Re:Compile — Effective digital learning
Curate your knowledge resources, share your learning path and learn from other’s journey
Learning in the 21st century is a life-long process. Many of us have the access to the internet to educate ourselves. Moreover, we learn from various courses, videos, blogs, podcasts, articles and academic papers to satisfy our curiosity, change jobs or do better in our current roles. The whole process of digital learning today has the following unanswered questions —
1. How do we manage/store everything we have learned from various sources about different fields?
The problem that everyone faces today is not where to find information but the abundance of information (information overload). The links we go through are often lost in the great rally of web engine searches.
Let’s say I am trying to learn finance and I go through several links— some useful, some not so. How do I track this information for my future use? One option is to use a bookmarking app but most such apps list URLs through tags and do not take the conceptual information about the content of the link into consideration. If I give the tag of ‘Finance’ to a 100 links, the app will list them all in a sequential manner.
2. How do I arrange the knowledge semantically?
To access the knowledge, I have learned I would want to take notes, go through them in the future, search through them and visualize them in a better way than lists.
How do I align the information I have gathered through time semantically and conceptually so that it is easier to revisit?
3. How do we share what we have learned?
Traditional degrees were a good way to show what you know. But now as fields are changing and the world relies more on skillset than degrees, how can one share their knowledge with others? Also how can we share the granularity of our skillset?
4. How can we learn from others?
If today I have to learn a new topic or enhance my knowledge of a topic. I would ask my colleague / someone more experienced to me in that field. How can someone share what they go through on a daily basis to expand their learning in a field? Some people might find the time to actively share this information but others might not have this time slot window.
Imagine you could see what papers / resources your advisor / mentor / anyone you want to learn from are going through on a daily basis.
5. Where to learn from?
Learning digitally can be overwhelming.
With so many textbooks, blogs, YouTube videos, University open source courses, customized courses, podcasts how do you know where to learn from? Which is the best course to take which maximizes your output (in terms of what you want to achieve by learning that) in the minimum amount of time. There is one quick fix for this problem —
A quick search on any search engine ~ This is the easiest resort that people fall to. A quick search on any of the search engines will list me the resources. Here is an example if I search ‘machine learning’ on two of the widely used search engines—
Both the searches recommend me introductory material.
It doesn't take my prior knowledge into consideration, thus making the search not very relevant to what I wanted
6. What to learn next?
Self-learners often struggle with what to learn next. Textbooks are a great source of structured conceptual information. But this is not the case when learning online (unless you are taking a specific course). For example — you took one introductory course on Natural Language Processing (NLP), how do you now know which particular topic to dive deeper into and from where.
Re:Compile
Recompile is a one stop solution for effective digital learning. Here you can curate your digital learning resources, create your learning journey on a topic, share your learning journey with the world and learn from others’ learning journeys’.
The whole idea is based on the fact that each person has their own learning journey which can be represented in graphical form. We use graphs to represent a person’s knowledge based on how people accumulate knowledge ~ Jumping from a video to a Medium explanation to multiple external references.
The solution can be divided into 4 different steps-
- Adding a resource — A resource can be added manually or through the click in a browser extension. The browser extension provides features like saving the highlighted text on a website, adding notes, auto generating tags or manually adding tags
- Formation of your learning journey — At the backend recompile compiles your URLs and attaches that URL to the most relevant previous learning resource. This attachment(or adding of nodes) is based on semantic and conceptual information of the content on the page.
- Sharing your journey — To share what you have learned and what concepts you know. You can share your knowledge with others
- Learning from others — You can look to other’s learning journeys for finding out where and what to learn next. You can search the topic you want to learn and the results will match you with people with similar interests and suggest the resources that they have been through.
Collaborations, Questions and Comments
If you are someone who is interested in the idea or actually want to work on building Re:Compile or have any other questions /comments feel free to email at recompile.ai@gmail.com. We are looking for front and backend developers to connect to.
