Sequestered in the mountains for a self-awarded sabbatical
of sorts, I have the luxury of having time to think about my research process
and what this extraordinary enabling technology [MOHO] can do to catalyze
thinking in today’s increasingly busier, ever ‘bigger data’ immersed world. And
I sympathize with those faculty who do not have access to MOHO. As someone who
was offered a full year’s salary to step down put it: “After 40 years of doing
research as well as teaching, I want to find the answers to certain questions
before I retire. I want to get those discoveries made, I want to get those
publications out, and there's a pretty long list of them still.”[2]
That’s fine if you have tenure, but it becomes a dampening frustration if the
system deals you too many ‘other duties as assigned’.
Armed with a BS in Geosciences and a MAT in Science
Education from a tier one research institution and experience in international
petroleum exploration and high-tech industry sectors, I completed my PhD in
Science Education on Virtual Field Trips:
Using Information Technology to Create an Integrated Science Learning
Environment[3]
at an Australian university of technology. Born at the tail-end of the ‘Baby
Boomer’ generation, I realize that I also have the privilege of having been
raised as an empowered – more fearless than arrogant – lifelong learner.
Formally and informally, I thrive on ‘chasing my curiosity’. Having most
recently taught future K-12 teachers with emerging technologies for nearly 20
years, my concern for today’s more entitled – or disenfranchised – learners is
that they will miss out on exploring their own driving passion(s) because they
haven’t had the means nor the opportunity to experience it. Warren Berger describes
this as knowing how to ask A More
Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Break-through Ideas.
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| MOHO's Graphical User Interface (GUI) |
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| MOHO’s Contextual Search versus Keyword/Boolean Search |
As a complementary alternative to Question/Answer systems
that focus on information (like Google), the MOHO Knowledge Discovery Platform
adds a new and critical layer to learning that stimulates deep thinking about
connections and enables individual/group ‘think tanks’ for exploring ideas. At
one end of the spectrum, MOHO allows for the discovery of knowledge that
translates into actionable insight in Academic/Scientific Research.
Illustrative Case-in-Point
I’ve been working with a graduate student to extend my
constructivist design model for creating an Integrated Science Learning
Environment (ISLE) with strategic applications of enabling technologies into
today’s K-12 classrooms, starting with Higher Education. A lot has changed
since 2000 – technologically and pedagogically – and yet we (both learners and
leaders) are still challenged to engage meaningfully in the learning process.
Each individual ought to be able to direct, manage, and maintain his/her
learning in today’s technology-enabled world, right? That, however, is a topic
for another dissertation(s).
Getting nowhere with the ‘scholarly’ research tools at my
fingertips (our university library collections, Google Scholar, and so on), I
turned to MOHO finally. That should have been my first course of action given
the complex nature of my query, but as mentioned, I am a product of the ‘Google
age’ and it is hard re-engineer ‘accepted’ practice – at first. For purely
exploratory purposes, I posed the following query to MOHO: How are multiple thinking skills (critical, constructive, creative, and
computational) demonstrated in an Iterative Discovery Cycle - that leverages a
Bayesian inference search engine and Natural Language Processing - when
students can explore their individual ideas and interests using Big Data
visualizations? And how can educators measure the subsequent Student
Satisfaction with learning and achievement gained by innovative teaching
methods in a collaborative, technology-enabled environment? The results
inspired me and helped to inform my quest for a better – deeper and broader –
understanding of the multiple and fascinating relationships among these
seemingly different and generally unrelated topics and ideas.
Out of curiosity and for comparison purposes, I also entered
that same query into Google before signing off for the day. Much to my
surprise, Google alerted me to the fact that (at the time and likely still)
their queries are limited to 32 words. That meant that Google totally ignored
the part of the query that mattered most to me: the subsequent Student Satisfaction with learning and achievement
gained by innovative teaching methods in a collaborative, technology-enabled
environment. At least Google told me up front. Our university system either
asks you to ask a different question when it finds no results – or even worse,
it just asks another question that it
thinks you mean to ask. No wonder the
results are often beyond confusing!
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| Google Query Limit Notification (captured Nov 14, 2018) |
A couple of weeks later, I met up with my graduate student
colleague at an international conference. With a new perspective on the driving
question that continued to allude me, I was able to hear others’ research
insights with a more focused – and even more open – mind. Someone described a
term that I thought might explain what I was trying to articulate. After asking
the presenter how to spell ‘kairotic’, when I ‘googled’ Kairotic Memory on my
iPhone, the reference she suggested did come up, but I couldn’t access the
chapter of interest online. (On adding the Boolean operators to search on the
phrase instead of the 2 independent terms, Google results dropped from ‘about
11,200’ to ‘about 8’ broadly relevant results. FYI, MOHO ‘naturally’ parses
sequential capitalized terms – like First Last Names – as a phrase.) Combined
with MOHO’s algorithmically-unbiased iterative discovery capabilities, I was
able “to find the answers to certain questions”, like those
still-employed/searching faculty members crave while I waited two weeks for the
print book to be recalled by the library. My new query was: Looking at Digital Humanities, what is
Kairotic Memory and how might it be related to the Semantic Turn or the Visual
Turn or the Computational Turn?
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| MOHO Screen Capture showing Topics added from the Analyze View |
MOHO catalyzes a different kind of ‘serendipity’ because I
had to dig into the results by following and choosing from many different visual
concept pathways that uniquely made sense to me. In addition to a familiar
Results list, MOHO can display query results as 6 different color-coded graphic
representations under the Analyze tab: Relevant Concepts, Concept Cloud,
Discover Knowledge (hierarchical), Timeline, Map, and Relevancy (histograms). In
retrospect, I am glad that the MOHO results didn’t include my pre-supposed
topic of interest (Kairotic Memory) in the initial results sets. As such, when
I did find related concepts nested under topics that I chose to click on
because they made sense to me from my own experience, the results meant
exponentially more to me. Thanks to MOHO’s help, I was easily able to add relevant
concepts to my initial query. So I was able to ask a much more effective
question: a question that, before MOHO, I really didn’t know how to ask.
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| Example of ‘Drilling Down’ into MOHO’s Discover Knowledge View (captured Nov 14, 2018) |
I still don’t know what that all means or how exactly it
fits into my work, but rest assured,
I will find out! As Edward de Bono notes, thinking is “the operating skill with
which intelligence acts upon experience.”[4]
The MOHO Knowledge Discovery Platform can help educators keep pace with our
rapidly changing world by bridging the gaps among those who share the
responsibility for leveraging enabling technologies and human creativity. In a world where “Science is becoming
increasingly unscientific”[5] and
Google “is often described as the only e-learning tool you’ll ever need!”[6],
serious learners need an advanced alternative for making sense of the myriad of
data available to all.
In a constructivist technology-enhanced iterative learning
environment, the life-long joy of discovery can develop thinking and can be
collaborative, measured, and learned! Q&A (keyword) information search and
retrieval generally promotes passive inquiry, even when problem-based. Outcomes
are usually closed-ended, right or wrong, narrowly focused. Adding contextual
and concept-based knowledge discovery into the process can spark passion that
runs deep and hook interest that stays current to fuel active inquiry. Outcomes
tend to be more relevant, inspiring, engaging, iterative, and broadly
encompassing. The insight gained is personally meaningful, often actionable,
and inherently sustainable – leading to professional productivity and ingenuity
that catalyzes innovation and imagination! As the Director of a prominent
center encouraged his graduate students to come up with novel research projects
for the new semester, “This [MOHO] however, will hopefully turn it into
something where, for starters, we have to ask new questions to make this work.”[7]
It’s exciting to see how MOHO offers a complementary alternative to Google-like question/answer systems for the different aims of today’s Academic/Scientific Researchers. In this age of Big Data, cross-cutting applications of new technologies – with real-world, real-time input – that return relevant and contextualized results elicit an innovative, creative, and proactive human advantage. With much to offer to today’s expert analysts and novice learners, the application-agnostic MOHO Knowledge Discovery Platform can power the discovery of actionable insight for a better, safer – smarter – world. MOHO is one way that we can help lifelong learners re-discover the joy of discovery.
[1] ‘MOHO’
is how most geologists refer to that transition zone between the Earth’s solid
crust and the molten mantle below. The name suits our software as it represents
a significant enabling technology that’s realizing a seismic shift in digital
discovery. MOHO discovery harnesses each individual's personal knowledge bases
to uncover new insights from highly-relevant results. MOHO algorithms empower
each user to iteratively discover what users want to know – even if they don't
know how to clearly ask for it. Through multiple visualizations, MOHO lets
users focus on information relationships that change based on their own
individual user-driven decisions for further examination of each unique query
(not whatever you happened to buy online yesterday).
[3] Nix,
R.K. (2003). Virtual field trips: Using
information technology to create an integrated science learning environment.
Unpublished doctoral thesis, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western
Australia.
[4] De
Bono, Edward. (1986). CoRT thinking: Teacher’s notes. Oxford, England:
Pergamon Press.
[7] Excerpt
from faculty member’s course introduction to MOHO for ‘the discovery-enabled
examination of complex text’ on September 11, 2017.
