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The Valdosta School
To: My Dear Students
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Seemingly mechanical and relatively unintimidating, can the practice of assembling collections of concepts and terms related to content areas of interest— of building taxonomies— be harnessed to render accessible, navigable the intellectual spaces we wish to explore?
Time to (re)design and glean those punked out immersive best practices.
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Evil involves forethought.
It’s all in the planning.
The ultimate futility of bureaucracy
(when it distracts from and derides collaboration and community)...
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Problem: the contemporary lust for data, in combination with the relative immaturity of collection tools and prevalence of ill-conceived implementations, has led to atomization of otherwise useful bits of raw information into indecipherable piles of, at best, unintelligible, misunderstood, and therefore largely unactionable factoids.
Insight: by limiting user prompts to core questions and providing fluid one-click access to related topic questions, the coherent mental map of topical and thematic interrelationships necessary to engage in the process of reflective writing— an intensive cognitive process requiringsynthesis, articulation, and ultimately, empathic consideration— can be supported and, perhaps, enhanced.
Solution: separate and minimize the architectural constraints (i.e. mechanisms of data pre-structuring or pigeonholing if you prefer) at ingress and introduce an initial analytical pass after the input stage is completed to map provided responses to expected/required structure.