# Grappling with ideas: convergence and divergence


Thanks to the generous recommendation by [Zaid Ali
Alsagoff](http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/), George Siemens invited me to
give a talk to the [Connectivism 2011 MOOC](http://cck11.mooc.ca/). I
decided that instead of giving a talk about something I know and have
thought a lot about, like open access or OER, I would try to challenge
myself by proposing a topic that I was in the middle of grappling with,
where I really didn't know where I was going or what my conclusion would
be. It's quite scary to be giving a presentation on something that is so
"raw" in your mind, but I figured the CCK11 crowd was the perfect crowd
for it, and the preparation of the slides helped me really gather my
thoughts.

I have thought a lot about how we think and work with ideas,
individually, in small groups online, in face-to-face workshops, and in
distributed networks. There seemed to me to be something fundamentally
similar with approaches to mind-mapping and note taking, collaborative
discourse tools like Knowledge Forum and Compendium, innovative workshop
methodologies like Unconferences and Open Space methodology, and
visualizations and sensemaking of massive amounts of networked data...
Yet whenever I read about one of these dimensions, they never seem to
mention the others. So I tried to map out some of the overlapping areas,
and principles that seem to apply.

This is something that I would love people's feedback on, but despite
the fact that we have both an [Elluminate
recording](https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2011-04-06.0734.M.D020A8F94687A60B3D95DF94DA4CE4.vcr&sid=2008104),
an [MP3](http://reganmian.net/files/cck11.mp3), as well as [a Vimeo
recording](http://vimeo.com/22403448), I knew that many are too busy to
sit through a 45+ minute presentation. I wanted to do something similar
to what I did with my presentation on [OER and multicultural
students](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/12/07/oer-for-a-multicultural-classroom-student-as-user-and-producer/),
where I exported all the slides into PNGs, added them to a blog entry,
and then added text - both from the talk, and from other sources -
around the pictures. It became a massive blog entry, but I got some very
positive feedback on it.

Lately, I have been playing around with a [[start|wiki]] to keep my
notes. It's a [DokuWiki](http://dokuwiki.org) installation, and I will
write more about the specific setup later - I've tweaked it quite a bit,
and am becoming quite happy with it, but there are still a few more
things to do. Anyway, I decided to try to do it in the wiki instead,
both because it's much easier to handle so many pictures (just resize
them with Automator, move them to the media directory, and create a file
with {{idea001.png}, {{idea002.png}} etc, and then type the relevant
text around those image links.

This turned out to work excellently. See [[grappling\_with\_ideas|my
extended notes here]]. The other advantage is that I can add links to
wikipages on people or theories that I discuss. Currently, many of these
are placeholders, because I've just gotten started, but eventually I'd
like these pages to link to their most important articles, my  notes
from those articles, etc. (And already, there are some pages offering a
lot more depth, like the one on [[tagging]], which I extracted from an
online course I was doing this winter, or the one on [[monologic and
dialogic learning]], where you can both see my organized notes, and the
[[ref:hoadley1999between|raw notes]] from reading the article.

I later wrote a paper for a course, where I also tried to process some
of these ideas. This was my first paper written
with [Multi-Markdown](http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/),
using [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) to process the [Bibtex
bibliography](http://www.bibtex.org/) (I'll write more about these
things later too). The nice thing about this, was that I could then use
Pandoc to convert the Markdown document to Mediawiki markup, which is
very similar to DokuWiki. Thus I was able to publish the
[[grappling\_with\_ideas-the\_paper|entire paper]] as a very nicely
formatted wiki page. Much nicer than PDF, if you ask me!

Hopefully you'll find the talk interesting, whichever format you consume
it in, and I would love to hear ideas on how to take my thinking
further, especially if you know about anyone who has been looking at all
these different levels before - seems to me that most thinkers
concentrate on one, whether it's [[Tony Buzan]] and his
[[the_mind_map_book|mind mapping]] for individuals, or [[Marlene
Scardamalia]] and her [[knowledge building]], etc.

Stian PS: You'll notice a tiny little icon behind links to the
[[start|wiki]]. I'll probably be keeping more of the notes that I would
have otherwise published on my blog, on the wiki, in the future, but
I'll blog about it so that it arrives in your feed reader.