Diary August 2013
22nd July 2013 to 11th August 2013 - Went on a family holiday and did no work on this PhD.
12th August 2013 to 26th August 2013 - Clearing. Did little other than talk to the nice Ramesh about whether I should use the mean of absolute differences or the geometric mean of the differences to define the learning dissonance. His initial view was that the geometric mean was probably better, but we could meet to discuss it once the hullabaloo died down.
27th August 2013 - In discussion with Tony Weight about the term "atom", we decided that "normalised" atom would be a better term. This has been intentionally hijacked from database design theory. The term an atom of learning has been used by may researchers. It refers to an indivisible block of learning that stands on its own. This would be a level 1 definition. Level 2 would be that the atom is in a form in which it can be reused by different learners, i.e learning style independent. It would therefore contain links to the same materials in other formats (video, MP3 and PDF at the moment). The final level, level 3, would occur when the atom is then technically reusable (i.e. in a specific format). This would be defined by a standard (say, the one we are developing on O-VL).
28th August 2013 - Tony Weight and I then started thinking about how this might be implemented. We decided that the normalised atoms could be contained within a wrapper which would list the other atoms which were below it (using the INCLUDE command in PHP). The top atom (the one we currently think of as a book) would have this wrapper that would link to other atoms (the chapters). These atoms in turn could then be wrapped up with other atoms and so on creating a tree. This would now be more akin to the idea Lachlan showed me of pearl trees. Using these wrappers would be much more flexible since the person creating the tree could nest them as deep as they require. The user would either start with one atom and develop their own string of pearls, add existing wrappers they have found in the O-VL archive or use (and later amend, if they wanted) an existing string of pearls.