This page is the starting page for a thesis that proposes the design of a new tool, embodying visual knowledge building techniques as well as linear narrative, to facilitate learner-directed education in a digital age: an age in which the gaps between production and consumption are breaking down, as are the supposed gaps between education and entertainment.

It is also, in effect, the permalink for the entire thesis.

The thesis is being written here, in this way, as a working example of the arguments that it proposes, and the methods that it proposes to advance those arguments.

“Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.”

Stanley Milgram, 1974

What follows is a concept map that outlines the route we will be taking. This will serve as a roadmap for the excursion, and the nodes will become live links to explanations and further visual representations. For the moment it stands as an executive summary of the arguments.

My aim is to draw the strands together, and publish a fully working version ready by mid-summer, 2007. That will not be the end of the project. Rather it will move the research onto a second stage which will begin with a small-scale practical test of the ideas expressed here..