St. Gregory's E.C. in the past year has had a simply extraordinary exploration of related subjects under the broad umbrella "The Evolution of Religious Thought". Visual displays including blackboard, PowerPoint and handouts have been an important help. But each time I see PowerPoint or paper I feel a deep longing to put modern technology to work to make learning and discovery oh, so much faster. I've been watching Google and other search engines develop and have had special interest in interactive graphics when I see them well done. I think this new technology might greatly enhance our intellectual pursuit and propose we see what we can do with it. The links below are some opportunities to learn more about where to find this new technology, but to help you with a shortcut let me point you to work being done cooperatively in Florida universities including FAU.

The technology is called "Cmap" which is an acronym for "Concept Map" and it is being developed by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). I believe IHMC originated at the University of West Florida but other Florida universities including FAU are partners in this developmental research. Many applications of this technology make sense, but the most impressive I've seen is the concept map that displays the process (or systems) by which the NASA 2001 Mission to Mars was managed.

The Mars Cmap is interactive. Clicking on the yellow boxes does nothing, but clicking on the gray network icons below the yellow boxes brings up another menu. Clicking on any of those topics brings up a new page which may be as complicated as the one on which you clicked. When you see a gray box with a circular icon inside, clicking on that may bring up a more traditional html menu or page, so this Cmap facility can display results of a search engine, a view of a complex network, play media files, or display traditional text & graphics just like any website. This is a superb place to learn because it is very fast and deals with a sufficiently complex subject. Note the lines, arrows and text that help you understand the relationships between the yellow boxes. Imagine the work being done now by Debbie, Chuck, Steve and Jack expressed in this format.

Imagine the fun that some of us who visit our library to learn might experience in learning this way. Sofia will need a new computer learning station in her library. What might it mean for young people exploring ideas from Sunday School ? And, of course, anyone with internet access can view it from home, school, or whereever. We do a lot of imaginitive things at St. Gregory's. Does this have a place among them ?

Here's an example of the sorts of information we can link to simply using Wikipedia. This is a simple illustration, but it is a linked representation of part of Steve's Powerpoint data which I'm calling the Evolution of Civilization. Jump to the bottom of this page to see the data which created the links.

To learn more about IHMC, the following links are suggested.
ihmc.us
ihmc.us/about
cmap.ihmc.us/download
cmap.coginst.uwf.edu

The following links are to related work or to pages I wrote years ago while learning about this.
Polarized Readers (New York Times story)
Polarized Readers (New York Times story)
RaceMatters.org/ConceptMaps (Carl's search years ago)
Devplan ConceptMaps (Carl's search years ago)

Here are more links which I've looked at briefly. I did see a technology a few years ago which linked music information with awesome dynamic graphics, but I've not found that technology again. LivePlasma might be it, but I haven't taken the time to learn about it this year.
ConceptDraw MINDMAP: mind map software
Igor Bidenko's links
KartOO.com
LivePlasma.com (terribly slow)
MusicPlasma.com (terribly slow)
http://www.like.com/
http://www.webreference.com/new/010607.html
http://www.oedb.org/library/features/top-25-web20-search-engines
http://www.infosthetics.com/archives/2006/07/sun_music_search_engine.html
http://www.infosthetics.com/archives/2006/11/like_visual_search.html
http://www.nooface.net/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/2245257
http://www.tucows.com/preview/511015
http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/music
http://www.forevergeek.com/entertainment/visual_music_search_engine.php

One last bit of information. Here's the data required to create the Wikipedia links. The data has 5 columns. First is the year to establish the link on the vertical timeline. Second is the subject. Third is a question mark if I'm not sure we got the right subject. Fourth is a 1 if the link relates to Steve's "Science" timeline or 2 if it relates to his "Religion" timeline. Fifth is a 1 to turn off the link if the term does not produce a meaningful response from Wikipedia. Later we can think about adding what's needed to make more info appear on the screen when the cursor gets near.