Importance of Wholeness

I reflect on Andy's notes and Frode's tools. They are all fascinating and hold important insight.

Andy's note tool has remarkable similarity to the fed wiki. He presents hyperlinked short pages that create a type of line-up. There are elements that are nicely interactive, but it starts to feel clumsy when the lineup is long.

I most appreciated, though, his thoughts within this tool as they mirror conversations that I have had with Ward that underpin our partnership together – he as a tool maker and me as a tool user.

While Andy talks about a 'thinking tool' (a reference that I just read but cannot now easily find as his tool lacks a search function but a reference I was able to find in a wiki page that I had forgotten I had written: More than a Delusion), Frode has created new writing and reading tools with wonderful functionality, based on Text as Symbols.

I sense that this distinction between thinking, writing and reading tools is important.

My experience is that the wiki is first and foremost a thinking tool – one that helps a creator to make meaning of Emergent Ideas. From a vortex of unknowing, these ideas appear.

The environment of the wiki challenges the creator to make those ideas whole, a word, a paragraph, a page, at a time. From there, given a Guiding Intention, those concepts develop a harmonic resonance that allows patterns to emerge – fractal patterns of meaning – forming increasingly higher abstractions of wholeness.

In the last few weeks, as my work with educators accelerates, we have been focusing on the wiki as a reading tool for others. We have written a guide to a new learning framework that we have developed to introduce the experience of agile-based learning to educators. This wiki not only provides online interactive exploration but we are also seeking new ways to easily publish the content in a printable format.

I sense that our success in fulfilling the promise of the wiki will be based on others appreciating not only the primary three dimensions of the wiki – a thinking, writing, and reading tool – but also new dimensions that are emerging, as a discovery and a publishing tool.

Imagine, for a moment where, through dynamic data visualization, the wiki helps us discover surprise that emerges from complex systems that leads to insight that forms into new patterns of understanding, understanding that develops into a comprehensive body of meaning that can not only be interactively explored but published into a printable page. Quickly. The wiki as an integrated 'creating tool'. Now, that would be interesting.

I think about this possibility after noticing how, because of the inherent nature of the wiki, much of a comprehensive 120 page DIG guide was built in just a few days, one that included the creation of a new pattern language to support this new learning framework. Now, that was remarkable.