Turning inside-out the popular model of delivery of digital media as 'open learning', here we consider the accumulating and mapping of documents as a practice of cultivating and evolving a personal cognitive landscape.
A long-standing model for this, from the early days of widening popular literacy - alongside radical, working-class institutions like *Corresponding societies* - is **the commonplace book**.
> - MCMorgan - wiki as commonplace book blog
> - Steven Johnson - The glass box and the commonplace book blog
wiki clearly stands in this tradition of **organic-intellectual**, 'autodidact' learning and investigation - as the above references attest. One advocate is Mike Caulfield, who has diligently explored the deployment of wiki as a tool in facilitating learning of college class members.
> - Caulfield 2014 - *New directions in digital collaboration* . . one of the best illustrations of the dynamic of 'distributed discovery' thro federation thro wiki blog
> - Caulfield 2015a: *Beyond conversation* (Vannevar Bush and why wiki is not the memex)
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- Caulfield 2015b: *Reader as Link Author* . . a rider to the previous, which explains what in wiki-use *is* akin to Bush's vision of the memex, and also highlights how the personal commonplace book can become a medium of collaborative discovery and mapping in a federation of writers using 'federatable' tools
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Here we see an emerging emphasis on the power of 'the collaborative link' within an ecosystem of digitally-federating 'commonplace books' by multiple authors, coupled with deepening skill in conducting (as a participant) a 'chorus of voices'. See Collaborative link > See Chorus of voices - To be added xxx
Something that needs very skilful performing, and much elucidation, is the deployment of a toolstack of auxiliary communicative means, through which such a chorus might be even better conducted; and maybe, even lead to a consensus or agreed-canonical 'collective-commonplace book'. This is part of the general matter of assembling a toolstack that can constitute 'a commons of running code' for collaborative production.
wiki has a bunch of affordances for this, built-in but not visible to a casual reader. You have to be an active writer, to discover them, and their power as a kind of **awareness engine**. Nevertheless other tools/channels - like video- or text-chat - are required. > Awareness engine - To be added xxx
What remains fundamentally important about wiki is that it is a means for fluent, responsive, hyper-mapping of 'the world' by an active investigator. 'Mapping' tools are one category of the extended trinity. Extended trinity