My Twin Magnificent Obsessions – (1) The Learning Cloud (TLC). Yes, The Learning First!

I am an alumnus of UP Los Baños (BSA major in Ag Edu, 1965) – I have been exploring the Internet since 1990, ie 33 years, and so I know people don’t look at the Digital World as a classroom. The method of teaching in the Internet is? Mostly Spoon Feeding – Some teachers never learn!

In any digital library – “Knowledge Bank” – you are (silently) told: “This is it. This is what you don’t know!” The instructor is treating you as simply a student who wants to graduate from that class of “Don’t Know At All” and pushing you into the class of “Know It All”!

No, nobody among the creators of webpages assumes that you want to learn – they just assume that you want to be told.

Logged on, typing “Rice Knowledge Bank” brings me to knowledgebank.irri.org. The top image is from here – it is the very first image that greets me. Note that it says: “Learn about best practices in rice farming” – below, Pre-planting.” “Growth.” “Postproduction.”

In other words, as in any Knowledge Bank, IRRI’s Rice Knowledge Bank tells you in no uncertain terms what to know and what to do – no questions asked.

The Knowledge Bank is a learned instructor talking to his/her students what to think and what to do without being asked priorly “Who?” or “What?” or “Where?” or “When?” or “Why?” The Knowledge Bank assumes that you are interested only in the unasked question, “How?”

The Learning Cloud

Hereby, I am offering an entirely different version of the Knowledge Bank, that which assumes that you know what you want to ask and are looking for answers yourself.

There is no such creature yet in the entire Internet universe. Here is a relevant background story – In 2014, I blogged “Science With A Human Face, 3: EXPLOREit, KSIConnect & Farmers' Library” (26 Aug 2014, Creative Thinkering, blogspot.com) where I said:

… I worked with the virtual Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture (OpAPA), an ICRISAT-inspired multi-agency project based at PhilRice in 2004; during that time, I wrote & finished a concept book for an information bank, The Geography Of Rice (unpublished) of 198 pages (8.5" x 11" trim size), about how to render OpAPA farmer-friendly.

Nothing happened to my book, and OpAPA went thataway. That information bank book I have since revised and retitled as “The Geography Of Knowledge” (TGoK).

My intellectual in(ter)vention, “The Learning Cloud” (TLC) is TGoK resuscitated.

The TLC – Tender Loving Counselor, will lead you on. For instance:

You type “rice” (cap or lowercase, with/without the quotation marks), press Enter, and TLC will show you simultaneously different images of varieties and suggested planting techniques. No such thing as you are immediately shown “best practices in rice farming”!

“The Learning Cloud“ And “The Knowledge Bank“ Compared

Note: It’s “Learning” versus “Knowledge” –

In TLC, you are guided;
in TKB, you are simply told, directed.

In TLC, you essentially teach yourself;
In RKB, you are simply instructed.

In TLC, you are both the learner and the teacher yourself.
In TKB, you are ignorant!@517