Saturday, December 12, 2015

The Joy of Juggling and Learning to Learn

In less than 20 hours, you can significantly increase your learning skills.  The general method applies to a wide range of skills and competencies. The specific approach, learning to juggle, has life-long benefits.


How Do We Learn a New Skill?
I often use juggling to get people to think about how we learn and then discuss what learning methods are most appropriate for different types of skills and competencies.

You can first ask people how they would learn to juggle and they will typically come up with a list like the one below.


You might start with one approach, encounter failure(s) and turn to another approach based on what you discover through your initial attempts.

A Great Way to Learn Quickly from Failure
Juggling offers so many opportunities to learn from failure -- I'm only half kidding here.  Failure is inevitable in learning to juggle and it's quite prevalent at first. Unless you're learning to juggle with clubs or knives, it's not dangerous.(2)

Juggling makes us learn from failure whether we like it or not.  With immediate feedback and a very quick cycle of trial and error, the learning curve is steep.  Deliberate practice makes us learn faster (see Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers) but I'm convinced that simple practice through repetition of the most basic elements of the skill also builds the muscle memory needed to focus on more difficult elements of the skill.

Easily Measurable Progress
Juggling is within everyone's reach.  It's like riding a bicycle. Everyone can learn to ride a bicycle and everyone can learn to juggle.  It is therefore a great tool to help nurture a growth mindset in people (See Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success).  A key advantage to juggling is that progress is very easily measured.  It is only frustrating in the first five minutes of practicing a new skill when you're missing almost all the balls.  Once you've accomplished a single pattern (one cycle of throwing and catching all the balls), you can increase the count and learn variations and new skills.

I'm now reasonably proficient with the three-ball cascade and two-ball fountain with each hand individually.  My next challenges are the four-ball fountain pattern and the three-ball shower.

Learning the Next Skill
This morning, I made my first attempt at the three-ball shower.  While I had seen it done, I had no understanding of the pattern and whenever I tried, my hands reverted to the cascade pattern.  Finally, I searched for a visual on the web that would show me in slow motion what was supposed to happen. Once I understood what it should look like, I was able to deconstruct it.  The lateral passing of one ball from one hand to the other without throwing in the air was the new movement I was struggling with.  So, I practiced that movement with just one ball.  I think it took me a full five minutes, which is ridiculously long when you realize that you're just throwing one ball from one hand to the other. Somehow I wasn't catching it.  Once that was mastered, I picked up a second ball.  Within a few minutes, my brain recognized a nice circular pattern created by the two balls and it became instantaneously easy.  Now I still have to figure out how to add the third ball to the shower.  I read that more height is required than for the cascade. (3)

Learning to Deconstruct - Deconstruct to Learn
The larger point is that like in juggling, many skills can be learned relatively quickly when they are deconstructed carefully (that is the basis of Josh Kaufman's claim that you can learn anything in 20 hours).  It looks silly to practice the basic element of a skill  (one ball throws), but that's how the body and brain learn to do it easily so the focus can be on other challenges. When you learn how to drive, you have to pay a great deal of attention to everything,including the amount of pressure your foot is putting on the accelerator and brake pedals.  With practice, you no longer have to constantly think about that and you can concentrate on other things, like keeping a close eye on what other cars are doing, not just controlling your car.

Notes
(1)  Tennis balls can be a little too big for a beginner.  Their main disadvantage, however, is that they bounce and they roll,  As a beginner, you will spend a lot of time running after dropped balls and therefore tennis balls are not ideal.  One way to deal with this challenge is to practice by the side of a bed, facing the bed so that balls drop on the bed and not to the floor.

(2) Since you're likely to bend down to pick up fallen balls regularly, warming up your calves and hamstrings beforehand might help or you'll just be a little sore the next day and you'll wonder what you did. That won't happen if you give up after five minutes but if you insist and you practice for 30 minutes, be warned. Of course, if you do 100 squats on a daily basis, this won't affect you that much.  If you don't squat to pick up the balls you will hurt your back, which is worse.

(3) Update:  Using the learning strategy of spacing learning, I came back to my practice with three balls later in the day and managed up to five counts. Within a week of starting to learn this skill, and focusing on it daily, I was able to consolidate it and consistently manage 10 counts, with a record of 30 by the end of the week.

Resources

Wednesday, December 09, 2015

Do you have a blogging Strategy? Think before you post

A LinkedIn blog post and mindmap posted by Marco Bertolini (Ou faut-il publier: Sur un blog d'entreprise ou sur Pulse de LinkedIn?)  a week or so ago prompted me to think about my own blogging approach.  The map below is meant as my initial effort to conceptualize how to think about it.

"Think before you post" in this context isn't so much about whether or not to post (though that comes into play in terms of WHAT to post), but more about WHERE to post WHAT depending on the nature of the post and the intended audience.


Click on the image to view in other window/enlarge.

I consider this map to be "half-baked", definitely a work-in-progress, and therefore I'm comfortable posting it here on my personal blog rather than as a response on the LinkedIn platform.  Still, there are ways to create linkages between the two without creating unnecessary noise (see Nick Milton's post about the Signal to Noise Ratio on Social Media).  The more natural the linkages, the better.

In addition, since I want to promote the idea that maps are thinking tools, I have purposefully NOT connected specific items on the map.  Draw your own connections!  That's the idea.  I don't have the solution for you, just a possible thinking framework.

Monday, December 07, 2015

Anatomy of Aha! Moments

I have come to define a aha! moment as an insight, a moment during which you suddenly realize something, you make a connection between something you knew and something new.  The key, as in any learning,isthat it is new to you.  A aha! moment is a personal insight.

After much consideration and one key aha! moment, I've decided to keep this blog going primarily as a reflection of work-in-progress or a venue for working out loud.  Except that these expressions, with the word "work" in them, do not really apply to what I am doing here.  I shall call it "learning in progress" and "learning out loud."

This particular decision came slowly but was consolidated as a result of reading a LinkedIn post about whether it was better to post on LinkedIn vs. a company blog. While technically,this is now a company blog (Fillip Consulting,LLC), the company is me and it will likely always be a "personal blog" in that sense.  As a result of some reflection based on that LinkedIn post, I realized that I could and probably should keep this blog for more regular, somewhat half-baked insights and ideas, and if/when I come up with something worth more attention,I could always post it on LinkedIn in or attempt guest blogging.  There is a great deal of value to half-baked insights and ideas. Capture them somewhere!  You never know what other half-baked insight will collide with them and inspire you.

Let's consolidate this approach by sharing a couple of aha! moments from yesterday:

To Study and to Learn
The question "How do you study?" is not the same as "How do you learn?"  It is not the same for two reasons:  1) you can study efficiently for a test and forget almost everything soon thereafter, resulting in very little long-term learning.  That's what cramming is all about; 2) When we talk about lifelong learning, or workplace learning, informal learning, or learning by doing, we are not talking about "studying", we are talking about a more organic form of learning [I'm not sure "organic" is the right word here]. It is that form of learning I am most interest in understanding better. 

Paradox of Knowing
I am most inclined to write about whatever it is that I am currently exploring and learning about.  It's much more exciting. The neurons are connecting.  I can almost feel the electricity.  When I try to write about things I (think I) know well, it feels boring and totally uninteresting.  Mature connections in the brain don't feel that exciting.  So,the excitement comes from learning,not knowing.  The good news is that the more you know the more you can connect new things to that knowledge.  The more you know the more you can learn.

Thursday, December 03, 2015

How to Earn People's Interest in Your Ideas and Projects (Sam Horn)

Here are my notes from today's Exploring Leadership Colloquium at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  The speaker was Sam Horn, author of Got Your Attention! and other books.

It immediately reminded me of Hooked, by Les Edgerton, which is about "writing fiction that grabs readers at page one...".  The connection between the two was the fish on the cover of both books. Apparently (I'm skeptical), people have shorter attention span than fish.  Luckily we have more brain power.  The point is that whatever you're trying to sell, whether it's an idea or a product, you've got about 60 seconds.  By then, the decision makers you're trying to convince have already made up their mind.  If you didn't hook them by then you've lost.
Click on the image to enlarge.

As a side note, and while this is not the first time I've noticed this, professional speakers like to pepper their talks with quotes from famous people.

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

Lifelong Learning: Opportunities and Challenges for Learning Junkies

What's a "learning junkie"?  Someone who compulsively registers for classes, listens to podcasts, reads broadly, signs up for countless Facebook/LinkedIn groups, thinks MOOCs are the best thing since sliced bread...  Some people get addicted to one particular kind of learning opportunity, others just pick up everything they can.

The typical learning junkie is someone who 1) didn't attend college or dropped out because they found it more stimulating to learn on their own, to learn exactly what they wanted and how they wanted; or 2) attended college, liked the student life, went on directly to graduate school and perhaps even kept on going with a Ph.D., more for the fun of learning than anything else; or 3) feels withdrawal symptoms when not able to visit the local library to pick up a new pile of books.

The term "junkie" suggests an obsession with learning and has a negative connotation.  So what could possibly be wrong with learning?  Is there such a thing as learning too much?  I wouldn't go that far but I would admit that it is possible to go too far and focus so much on the learning and not enough on the doing and living a full life. Of course, who am I to say what constitutes a "full life"?

The key is to channel all that energy into productive learning activities and in particular, into actions and an action-learning activities.  Learning for the sake of learning may be fine but if you want it to have an impact on your life, take control of your learning.  Don't let it consume you!

Let's try to be strategic.  How much do you really want to / need to know about a particular topic? Will the Wikipedia page be enough?  Would a couple of well-written articles suffice or do you want to dive in with some assistance through a formal course or training program?

The challenge is not so much to find learning opportunities. Those abound.  Here are a couple of examples I just came across:


Hard to resist, I know!

Focus your efforts by developing a learning strategy and learning plan.  Develop a long-term vision, annual learning goals, and a more detailed monthly learning plan with specific activities.  (Yes, I can help you with that!)

Time is precious.  Decide what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, what level of mastery you will be satisfied with.   Make sure you're using effective approaches, not just your preferred learning mode.  Don't just read about something go figure out a way to "do" it, practice it in a real life setting.

That's why I like Toastmasters.   You can read a hundred books about how to make great speeches, how to communicate better, how to deliver great presentations, how to be an effective leader and nothing much will really sink in to change how you perform in the real world.  Until you start practicing the skills involved, little is really being "learned."

Toastmasters forces me to practice a whole range of skills for which there is always room for improvement AND it allows me to explore new areas of interest all the time since every speech opportunity is an opportunity to learn and share something new.  Tomorrow, I'm doing a short technical presentation on Search Engine Optimization.

Toastmasters: Better than Psychotherapy and Cheaper than a Ferrari


Resources:
- Are you a learning Junkie?
- Learning Junkie: Are you taking the right course? 5 Questions to Ask Yourself
- Are You A Learning Junkie? You're Killing Your Business (Video)
- Learning Junkie (Pinterest board)
- Addicted to Insight


This is my 300th post.  Hard to believe.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Concept Mapping and 508 Compliance


In the process of preparing a short presentation on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for my Toastmasters club (Space Speakers), I was reminded that concept maps and mind maps are not 508 compliant when they are presented in the form of an image, such as the example below.  Obviously, alt text isn't going to be adequate to convey all the information presented on the map.

Concept map with key words associated with learning, covering the alphabet.
Click to enlarge the image.

Here is my attempt at translating the map back into machine readable text.

Learning is about...sharing, which is about learning with others and exchanging knowledge.... and knowledge, because data and information are never enough and wisdom is just a mirage.. and it's related to teaching, because there is no better way to learn than to teach. ...sharing through the Internet, because there is no end to learning on the Internet and no end to the number of people we can learn from in our network... and network, because we learn from people in our network, people we interact with.

Learning is about... habit, because learning is enhanced with a habit of daily reflection, and reflection because without reflection there is only rote learning, which doesn't have much value... reflection enhanced with mapping, my personal learning hammer:  there is nothing a map can't help with but mapping isn't the answer to everything... and questions, because asking the right questions leads to more/better learning.

Learning is about.. games because learning should be fun, like juggling.  How would you learn to juggle?  That's a question I ask to get people talking about how people learn.  Can you learn by watching someone juggle?  V is for vicarious learning because I just learned that concept today and if I write it down I'm more likely to remember it tomorrow.. and writing towards wisdom, because writing forces clarity of thought and therefore strengthens learning.... writing which can end up in books, found in the old-fashioned local library, because walking through the stacks reminds me of how much I still have to learn.  X, Y and Z stumped me.  Did you know that the only word that has all three letters is hydroxyzine.  It's a antihistamine.  Here you go, I learned something new.

Learning is about .... oxytocin, because between dopamine and oxytocin, there is still a lot we don't know about how the brain works and how learning is linked to emotions.  D is for dopamine.  I may be a learning junkie.  I crave learning and Nutella... which is related to cognitive cycology (not a typo); see also cycology therapy, which recommends getting on a bicycle and going on a ride to clear one's head and let the mind do its job so that ideas can percolate, because it's my favorite word and it makes me think of coffee, which is my favorite drink.

And finally, learning is about... experiments, because that's my approach to learning in the kitchen and in the garden, where it's safe to have failures, because failures are best seen as an opportunity for learning, and unlearning, because not everything we learn is good for us.

Sounds like a non-sensical poem that doesn't even rhyme, doesn't it?

As a side note, this was an exercise prepared for Jane Hart's excellent "How to Become a Personal Learning Advisor" workshop.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Working Smarter to Address Wicked Problems

 When we face wicked problems and it feels as if we've tried everything to fix them and nothing seems to work, it's easy to walk away. I admire the courage of those who stick with it and keep fighting. I wish I could help them.  There has to be something I can do.

We need to find ways to work smarter.  We need double-loop learning, we need to reassess our assumptions, our entire models.  Terrorism is a wicked problem. The solution isn't more of the same response. We need a smarter response.  And we need to accelerate our ability to learn and adapt, whether it is to keep ahead of the competition or to defeat a constantly morphing enemy.

Unfortunately, it can be a matter of life and death.

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Quick Definitions

Wicked problems: A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.  The term was coined by Horst Rittel.

Double-loop learning: "Single-loop learning" is the repeated attempt at the same problem, with no variation of method and without ever questioning the goal.  Double-loop learning requires changing underlying values and assumptions to redefine the goal. The term was coined by Chris Argyris.
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What to Read

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Learning from Others

I was attending a post-KM World conference event on Friday where one of brainstorming activities involved helping an organization (in this case the International Olympic Committee) think through which other organizations it might be able to learn from.  We had an interesting, if somewhat unfocused, small group conversation.  Upon further reflection, I decided to clarify my own thoughts about how organizations can identify others to learn from, even when they think of themselves as rather unique.  Here's the map of my reflections on the subject.

Click on the image to enlarge/open in other tab.


Very similar questions can be asked from different perspectives:

  • Are we unique as a project?  What other projects, internally and externally, can we learn from?
  • Am I unique as a consultant?  What can I learn from other consultants in my field or beyond my field?
I think of these questions as slightly different from traditional benchmarking.  In particular, I would not want to limit the scope to a particular field of industry for learning.

Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Mapping Your Reading Reflections


Mapping can be used for many different things.  One of them is to take notes on readings.   The map below was done very quickly based on an article from the Harvard Business Review.  

What can I say about this map:

1) I used the article's headings and made it very simple to synthesize the content;  You could say that I didn't do a good job of synthesizing the content if the intent was to share the key messages of the article.  Headings don't always make a full story; 

2) I focused only on a few key thoughts that popped up while I was reading, mainly where the text either resonated with my own experience or failed to resonate.  The use of color is minimal and meant to put the emphasis on my own insights/reflections.  

Click on the image to enlarge/open in other tab or window.

3) I suspect that if I had read the article one more time and spent 20 more minutes with the map, I would have come up with a couple of additional, perhaps deeper insights.

Friday, October 30, 2015

KM and Design Thinking

Some thoughts generated by a meeting of the Knowledge Management Association (KMA) - DC Chapter on October 30th with a presentation/discussion with Arno Boersma and Barbara Bitondo:


  • The session was titled "Why Design Thinking Will Save KM".  I was reading “design thinking” and my brain was registering “systems thinking” until the day of the event. Essentially, we’re talking about a different way of thinking about KM.  KM could benefit from both design thinking and systems thinking if they were integrated in some way.  That will require more percolations. For now I see design thinking as an interesting way of applying a new way of thinking to get us possibly unstuck from the general “KM is dead” malaise. KM has been supposedly dead or dying for as long as I've been in this field (close to 20 years) so I'm not too concerned. Sometimes as a cadre of professionals, we may need to unlearn, get rid of our assumptions and what we believe we’ve learned.
  • What’s special about design thinking? The focus on the people, the end-users.  The term end-user suggests that there is a KM “system” to be used.  User experience also suggests a system or tool to be “used.”  If we want to focus on people, I think we need to focus on how people think, how they use their brains, not how they use any specific tool or system.
  • If design thinking can help KM folks understand how people behave around information and how they create and share information to generate knowledge, that’s great.  I’m a little skeptical about simply observing what people do because there is a lot going on in someone’s head that doesn’t necessarily show up in observable actions.  There would be added benefit, however, in asking people to think about how they handle information and how they share their knowledge.  Can we apply cognitive task analysis (CTA) without making it all about how they navigate a website? In the end, the task may not involve “using” anything other than their brain and their voice in a valuable conversation over coffee (See Chris Collison’s article “Is this Knowledge Management’s most effective tool?”).
  • In the spirit of learning from other disciplines and cross-pollination, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look again at theories of adult learning/andragogy.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel there either by starting from scratch with design thinking.
  • Agile this, agile that, and finally, agile KM.  Is that not the same as applying the rapid results methodology to KM?
                                                            
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Here is the corresponding map for this post.  Unfortunately, I can only publish the maps as images at this time and therefore the links embedded in the map will not work.
Click to open in a separate window and enlarge.



Thursday, October 29, 2015

Change a Tire and Learn a Thing or Two - (Mapping to Reflect and Learn)

I had a flat tire a few days ago.  Luckily, it happened (or at least I realized it) while the car was parked in my driveway.  That was convenient for a number of reasons:  1) I could go back inside the house and change into my "garden" clothes.  It turned out I also needed more sturdy shoes to get the lug nut wrench to do its job; 2) I could go back inside the house, turn on my computer and google a couple of videos on "how to change a tire?"  It's not that I had no clue about how to do it but since I'd never done it before, I thought it would be good to do it right and not improvise.  Of course, with my smartphone, I could have done this anywhere.  It was just more comfortable and less stressful to do it at home than it would have been on the side of a highway.

The car is more than 10 years old and as far as I know the donut tire has been used once before but I wasn't the one who changed it.  It did occur to me as I was struggling to unstuck the lug nuts that the replacement tire might not have enough pressure in it to take me anywhere.  My target destination was the gas station/car repair shop that is literally at the end of the street.  Their car repair folks had left for the day but at least I'd be able to get some air pressure into the donut.

I'd like to see a woman in heels try to replace a flat tire!  I had to go put on my extra sturdy hiking shoes to kick the wrench without hurting my foot.  I'm surprised I managed to do it.  I seriously doubted I could do it but I had to try.... and it worked.. with some effort.

It was the jack and attached lug nug wrench that gave me the most trouble.  First, dislodging the wrench from the jack wasn't obvious.  It required some thinking about how on earth the mechanism worked. Then the wrench wouldn't open up because it's only been used once in 10 years.  I ended up using a screwdriver as a lever and there was nothing to it.

What can or should I learn from this experience?

A self-confidence lesson:  Changing a tire isn't rocket science but if you've never done it before, it can be a little intimidating.  I decided I would try and success boosted my confidence.  I was able to figure how the whole thing, from taking out the flat tire, putting on the replacement tire, getting some air into it, and driving to a place that could either fix the flat tire or replace it. And it only took about 90 minutes for the whole thing.

Paying attention to warning signs:  I know why I ended up with a flat tire.  A week ago, I had a small collision, resulting in a misalignment of the front wheels.  Driving with the misaligned wheels essentially destroyed the front tires.  When I had the collision damage repaired and wheels realigned, I might have paid attention to the car repair folks' suggestion that I replace the tires.  I chose not to, probably because I didn't sufficiently understand the connection.  Had they shown me the tire damage, I would have considered the replacement more seriously.

Slow down the thinking:  When I couldn't figure out the jack and wrench for a couple of minutes, I didn't get frustrated.  I saw it as a challenge. It was obvious that there was nothing wrong with the jack and wrench and all I needed to do was figure out how they were supposed to be disconnected and then used properly.  Slowing down to just sit and observe the jack and wrench, identifying the moving parts and eventually the bulb lights up and it's obvious and pretty smart.

How often do we take the time to reflect upon simple experiences like this?  I'm not suggesting that we should sit down every night to document the lessons of the day, but there is definite value in taking the time to think it through.  It can be empowering!

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Two days after drafting this post, I decided to see what it would look like as a map  (see below).  Can you tell from the map that I had more fun doing the map than writing the post?  After years of mapping, I think my brain prefers mapping to writing.

Click to enlarge.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Insights, Tips, Lessons and More

This is a map I developed based on my experience at the Shenandoah Fall Foliage Bike Festival out of Staunton, Virginia. Beautiful countryside. It was my first experience with this type of group bicycling event and therefore a great learning opportunity.  As you'll see from the map, I started thinking about the difference between lessons, insights, recommendations, observations, and tips.


Click to enlarge.




A tip is a piece of practical advice.  Tips are great for the novices.

An observation is something worth noticing, a relevant piece of information, usually related to the context for key insights and recommendations. Observation is the first step in reflection.  It's the "what did I notice?"

An insight is a kind of "aha moment", often triggered by reflection and supported by observations.  It's the answer to "what did it mean?"

A lesson is what we tell ourselves we'll do differently next time.  Lessons occur to us most often when we realize we made a mistake that was avoidable and we could have done things differently. Note that even though riding mid-day instead of early morning to avoid the colder temperatures is common sense, I will most likely not learn that lesson.  I'm a morning person and waiting for mid-day to ride makes no sense to me whatsoever.   This is typical of lessons I'm afraid.  Just because we note the lesson does not guarantee we'll learn it and do things differently next time.

I didn't include any "best practice" on the map.  Perhaps a best practice would be something that avid bicyclists do out of habit and novices like myself need to be reminded of, something like "stay hydrated, drink before, during and after the ride."  How is that different from a tip?  Perhaps a best practice is something that applies to everyone whereas a tip is simply advice to address challenges you might encounter as a rider.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Exploring TiddlyMap (while waiting for my car to get a tune-up

Very impressed with what I can do with TiddlyMap.  I've posted before, probably several times, about TiddlyWiki. I've used TiddlyWiki extensively in the past but I've also used various concept mapping and mind mapping tools.  All I needed was a tool that would combine both.  It turns out that someone ( Felix Küppers, aka felixhayashi) developed a mapping plugin for TiddlyWiki.

I downloaded it a couple of days ago to try out and since I've been sitting in the waiting room of the car dealership for a few hours now, there was no better time to play around with it and see what it can do.  I am impressed.  It's significantly different from tools I've previously used for mapping.


  • I've used CmapTools extensively in the past as a mapping tool but I have not really used it as a concept mapping tool per se. I was putting entire sentences rather than distinct concepts in each node and not using the linking phrases.  CmapTools is very flexible and can be used in ways that it wasn't intended for, and so I did.  TiddlyMap doesn't have that flexibility YET since each node is attached to a tiddler, it allows me to connect a node to a great deal of information, including links, images and entire paragraphs of text if I need to.  That's also possible with CmapTools but more awkward.  Going back to a mapping approach that sticks to main concepts and linking phrases has been easy but that could be because of the simple types of maps I was working with for practice. 
Here is a little practice example: 
  • I've made extensive use of the ability to link maps built with CmapTools.  I've developed knowledge systems that have hundreds of maps linked and cross-referenced in every possible direction.  TiddlyMap is meant for a single map.  The trick is that nodes can be tagged and views created so that only nodes with a specific tag are visible.  This allows me to show high level maps without all the confusing details, yet also only the details of a particular topic when I want to.  In the case of the map above, I tagged all the nodes that you can see as "tools" and the map is based on a subset of nodes with that tag, yet part of a much bigger map.

    Technically, it's one canvas but there's nothing preventing me from developing completely separate maps on that one canvas.  Each view can be a completely separate map.
  • I also like the ability to embed a map (or specific map view) in a tiddler.
  • The nodes and links have many styling options (nothing much is pre-populated), but as with anything TiddlyWiki-related, it's good to have a little bit of a coder's brain.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Just thinking...

When I read a non-fiction book, I often take notes.  I've brought out of the closet a dozen notebooks of various sizes and color and as I scanned through them, I wondered:  If I read a book again, by chance, would I remember that I've read it before?  Would I take essentially the same notes?  Would taking the same notes suggest I didn't really internalize anything from my first reading of the book?  It would seem to suggest I'm stuck.  Or, does it simply reflect the fact that we need refresher courses in everything.  We forget!

Just thinking!  

There's more to this.  I'll need to come back to it.  I've barely scratched the surface of my questions.