How people are using Thortspace
Bob Clark
“I’m a ‘vectorized’ kind of guy. I think in 3D thanks to the greatest teacher in my life: Legos. Again with the hands. So I set out looking for an ap to create mind maps in 3D with. Nothing flat will do. ThortSpace was it. I haven’t looked recently, but at the time there were no other choices.”
Colin Horner — BNI Chapter Development
Colin Horner talks about how he is using Thortspace to develop BNI chapters.
Jane Tyson — Project Oakleaf
“Solving World Problems One Mum at a Time.
Rama Dasaratha’s Growing Systems of Success (GSS) inspired a 7 day Thortspace sharing experience.
In this collaborative, creative and thort provoking space we created a number of individual nano-projects, one of which was to create a YouTube video to explain what occurred!
These foundational nano experiences are catalysts for bigger projects. Who knows maybe even contributing to solving world problems one thort at a time?
You can find our 7 day sphere at https://thort.space/187297004/view/-0.332369,-0.94126,0.059675/up/0.033445,0.05147,0.998114/zoom/549.218/trans/1
Jane Tyson #randdialvid #frustrationexpert ”
Schools of Tomorrow — Xavier Canute Nao Gibbons
“For the first four days of October I travelled around the west of England for Schools of Tomorrow to train students on Thortspace. The results of the training sessions were very positive and encouraging, students seemed to have great fun with the software.
Thortspace was praised for it’s intuitive interface by students and staff across all 6 of the schools. The students seemed to have a very easy time navigating the program and creating and linking content, even the students in their primary years picked up the software very easily and for some, even went ahead at times. This was true for students using iPad and Windows versions of the software.
The visuals of Thortspace were very well received at all schools with students mentioning how cool the software looks and exclaiming “wow” at the various animations and transitions. The ability to customise the spheres and drag and drop spheres to link them to each other was also fascinating to students and the collaboration over the network was a lot of fun for them. Even the cloud saving feature interested students as it allowed them to work on spheres outside of school. They generally seemed to be eager to continue using the software.
Thortspace ran well on both high-end and low-end systems, this can also be said about phones as it works quite well on my lower-end phone. Very little to no lag was experienced on all the machines I have worked with.
Praise was very universal across all 6 schools. The issues that had been experienced during the training session were on the whole quite minor but most were very specific to certain schools/ students.
The most consistent issue accross schools spawned from the installer for Thortspace. By default it installs into “appdata”, this proved to be a problem as all schools required the software to be installed elsewhere, usually “program files”. Luckily the folder can simply be moved from appdata to program files or any other folder and it works perfectly. The consensus from school technicians was that it would be useful to be able to choose install location. When given instruction about the appdata install location it seemed to be quite straightforward for most of the schools to install it. On another note a few of the technicians said that having a web-app version of the program would be convenient as well.
Another common issue was dropouts during shared sphere collaboration. I find out that having over 5 clients collaborating on the same sphere was the main cause of these dropouts, so I limited shared spheres in most of the workshops to 5 clients each, that made collaboration much more responsive and we stopped experiencing drop-outs.
One piece of feedback we got regarding collaboration was a request for further control over permissions on spheres. At times students would accidentally or intentionally interfere with other student’s thorts and groups, in which cases the ability to enable or disable collaboration on different thorts or groups would be very useful.
There was one instance where a student was feeling nausea because of another student changing the size of the sphere quickly in a shared sphere with a lot of thorts on it. There was only one case of this but it might be useful to know.
One school had some big issues with collaboration however that is not the fault of the software but rather because the quality of internet access at that school is poor as the school is unfortunately placed for internet access. This made collaboration virtually impossible sue to constant and long drop-outs. This did cause further problems later on where students couldn’t actually access their own spheres because of dropouts. We eventually had to turn off the Wi-Fi, from there the workshop went very smoothly however and the school seemed to be quite happy to use the software locally. It might be useful to have a Local Mode which ignores Wi-Fi for cases like this so students could stay connected to Wi-Fi whilst working locally. The students in this school were using iPads which were very easy to install the software onto and the app was also very intuitive and fun for them to use. One issue on iPads was the tolerance for selecting the outer edge of spheres to resize them, it is a bit difficult to select the border. There was also a problem with selecting parts of a body of text in the application on iPad, it wouldn’t allow you to append text to the centre of some text, it also wouldn’t allow selection of certain parts of text too.
Other feedback includes the idea of an included spell checker, the ability to use images as a texture when editing the sphere and having all features unlocked by default without having to go through the tutorials.
All the issues experienced were quite limited compared to the great response from the students who took part. I think the Thortspace team should be very proud of the software and the potential it has in many industries.
I hope this feedback is of use to you all.”
~ Xavier Canute Nao Gibbons
Link to related Facebook group post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thortspace/permalink/1851252994922895/
Japanese: We Japanese do not think it strange if a dialogue leaves undefined what is really intended, or even restores it back to the keeping of the undefinable.
Heidegger: That is part, I believe, or every dialogue that has turned out well between thinking beings. As if of its own accord, it can take care that that undefinable something, not only does not slip away, but displays its gathering force ever more luminously in the course of the dialogue.
~ From “On The Way to Language”, Martin Heidegger
Edward Hoare — Sustainable Development Goals
“Finally, we now have a repeatable, scalable process for learning, and Thortspace is an integral part of the workflow.
We started a feature page on Medium to document our journey.
Move learning forward one nano-project at a time!
While we had not viewed Thortspace as a workflow application, that is the use that is of most value to us at this time. The dynamic arrangement of activities in spheres conveys the way nano-projects emerge over time. We have a long-term macro-project goal. However, the scope and sequence of micro and nano projects is not pre-determined. We do nano-projects and decide on new projects based on progress.
In the learning workflow context, nano-projects are repeatable. We have categories of nano-projects (e.g., watch a video, write about a topic) that are repeated daily. We use categorization features of Thortspace to show the different types of nano-projects.
As we do nano-projects and seek feedback from our thinking partners, new nano-projects arise. Unlike a traditional learning process where a the sequence of learning activities is pre-determined, we are continually adjusting our learning processes, and thus the types of nano-projects. The Thortspace sphere provides us a unique visual representation that we intend to use consistently to document our learning journey.
We are using the arrangements feature in Thortspace for version control. As our learning workflow evolves, we start a new arrangement to capture significant changes to the workflow.”
~ Prof. Dasaratha Rama, Florida International University
The Journey to Wakelet
See: https://wakelet.com/
Integrating Thortspace content and journeys with Medium articles:
Some more Medium articles by Dasaratha Rama:
NCF presents on war avoidance in Iran — a breakdown of the key issues
Predicting trends in the Middle East
“We use Thortspace to analyse crises in the Middle East and predict trends. Our methodology is to use the software as framework on which to identify probabilities. Thus for instance in regard to the question of prospects for Bashar al-Assad’s survival, there were a number of options: # Ongoing civil war # Coup d’etat # Rebel victory # Government victory # Foreign intervention # Negotiated peace # Unilateral reform AND there were a range of time frames from 2 weeks to more than two years plus from the outset of the war. We used Thortspace to look at various factors such as the commitment of the external players, using the various categories in the category set library and adding our own (e.g. “hegemonic interest”) and brainstorming as to the importance of all the various factors we could think of, then adding values to each factor after exporting the file to exel. The consequence was that we were able to predict the fall of Bashar for Spring 2014 at the earliest despite predictions from others that his fall would take place within weeks. We conducted a similar exercise to predict the future of Iraq’s Premier Malaki. Here we examined a range of factors including: # Sunni insurgency # Security # Federalism # External political control As a consequence of the analysis facilitated by Thortspace we predict Premier Malaki and his Dawa Party will remain in control in 2014 but that he will lose the 2018 general election and be succeeded by an alternative Shiite Premier from the Majlis party or one of its affiliates Overall we have found Thortspace an invaluable aid to examining situations and brainstorming predictions of possible outcomes.”
“Using the mind-mapping software Thortspace, they covered the key issues concerning war avoidance in Iran: the nuclear issue, relations with terror groups, geopolitical ties in the Middle East, and domestic issues.”
see:
Dr. Jamie Schwandt, (Ed.D.)
Opportunities Emerge In Confusing And Chaotic Situations.
See the articles and links below:
Kinhost.org: encouraging internal community
“What I mean by ‘free-form’ mind-mapping software. You probably don’t want mind-mapping software that locks you in to a center ‘thought’ and then has distinct branches from there — that’s much more like an outline. You want to be able to draw independent ‘Nodes’ and have several branches or connections as needed. ‘Thought-Mapping’ applications. So we used this 3D ‘collaborative thinking’ software to re-create our complicated headmap with myriad subsystems and connections in it: https://www.thortspace.com which allows you to tour your ‘globe’ headmap from various directions. Other ‘Thought-mapping’ software could be of interest, but probably not as pretty. And in cases like “TheBrain” (which we’ve used for information and has a free individual license), it doesn’t allow any independent nodes (as mentioned above)… so it doesn’t work well for most system maps.”
The Human Research Project
CAMBRIDGE, UK — What will happen to emotion, art, humor, inspiration, culture, philosophy, and spirituality when Humans and Artificial Intelligences merge around the year 2030, during the series of events researchers at Google and elsewhere call the Singularity?
That is one of the questions addressed by the Human Research Project, a worldwide online series of experiments currently being conducted by researchers and students from Cambridge, Berkeley, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale. One answer, according to HRP Community Directors Anna Chu Lin and Wolfram Ruisdael, is intense cultivation, through the groups interactive 3D Mind Mapping using Thortspace, of uniquely human qualities like Awe, Humor, and Inspiration, that are rarely addressed in discussions of current AI technology. We find that every human alive today is the inheritor of certain archetypes which help to form our individual psyches, and the ways we feel and emote in the world say Lin and Ruisdael. These include the Hero, the Philosopher, the Humanitarian, the General, the Lover,the Experimenter, and many others. Each of these is hard to replicate with current AI technology.
“To participate in the Human Research Project, first go through the experiments below. Then create your own 3D mind mapped planet, or ‘sphere’ on Thortspace by going to Thortspace.com.
On your own planet you will place ‘continents’ which are the component ‘selves’ that exist within you. Each planet is an Earth-like simulated 3D globe traveling through space amongst other similar bodies. (This will make more sense after you plunge in). You can use the Human Research Project account on Thortspace, or start your own.
Creating and playing with ‘spheres’ can show you hidden relationships between, and insights about your various selves. Performing the experiments below will teach you enough that you can design your own protocols for examining your other personas.”
For more about The Human Research project, and to read more from this article quoted above, follow these links:
http://humanresearchproject.org/ http://7thspace.com/headlines/537244/online_research_project_seeks_to_protect_uniquely_human_qualities_from_ai.html
https://sites.google.com/site/humanresearchprojectindia/
http://www.releasenews.co.uk/business/online-research-project-seeks-to-protect-uniquely-human-qualities-from-ai
Printernet — Everyone can read
A Multiplicidade E Unidade Das Ciências E A Arte
http://recalibrando.com.br/2019/06/05/a-multiplicidade-e-unidade-das-ciencias-e-a-arte/
Reality Decoded
Thort Space is a weird but fun way of looking at your site or organizing ideas
“Thort Space is a weird but fun way of looking at your site or organizing ideas. I framed Reality Decoded into it for fun, check it out.”
Note-taking at Philosophy Club talks
My article on LessWrong about Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Lots more examples of Thortspace use
Zoom
Arrange
Transition
Rotate
Scale up
The Public Spheres and Journeys Lists
The public sphere lists provide a whole load of examples of how people are using Thortspace. These lists do not include the spheres which users have made private, are keeping locally only on their devices and computers, or are private sharing with their teams.
2020
2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, December 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, November 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, October 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, September 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, August 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, July 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, June 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, May 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, April 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, March 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, February 2019
- Public Spheres and Journeys, January 2019
2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, December 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, November 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, October 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, September 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, August 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, July 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, June 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, May 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, April 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, March 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, February 2018
- Public Spheres and Journeys, January 2018
2017
Next from Thortspace, read this:
Or this:
Or this:
Thortspace community group on Facebook
