Without getting too kitchy and carried away with this metaphor, you can visualize the Boost content as being part of a huge dungeon or series of escape rooms where every room has something to unique to learn or do in order to move on. There’s a lot to learn and sometimes holding onto that visual can really help keep your sanity. If you know what a is you can think of it as a MUD for learning or MUDL. Since each room is captured in a zettel you can appreciate what psypheric1 said while I was writing this:
“Don’t get yourself in a MUDL when learning. Just zettel down and you’ll learn a lot more than you thought.”
This connection of rooms with doors all starts with a single entrance. The formal name for such a structure is a rooted node tree, where everything starts from a single point and then branches out in different ways at each point of connection with some points interconnecting on occasion. Formally, I call these points of content and connection learning nodes (a specialization of knowledge nodes, a concept from the Knowledge Exchange Grid/Graph KEG project), but informally we call them rooms for the sake of the Boost as in the following:
💬 When the Boost first started we tried to group the content into ‘days’, which never seemed quite right, because learning it took a lot longer than a single day. Rooms are a more more apt metaphor.
The structure of a rooted tree of learning nodes allows you to choose to cover just the minimum or to continue more deeply into any specific topic or skill while managing the interdependencies in natural way.
You might know some examples of this structure from the gaming or tech world already. A skills tree in a game like Dota2 is a simple version of one. Every time you open a web page and “Inspect Element” you see the Document Object Model (DOM), which is also a rooted node tree.
Perhaps the most significant example can be found in the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books and turn-based role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. First you read (or are read) the content for that “room” and are then asked, “What do you do?” In this sense, the “room” is a knowledge node, the description is the knowledge followed by an invitation to assess your understanding and take action. This is the same for learning nodes, “rooms” of learning, as if stuck in an escape room where you have to unlock each one before proceeding (except that nothing is actually stopping you).
Sometimes your choices are obvious, sometimes not. But they are always up to you. One choice is to not make any choice at all. You control your path, within certain boundaries to keep things from getting really crazy.
💬 Other, kitschier terms were considered and abandoned including ‘mission’, ‘quest’, ‘challenge’, and ‘achievement’ which I might still use for the gamified, hacker/spy themed learning on skilstak.io and skilstak.sh someday.
Doors:
20210830025609 Boost: You Must Be This ‘Tall’ to Ride
#learning #education #edtech #compsci #pedagogy