n-dimensional Learning.

A lot of the technical learning I do seems to come from books. Textbooks. Reference books. Manuals. Etc.

But I'm tired of learning in one dimension.

The author(s) organize the text to be read, generally, from front cover to back. Reference manuals are a little more generous. The authors of such books usually assume the reader will jump from topic to topic and there may be more of a guide than a simple table of contents and index. But no matter how the information in a book is organized, I feel like the job of connecting all the topics is up to me.The problem, is that I get it wrong initially and it takes me a while to get it right.

So I want to introduce a new way of learning. One that's more conducive to spatial understanding. A way of organizing information so that the connections between topics is obvious.

This won't be the first time graphical, spatial interfaces are used to organize information. Visuwords is a free online graphical dictionary. You can type in a word and see a word's hyper/hyponym, mero/holonym associations, related verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, topic/region/usage domains, etc.

Essentially, my system would consist of a number of orthogonal axes 'n' and an origin. For instance, in learning C++, the origin might be the following: "C++ is a programming language. The language is made up of: Classes, Functions, Variables, (etc.)." Then to the right would be a column-like space. The top sub-space of the column might be Classes, below that, Functions, below that, Variables, then Enumerators, etc. So we might have a column of 7 'sub-spaces'. In one of the seven sub-spaces we might read "Enumerators group sets of integral constants." To the right of that, a more detailed explanation of enumerators, specific syntax, limits to how we can use enumerators. To the right of that would be a space for concrete examples of enumerated lists in C++, more detailed explanation, problems and solutions. To the right of that might be more challenging exercises, abstract relations problems, etc.

In the example we deal with two axes. The horizontal axis would be depth of one topic, and the vertical axis would be breadth of all topics given a certain depth. The interface for a book-space of C++ might look like:

The grand idea might be to have a single, universal Information-Space (IS). Something like Wikipedia but with more detailed information as well: textbook-depth information, academic journal level information. You could navigate the IS through a customizable digital interface. An IS browser. Your browser could track where you spend your time learning/studying. The breadth you cover as well as the depth of individual topics. You might chart it out and see that "Oh, while I was in school I spent a lot of time in the Math sector of the IS, now I'm spiralling outwards, hitting computer sciences, chemistry, and physics. But compared to last year, my average depth in topics of the IS has increased."

The goal of this all is just to help people learn. And maybe to help us see something about how we learn.