty actionable information. Then we can do an even better job of FSN-ing that material, vastly improving the E-Learning field on a massive scale. Ad infinitum. Millions upon Millions of teachers teaching teachers. Maybe that’s a pipe-dream, but it’s an exciting one.
To cap this off, we are learning more and more with the advent of Machine Learning and technology that it is best to produce and handle information algorithmically. In an algorithm, you want the equation or program to run as efficiently as possible. If you have overlaps or redundancies, you can make your algorithm much better by consoling those redundancies, and combining the efforts into one. If we can crowd-source E-Learning and treat it like we would an algorithm, we have a lot more hands working to build the Library of the Future.
If we’re all learning the same things independently, why not help each other out? If it takes me 5 days to learn to use a Wordpress template as an expert from 7 separate YouTube videos, why not keep all of my notes from those studies in one spot and publish them? Maybe then, the next person who wants to learn the same thing I did can learn it in a day, or 5x as fast!
I’m all about saving wildlife, but let’s save some stones too. If we can kill a lot of birds with very few stones in the learning process, we might as well go for it.
I for one look forward to helping build the crowd-sourced library of the future.
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Don’t forget to hit the Recommend button if you like the idea of OSN, so others can check this out!
Also, follow the publication Free Software Notes if you want to see what FSN looks like so far in action. It’s still learning its baby steps though.
If you want to submit Free Software Notes articles through the FSN channel, Please, please do! Shoot me an email via: garrett [at] aradiancecollective.com … just include a link to your article, draft or published, and I’ll add your article to the publication.
As always, I appreciate you reading this and I’d be grateful to get your feedback below in the comments.
