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Sunday, January 5, 2020

It’s ‘T’ Time! A Trivial Tribute to Mr Twister on Turning Twelve Today


Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Zip-lining into the Future on the 'Internet of (Too Many) Things'... ... ... ...

proudly posted by Rebekah - with a lot of help from Christine!
From 2013: Christine Maxwell, UTD staff member and student at the same time, and Rebekah Nix, two-time UTD graduate and current faculty member, had fun adding an IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) sticker from the first 2013 UT Dallas hosted IPv6 Conference, to the Manitou Springs zipline in Colorado this past summer.

Continuing vTapestry's interests in the development and use of the Internet, we were thrilled that Christine Maxwell was inducted into the IPv6 Hall of Fame at the 2019 Global Network Technology Conference (GNTC) in Nanjing, China. We’re going to break that loaded sentence down for our own sakes, but first, please either take a look at her 2.5-minute ‘acceptance speech’ video and/or read the transcription below to join us in celebrating this global recognition and well-deserved (earned) honor!


Hello. I am Christine Maxwell. As one of the first women to be appointed to the Board of the Internet Society in 1997, I have enjoyed making a contribution to the evolution of the Internet during the six years that I was on the ISOC Board. I have always stayed keenly interested in the advancement of the Internet for everyone, since I ran one of the early Information broker companies in the 1980s and became an Internet content pioneer when I invented Magellan and co-founded the company that brought this early search engine onto the Home page of Netscape in the early 1990s.

I immediately recognized the important advancement that IPv6 meant and continues to mean for improving security and connectability for all ‘Internauts’ – particularly in relation to enabling the Internet of Things to become a reality. As CEO today of an iterative knowledge discovery software company, I appreciate the critical importance of IPv6 to my own company’s vision and mission. This further motivates me to continue my efforts to encourage educational institutions and businesses everywhere, to embrace IPv6.

 As I watch the evolution of Cloud Computing and IoT, I see that it is ever more critical for the Public to appreciate what IPv6 is and does. Security in this day and age matters more than ever – IPv6 through its use of OpenStack, when compared to something like AWS right now, is clearly the better choice from my perspective. I am extremely honored to be inducted into the IPv6 Hall of Fame for 2019. I see this honor as providing a key platform from which to specifically help businesses and the general public at large understand and appreciate what a huge impact the application of IPv6 is to a secure Internet and to the Internet of Things and for Cloud Computing in particular. Thank you.

Along with the other new inductees and initial 2018 Hall of Famers (Dr Vint Cerf, VP and Internet Evangelist at Google and Honorary Chair of the IPv6 Forum since its creation; Dr. Wu Hequan, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Dr. Jun Murai, Father of the Internet in Japan and Founder of the IPv6 Promotion Council), we celebrate this recognition of her extraordinary contributions to the large-scale deployment of IPv6 around the world.


So, you’re likely still wondering: what the heck is ‘IPv6’?


As explained by Wikipedia, “Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4... IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate route aggregation across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of routing tables. The use of multicast addressing is expanded and simplified, and provides additional optimization for the delivery of services. Device mobility, security, and configuration aspects have been considered in the design of the protocol.”

Putting things into perspective, “The explosive growth in mobile devices including mobile phones, notebook computers, and wireless handheld devices has created a need for additional blocks of IP addresses. IPv4 currently supports a maximum of approximately 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. IPv6 supports a theoretical maximum of 2128 addresses (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 to be exact!)”

The difference between IPv4 (orange) and IPv6 (green) - as conceptualized by Rebekah!
In case you feel like something's missing here, aspects of 'IPv5' were integrated into IPv6.

In English that I can understand (somewhat), the bottom line is that we’ve outgrown the original Internet (based on IPv4) and IPv6 gives us a new and improved Internet. See my constructivist interpretation of what that means in a Dec 2014 post called VIP Breakfast Centerpiece Notes! The current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses – not nearly enough for the world's people, let alone the devices that are online today and those that will be in the future: computers, phones, TVs, watches, fridges, cars, and so on. IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol and expands the number of available addresses to a virtually limitless amount – 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. Transitioning to IPv6 enables the Internet to continue to grow and enables new, innovative services to be developed because more devices can connect to the Internet.

Vint Cerf 'evangelizing' for IPv6!
I first heard about IPv6 in late 2012 when Christine was contacted by the Texas IPv6 Task Force (for whom we actively promoted the IPv6 Forum to UT Dallas). According to worldipv6launch, “Global IPv6 traffic has grown more than 5000% since World IPv6 Launch began on 6 June 2012, with some networks now reporting 80 or 90% deployment of IPv6!” In fact, if you use the Internet today, you probably already have used IPv6 and hopefully purchased IPv6-ready devices recently.

If you’re really into this, add the IPvFoo extension to your Chrome or Firefox browser to test your IPv6 connectivity! Here's what you might learn from the results:
You appear to have no IPv6 address. 
It looks like you have only IPv4 Internet service at this time. Don't feel bad - most people are in this position right now. Most Internet service providers are not quite yet ready to provide IPv6 Internet to residential customers. 
Many of the visitors to the site are new to what IPv6 is. If you don't know why IPv6 matters, see the Why IPv6 FAQ. This will give you a bit of background of what to expect with IPv4 in the coming months and years; and perhaps some incentive to ask your ISP when they will offer IPv6. 
If you strongly believe you have IPv6, but we were unable to detect it: it means one of a couple of things. Either your organization is blocking the use of IPv6 to talk to the outside Internet through network policy; or perhaps what you see with IPv6 on your host is not a global address. Any address starting with "::", "fc", "fd", or "fe" are unable to work with the public IPv6 Internet.
On a positive data tracking note, Google also collects statistics about IPv6 adoption, which is on the rise!

This graph shows the percentage of users that access Google over IPv6.
SOURCE: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

From a practical point of view, the IPv6 Forum is a world-wide consortium of international Internet service providers (ISPs) and National Research & Education Networks (NRENs) with a mission to promote IPv6 by improving market and user awareness, creating a quality and secure New Generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology. The key focus of the IPv6 Forum today is to provide technical guidance for the deployment of IPv6. IPv6 Summits are organized by the IPv6 Forum and staged in various locations around the world to provide industry and market with the best available information on this rapidly advancing technology.

Christine Maxwell, Vint Cerf, Rebekah Nix
vTapestry was thrilled to invite and host Dr Vinton Cerf – one of the better-known Fathers of the Internet – to deliver the keynote speech at the 2014 Global IPv6 Forum Summit. It was a very exciting event with both technical and business tracks. You can revisit the materials we put together on Christine's university website for now.

Now that you know all of that, you can appreciate the significance of Christine’s award and why it actually does matter to you and your world. Her genuinely valuable and on-going contribution to the Internet helps to take it to the next level, so it can continue to flourish in the service of mankind as the one and only true vehicle to empower people and progress our world to a far better and richer place. 

Latif Ladid (left) seeing the difference.

As IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid surmised in the official IPv6 Forum press release: The IPv6 Forum is very blessed and proud to have attracted and won some of the finest and top IPv6 pioneers, experts and genuine volunteers around the world, quoting Vint Cerf, to upgrade the Internet from a “Research” Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to a “Production” Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) to sustain the growth of the Internet to include everyone and connect any sensible device.


Congratulations – and THANKS – 
to both Christine and the IPv6 Forum
for your on-going leadership.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2019

A-S-C, 1-2-3!


Christine and Rebekah were honored to present at the 49th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches at UT Dallas again this spring. Rounding out a nice trio, please feel free to watch narrated presentations from our amateur archives in sequence via the following links:
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Monday, March 4, 2019

A-S-C, Easy as 1-2-3: 'Event' turned 'Story' in a Hat Trick!

What normally would’ve been a simple 'Notable News' post easily became a 'Special Projects' story post - just like that... and without warning, BAM! As my colleague Christine Maxwell [doctoral candidate in the School of Arts & Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas, in Richardson, Texas] and I [Rebekah K Nix, PhD in the Science/Mathematics Education Centre at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia] practiced our third presentation for the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches (ASC), I wanted to make sure we weren’t being repetitive. We are both very focused (possibly verging on obsessive-compulsive) on education, technology, and knowledge discovery! But it’s the best thing to happen yet...

Thus, I went back and looked at our very first presentation that we ever made together and that bravely was delivered at our very first ASC, which took place at Temple University in Philadelphia, back in 2017. I’m so glad we have the archive because, to me, it was actually pretty darn good! With that refresher, I was brave enough to look again at our 2018 archive, which was created the year that ASC moved to my 2-time alma mater: UT Dallas. Surprisingly, it was pretty interesting too! And when I came back to our 2019 presentation, I realized that we were writing/telling an important story, indeed.

Please feel free to watch them in sequence via the following links:
For a fleeting moment, it seemed that we were perhaps veering 'off course', so to speak, with so much happening so fast and so out of our immediate control. It's been tricky maintaining the balance between our interests (technology) and passions (education) as we both come from families with strong convictions and active leaders. But that's where 'keeping the faith' - as my youth mentor would always shout across the distance with a smile - comes into play. Keeping our eyes on the shared prize (enabling knowledge discovery) as truly equal partners, in the sense of sowing and reaping, has shown us a most excellent pathway... one that we never could or would have imagined independently. We are not 'birds of a feather', on the surface.

But neither are the 18 contributors to an absolutely intriguing book that I stumbled across in doing my 'homework' for our 2019 ASC presentation... In a crazy way, Encountering the Stranger embodies what must be the 'tie that binds' us throughout this serendipitous adventure. Given that neither of us attends church on a regular basis (even though continents-apart, we each were raised as Christians and remain highly spiritual beings), it's somewhat shocking that we find ourselves in the midst of a Jewish-Christian-Muslim trialogue. By the same token, it makes perfect sense given our backgrounds. But that's a REALLY long story that will take more than 3 goals scored. 

The prescient and provocative point that John Muir so eloquently related is that 'whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe'. That's essentially where the name representing this partnership (vTapestry, or virtual Tapestry) derived. Per Edna St Vincent Millay's call to action in a sonnet from Huntsman, What Quarry?, we aim to 'weave' today's technology-empowered furtive age 'into fabric' that will perpetuate the good things of this miraculous life. In other words, to leverage existing technologies (like the MOHO Knowledge Discovery Platform) to foster open trans-/inter-/intra-disciplinary inquiry into matters of equity, especially antisemitism and resiliency, through discovery that promotes digital literacy in seeking out the truth. 

On page 44 of Encountering the Stranger, Dr David Patterson relates what I take to be the same as "... recognition of our essential connection to the most distant of human beings rests upon our realization of a connection to those who were nearest. And each connection is connected to the other." In honor of the good work of each of our apparently dichotomous pairs of parents, as Christine's mother Dr Elisabeth Maxwell said at the 19th ASC dinner address in 1985, we "stand in front of you all in great humility. It is known world wide that the Annual Scholars' Conference invites the most distinguished scholars in the field of studies encompassed by the Jewish catastrophe: the Shoah. All I have read, all I know, all I have learned and continue to learn comes from you, assembled here tonight. You have been, some knowingly, some unbeknown to you, my mentors, my guides, my teachers and I am pleased to be given the opportunity to thank you." 

And so, I thank you Christine, for introducing me to this new-to-me world that has been right in front of my blinder-ed eyes all along - the same that my parents prepared me not only to see, but in which to act.
_________

Postscript. On immediate reflection, I realized that this post in and of itself was making a new point, one that deserved/demanded elaboration. It wrote itself between the lines so even I didn't see it right off the bat (or hockey stick in this case), but for some reason I just kept revisiting it. As we re-awaken in a post-digital world (one in which digital is the norm versus the aim), we begin to re-think much about who we are and who we want to be – and why. At least one would hope that to be the case, that we would open our eyes and also our minds and our hearts. In retrospect, I realize that in writing the first part of this post, I answered a primal urge to ACT like an upstander. An astute observer, I SEE a lot, but as Dr Hubert Locke said... "We can no longer keep silent." I don't know if it's because I'm adding more birthdays than busywork to my CV now or because I'm finally paying more attention to things that I blew off for so long, but seeing so much 'evilness' in such a 'glorious' age wrenches my stomach and my soul. It's hard to not lose hope, but that's where humanity holds on in spite of the harsh realities we bring onto ourselves.

I hear myself asking many of the same questions about my world that are still asked about the Holocaust. While I suppose that I am a 'bystander' in that contextual definition, that's not where this is coming from... And it's not simply the novelty of new information or a passing interest in the top headlines around the globe... It's not even about being brave, but that's part of it – maybe that's what has changed for me (because it's not happening for anyone or anything else). Given the work that Christine and I have been doing to better articulate the uniqueness of our  knowledge discovery software, we have been thinking long and hard about thinking (metacogitating?). That's the key! If we think about things, then it's almost impossible to not do things that come to mind, especially when they matter to the thinker. The present 'state of the world' devolved us into doing too many things automatically, subconsciously, without thinking much really (which, looking at today's environmental distress, evidently we did not do at all for far too long). As AI (artificial intelligence) evolves at a rapidly increasing rate, we absolutely must speak up for what matters. Admittedly, I do not know much at all about politics, religion, social issues, etc., but I do know that we owe it to all ourselves to cultivate what I call 'information artisans' (IAs) who do think about all of the above and whatever is on the way.

Atypically, I found that the Urban Dictionary's top definition for 'upstander' matched my sense of what I might be trying to define:
A person who stands up for his or her beliefs.
A person who does what they think is right, even if they are alone.
A person who is not a bystander.
Apparently posted in February of 2011, this definition had 84 thumbs-up and 15 thumbs-down when I retrieved it almost exactly 8 years later. (Yes, this is how we do a lot of things these days, right? Think about it, please!)

Coming back to the original point of this now lengthy and leggy post, in closing, I challenge myself and others to think (really) about whatever it is that we think about. We need to ‘practice’ that BEFORE we start ‘preaching’… especially with so many avenues of communication available for free and at our fingertips – like this blog (even if no one else reads this post, I have put it out there for posterity presumably). Interpret these things as you will, but be sure that YOU – not a machine, not an algorithm, not an organization, not a fanatic, etc – are making open-minded and fully-informed decisions before you take things as the ‘gospel truth’ or take action (including the choice for inaction). That’s the urgent message for the now.

Echoing my initial take-away from a novice quick-read of Encountering the Stranger, it seems almost too coincidental that earlier this month, on 4 February 2019, His Holiness, Pope Francis, and The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, signed A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Seeking “a universal peace that all can enjoy in this life”, they call for “... the adoption of a culture of dialogue as the path; mutual cooperation as the code of conduct; reciprocal understanding as the method and standard.” Today, right now, we have the tools and resources to craft wisdom and knowledge from information and data – if we apply our unique ability to THINK. If we can do all that we have done, why don’t we start to undo more of what we probably wouldn’t have done/allowed to be done if we had thought about it? Let’s realize that we do each make a critical difference and do whatever it is that we can do. Regardless, first do your homework, then start the needed conversation, and continue forward by going with the flow as you row.
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Location: Richardson, TX 75080, USA

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Uh Oh. There is no H in STEAM.


Tag it as you like – epiphany, eureka, aha moment, duh, or other – there is no ‘H’ in ‘STEAM’, obviously. If you're human, that could be a problem!

Without getting overly academic or ridiculously technical, this commentary is more of my thinking aloud about the 'things' that weave strands throughout my varied interests and happenstance encounters in hopes of catalyzing curious investigation. I've always been interested in science and intrigued by education, in every sense of both broad terms. The culmination of my mother's creative artistry and my father's brilliant logic, it's not really surprising that my Australian dissertation focused on technology-enriched science learning environments. What is surprising to me is that, over the course of some 30+ years at a leading university, I [Rebekah K Nix, PhD] managed to happily transition from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (from which I earned my bachelors and masters degrees) over into the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and eventually to the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (partly). Many other roots run deep there too. Later, as faculty and staff, I enjoyed working with many of my professors across these three distinct fields and now call several good friends.

But back to my point and explaining the odd title of this whatever it is...

From pre-K through post-doc, educators joke about the 'alphabet soup' of acronyms and mnemonic labels that make pedagogical conversations almost unintelligible. Even within tight circles there can be multiple definitions that often lead to well-intentioned misunderstandings. Social media and online learning have certainly added to the litany. However, even beyond the institutional bounds, most leaders and learners know what STEM means: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It's almost all you see in the news about education (and employment and legislation and funding and so on) these days. Literally and figuratively positioned at the opposite edge of my campus, A&H is how we refer to the School of Arts and Humanities. A fairly recent outgrowth of A&H, ATEC (the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication) straddles domains, nestled away in a shiny new building with all sorts of 'toys', aka 'educational technologies'. I am truly honored to know my way around each, even though much is new and I've only scratched the surface of so many exciting topics.

The clever notion of 'STEAM' and its many variations (worth Googling) is how folks describe the impassioned initiatives to integrate Art – the A – into STEM. I'll try to explain why I think we need to include Humanities – the H of A&H – as well.

In retrospect, this idea makes perfect sense to me. I remain appreciative that I attended a 'liberal arts' high school. I knew that I was not likely to ever take an influential amount of non-STEM courses once I started my advanced studies. And my parents made it a point to keep me 'well-rounded'. I was raised under the never-excepted rule that one should try everything (legal) once, including, much to my dismay, sardines. As different as my parents were, they both agreed on this so I was exposed to a wide variety of people and places and things. We didn't categorize anything as STEM or A&H as we recognized each in the other and vice versa. If I had known about the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, I’d probably be somewhere else right now as I might have designed my own degree so that I wouldn’t have had to choose between A&H or STEM back in the day. Even though it’s relegated to academic silos in most cases, the on-going movement toward 'convergence' research with its transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity reflects this ubiquity – and opens the door to new ways of thinking and doing in our well-connected world.

Now outside of 'the academy', I am able to look at the 'busy-ness' of education with a fresh perspective. Focused on educational applications of an enabling knowledge discovery platform, I had an epiphany, eureka, aha moment regarding how most folks are trying to effect the STEM to STEAM shift. As we are daily confronted with the real-life 'sci-fi' decisions of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, my colleague and I realized that MOHO (the software we're investigating) relies on continuous human intervention. That's what makes it unique. In fact, it depends on human intuition and individual experience to deliver the best results! That's what got me to thinking about other areas in which we are yielding our human essence.

Coming back to the STEM to STEAM versus A&H issue, instead of inserting an A into STEM, why don't we pull STEM into A&H (Arts AND Humanities)? As with everything else, in the accountable classroom, some educators integrate tools, techniques, and topics better than others.

Mechanically, it’s not that big of a deal. In fact, a highly successful, international peer-reviewed journal, called Leonardo, has been documenting the use of science and technology in the arts and music for over 50 years. From the website, "Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) is a nonprofit organization that serves the global network of distinguished scholars, artists, scientists, researchers and thinkers through our programs, which focus on interdisciplinary work, creative output and innovation." That introduces another M (music) along with the A, S, and T. Moving forward, Leonardo is increasingly focusing on “the application and influence of the arts and humanities on science and technology". That adds the H!

Visual, semantic, and computational tools and techniques are being used in most every arena of various 'schools' of thought. Maybe, for those of us who live, work, and think outside of the Leonardo community, it’s hard to bridge the gaps because of how enabling technologies 'emerge'. Most are created by engineers who often don't know why anyone would use them! Today's 'big data' methods are changing the ways in which we assess and evaluate academic, scientific, and philosophical studies. There's a lot to learn from each application. For example, when we added MOHO (that knowledge discovery platform we're investigating) to the toolbox for graduate researchers in ATEC, they each were able to search differently (use digital resources more effectively in the process of knowledge discovery) to form more nuanced questions about their research interests – with little or no training. Yay! In a practical way, MOHO’s iterative discovery process enabled these expert searchers to delve into the relationships among concepts that were returned and make connections based on their own existing knowledge, to continuously drive the focus of the MOHO knowledge discovery process rather than needing to rely on the AI (artificial intelligence) process alone.

HOWEVER, in terms of the dynamics of thinking differently about search and research, it’s a whole ‘other ball game’. As you’re probably well-aware, artists don’t typically think like engineers and engineers think very differently from artists usually. Even though this A&H professor didn’t teach like he was taught, when his graduate students were presented with MOHO to come up with novel approaches to the study of a complex body of literature with which they were not very familiar, they didn’t know what to make of the results. Granted, one cannot make a direct comparison to these two cases as there are numerous variables, but the point I’m hoping to make is that transforming any data and information into knowledge and wisdom requires ‘the H’. Technology and theory do not effect change; people do. Particularly in academia, when I think about the future of research, ‘big data’ is like the donut and what we seek is really the spherical ‘hole’. I want to ‘fill in’ those missing elements to paint a more complete, exponentially more meaningful, even bigger picture that links to the reality around me right now.

Innovative applications of enabling technologies, like MOHO, offer infinite ways to leverage the benefits of machine-reading, multiple other forms of AI, and whatever is yet to come, WITHOUT conceding human control of the discovery process. Interjecting human inferential learning (analog decision-making) into the digital tradition of discrete decision-making delivers the best of both worlds as an integrated culture. We should empower searchers to draw from and to build on their unique individual knowledge bases and to explore gradual changes around connections that can take them a little further down the way. That’s the joy of learning (and teaching) that we’ve buried in the unnecessarily overwhelming complexity of the current educational system.

My quest is to promote the development of 'information artisans' (IAs) who appreciate and crave the joy of discovery. Both learners and leaders must be encouraged to exercise playfulness, ingenuity, and creativity. Always a matter of context, ‘play’ is the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for its own pure joy. Technique is acquired by “the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 42). With more experience and shared expertise, I expect that we will eventually return to the 'basics' of life-long learning – where there are no boundaries and ‘learning’ is simply learning (without any qualifiers like S, T, R, E, A, M, or even H). Such (r)evolutionary change takes time, typically on a geologic scale it seems. Existing and emerging open solutions should organically lead to integrated problem-solving. If we 'flipped' the common curricular ‘STEM-to-STEAM’ model, perhaps A&H+STEM (or STEM+A&H, if you’re so inclined) would leapfrog us to the next level of cultural creativity at a rate of change in academia that’s closer to that of today’s rapid technology advances. 

Just sayin', “AH, STEM, I can have it all!”
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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Re-discovering the Joy of Discovery (Technically-Speaking in Everyday Conversation)

“This tool is sooo helpful! We are currently going through a hiring process and I asked the question: What are the best practices for hiring with an equity lens? And I have already so many resources! I can’t wait to use this tool. I think it will be tremendously useful.” That’s what a county official said within hours of getting a login to a beta release of MOHO[1]. She was encouraged to let her ‘mind run free’ after a brief introduction to the GUI (graphical user interface). As an experienced Faculty Librarian and Equity Associate in Higher Education added, “We have not been accustomed to asking whatever question we could imagine, so just see where it leads! And have fun.” As one of the principals exploring educational applications of the MOHO Knowledge Discovery Platform for Academic/Scientific Research, I’ve heard dozens of paraphrasings of that refreshing commentary. It’s a productive, not distracting, ‘giddiness’. Having recently experienced it for myself again, [Rebekah K Nix, PhD] I decided to try to capture the essence of re-discovering that joy of discovery in academia.

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.

MOHO's Graphical User Interface (GUI)
MOHO is highly scalable and enables distributed, real-time knowledge discovery through a single information view – without having to centralize the data – no matter what it is or where it is. (All you need is permission to access the information.) At the same time, MOHO leverages the human capacity for sense-making while off-loading the mechanics of ‘big data’ analytics to advanced machine learning and natural language processing functions. In other words, MOHO simply helps people (not statistics, not machine-inference) make fully-informed decisions – quickly. Built on a robust Bayesian inference engine at the back-end, MOHO’s contextual query processing utilizes probabilistic models and uses evidence from terms, phrases, and entities to infer most relevant documents. The richer the context, the better the results. This in conjunction with discovering most relevant entities related to the query enables an iterative discovery platform.

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!

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?

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.

Example of ‘Drilling Down’ into MOHO’s Discover Knowledge View (captured Nov 14, 2018)
Proactive, Human Perspective
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).
[2] SOURCE: Marcus, Jon (2015). On Campus, Older Faculty Keep On Keepin' On. nprEd, OCTOBER 09, 2015.
[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.
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Friday, March 9, 2018

Remembering in the Future...


This March 3-5, 2018, vTapestry partners Christine Maxwell and Rebekah Nix were pleased to represent The University of Texas at Dallas' (UTD's) Office of Information Technology (OIT), School of Interdisciplinary Studies (IS), and School of Arts, Technology & Emerging Communication (ATEC) by sharing new research and resources (managed by Corinne Griffin, OIT Enterprise Systems Developer) at the 48th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. UTD's Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies is the new 'home' of this inter-faith, international, and interdisciplinary event.


Focused on Critical Moments in the History and Memory of the Holocaust, it was a full weekend of learning, discussing, and networking by over 100 educators, historians, and lifelong learners with several general sessions presented by UTD students and faculty. Along with Dr Anne Balsamo (Dean of ATEC), Christine and Rebekah delivered a paper titled Remembering in the Future: Redesigning Holocaust Education for Digital Discovery that included an overview of the Fall 2017 semester pilots of MOHO (in HUHI 6320 and ATCM 7331) and reviewed examples of the developing DI Assignment Blazer/Calculator (ABC). Both initiatives were well-received by students, faculty, and scholars as several new opportunities for collaborative projects were identified for further integrating iterative knowledge discovery into academic research within the complex field of Holocaust Studies.

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