Ten years ago, I was leading a project called HomeworkCentral.com, with a graduate student team captained by two Ph.D’s, for sciences and the humanities. We built an open online network of 35,000 study subjects comprised of about 150,000 links to webpages picked by our scholars for sciences, humanities, arts, technologies and more. HomeworkCentral.com was very popular, receiving 4 million monthly visitors in the year 2000.
Those of us who connected the webpages of subjects imagined what the resulting network might look like, but had no way of representing it visually. This month the Los Alamos Laboratory has released what they call a Map of Science, which is a first look at what we realized was happening a decade ago. The Los Alamos research and map appear in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).
Although Johan Bollen, who headed the project team was “surprised” by the networking of subjects that he saw, I was not:
Bollen and colleagues were surprised by the map’s scope and detail. Whereas maps based on citations favor the natural sciences, the team’s maps of science showed a prominent and central position for the humanities and social sciences, which, in many places, acted like interdisciplinary bridges connecting various other scientific domains. Sections of the maps were shaped by the activities of practitioners who read the scientific literature but do not frequently publish in its journals.
HomeworkCentral.com was taken offline in 2003, and made proprietary. The practice for online “education” materials in the years since has not been to use the open internet as a network. Education is packaged in standards, curricula, courses and other formats repositioned from the analog 20th century. These formats do not allow the subject (cognitive), granular (unbundled) connectivity you see on the Map of Science.
Even back in the late 90s, as I watched the graduate students find and judge links in their fields, and then link what they found in cognitive patterns, I was sure that this method would be the future of learning resources. The Map of Science proves me right!
In the Golden Swamp that is the internet, the network whose depiction is glimpsed in the Map of Science has evolved to mirror the subjects education is meant to teach. This network delivers the freshest, most authoritative manifestation of these subjects. We should be using — and optimizing — this network for teaching and learning.
