Curating Knowledge
A review of milq and thoughts on the future of learning content.
At last week’s summit on the future of “Cities of Learning”, I talked with participants about a platform called milq. Upon further research, I found that milq fits squarely in a timely and crucial genre of technology that is working to curate the web. In a lot of my writing, I’ve been attempting to describe the “mythical unicorn” of educational technology and, at its core, that unicorn is mainly a complex curatorial platform. I spent some time with milq to decipher its quality and how useful it might be in the future of knowledge curation.
milq
To begin, it is unfortunately obvious that the milq team has not fully realized the importance of their work. Currently, the contents of milq consists mainly of pop cultural artifacts organized into lists of varying quality. For what it is, the platform is extremely well designed and easy to use, but it fails to separate its purpose from that of the competition. Instead of the “boards” of Pinterest, on milq you sort things into “beads” which are, essentially, lists. Strangely, milq adds a mandatory “?” to the title of every bead. Perhaps to emphasize the lack of surety or completeness in the work?
The potential of milq to differentiate from Pinterest lies in its broader approach and the ability to sort lists (beads) by certain criteria. While Pinterest is primarily the land of image-rich topics (crafts, designs, fashion, etc.), milq appeals to the curation of topics that are less aesthetically interesting. The broader approach is also evident in the focus on collaboration. Most every list is curated by multiple people.
Although its usefulness is not evident for most topics, the beads (lists) on milq allow for a second level of curation. When viewing a bead, you can sort it by recommendations, contributors, or timestamp. If the recommendations system were to mature, one could not only see what content is attached to a certain topic, but which content the community thought was best.
The two levels of curation and the collaborative process are the most important but least realized aspects of milq, in large part due to the trivial nature of the content. Most of milq is populated by lists like “Favorite TV Commercials?” or “My New Favorite Song?” I’m starting to think that the required “?” is mandatory to make the headlines better buzzfeed-esque clickbait, e.g. “What impossible thing did this celebrity do to make a million dollars?” Milq will become interesting when a lot of people start collaborating on a difficult topic. Many of those difficult topics are found in the curation of knowledge and of learning.
milq for Learning
I was only able to find one bead within milq that was expressly focused on an obvious topic of learning: the French Revolution. A lone curator lists 3 videos on the subject, including one from Khan Academy. Before I found this, I went ahead and created my own brief example bead: “How do I build a canoe?” Both lists are short and underwhelming, but useful. In this way, milq can help learners find curated content, contribute their own expertise, and even queue up content for future learning. The problem with milq, however, is that learning is rarely done on singular topics, we learned in networks. Even the very simple example of canoe-building is limited by the scope of milq. What if I need to define separate techniques for building fiberglass versus wooden canoes, and the technique for epoxying and waterproofing demands its own page?
See, for example, this visualization of the connections to “Canoe” on Wikipedia. Milq can reference “related beads” by means of tagging and other reference points, but it lacks the important curatorial work that actually maps the network between points of knowledge. To be fair, Wikipedia does not quite do this either. This map references generic links within pages, not meaningful connections based on the chosen topic. The map we need to create for learners will show the learning pathways between digital and in-person content, not just the topical associations.
From a learning perspective, Milq could provide a simple tool for people to collaborate on answering the question “What is the best content to help me learn about x ?” and can create social activity around that content. This could integrate nicely with the current City of Learning platform by listing relevant content alongside broad categories of in-person learning opportunities. For instance, the Coding & Gaming filter on the City of Learning page could include a section for milq “beads” that reference digital Coding & Gaming learning content. At a basic level, this alludes to that “mythical unicorn” of ed.tech I mentioned earlier: a map of learning resources that integrates local opportunities and digital content.
Although it is still a long way from the platform that we need to curate the super-abundance of learning resources, milq is a useful intermediary tool that could be easily plugged into current projects. If taken up by the right communities and used expressly for the purpose of learning, milq could adequately function as “the Pinterest of learning resources”. These resource lists could then be embedded side-by-side with lists of in-person opportunities. One crucial thing here, of course, is missing: the data behind the milq-lised resources is fully separate from the in-person opportunities, any connections are merely visual, based on broad topical associations. Learning pathways that integrate resources are not made possible.
Although milq has more polish and funding, a more important beginning to this work is the Federated Wiki project and its ramifications for collaborative knowledge creation as explained by Mike Caulfield. There is a serious need for someone soon to build the platform we do need, but I have yet to see it.
