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Visualizing the Future Question...

What would your ideal information organization attention focusing device be, if it were to be manifest outside of your brains?I ask because I am constantly picturing an interactive virtual reality in which I get to organize a giant 3D map of knowledges, interconnected and mobile (with a kick ass search engine). What kinds of technology do you all picture being used to filter/generate attention...?

Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:16.
Morgan R.'s blog

Kung Fu
mark p's picture
Submitted by mark p on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:46.

I shall accept nothing less than a plug that goes directly into my brain, connected to the web of course, which reads for my preferences from the entire bank of human knowledge, and automatically downloads into my brain anything i could possibly be interested in-- the knowledge i needed at any given moment woud simply come to me in a flash of inspriation or be presented comic book style on panels across my visual view. Yes, yes, the first thing I would do is learn kung-fu!


Would this mad kung-fu
Morgan R.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:52.

Would this mad kung-fu change the way you were able to know knowledge though?  If you have to sit down with a book and slog your way through the knowing, with frequent interuptions, possibly over a few days, and you're thinking about it and processing... If its just there, do you really know it?  If there was no visual before you informing you that information was there, does it exist?  Can you snatch that pebble from my hand?Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)


Learning in the Brain?
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:51.

Actually, the idea of the plug into the brain (ala Matrix) really privileges an outdated idea about how we learn. Many congitive scienctists, working against top-down models of cognition, argue that learning takes place throughout the body. With kung-fu your body would need to "know" (muscle memory really is in muscle) as much as the brain would need to know. The plug only works if cognition takes place solely in the brain; much evidence suggests that learning and cognition are decentered and distributed across the body and the environment.


sick burn
mark p's picture
Submitted by mark p on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:56.

Yeah, well . . . . i like privilaging outdated ideas about how we learn! So, uh, there! And . . . yo momma dresses you funny!


So do we need some kind of
Morgan R.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:55.

So do we need some kind of ultimate brain pumping exercise machine?  Or a holodeck with learning built in (live ancient rhetoric rather then read it)? Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)


The Holodeck
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Thu, 2007-02-15 10:57.

Any educational program that involves the body and incorporates (what a word) the environment in acts of cognition would serve us well. Holodecks (to a certain extent) do seem to imply the cognition is embodied.


The Role of the Teacher
Amylea's picture
Submitted by Amylea on Thu, 2007-02-15 11:26.

If we imagine a future where attention is even more important, and there are new ways of reading as the oscillation Lanham describes, then what would we instructors of "composition" be doing? Hanging out in a Holodeck? In a Chatbox? If we can educate via the body *and* mind, then what will instructors need to know?


Will we be instructors or
Morgan R.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan R. on Thu, 2007-02-15 11:34.

Will we be instructors or programers?  Will we sit in a virtual world and create vast mind maps with our students?  School and learning certainly would have to be altered when we think about attention...Mad Morgan Rackem (aka Morgan Reitmeyer)


I hadn't read this post
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Sun, 2007-02-18 08:25.

I hadn't read this post before I posted it, but I think part of this question is related to my post "VizRhet as the key to WAC?". The limitation is, of course, the lack of bodily involvement. As Rackem and Nathaniel have both articulated, Mark's Matrix model of instant-upload cannot provide meta-knowledge, only trivia. Without the relations, the networks of data, there is no meaning in information. While we're currently equipped to keep this claim wihtin the brain, a more useful way of understanding this claim would be to require emotions, the body, social relations, spacial and temporal relations to all be included in our conception of relations or data networks.