4 ms·

Community-Curated Interactive Mind Maps

37 points by golanggeek 9y ago

oceanghost 9y ago
I’ve been working on something along these lines. What is your data source and where are you planning on taking things if I may ask? We might have overlapping interests. :)
- nikivi 9y ago
  Our goals with the project is to present visually the most efficient paths for learning any topic on Earth. The focus is on progressive learning. That is if a person wants to learn React.js. The effective path to learning it would be to learn Javascript first as it is a Javascript library. Or in case of learning machine learning, one should ideally have knowledge of statistics and linear algebra. And another big focus is exploration. That is why we suggest new users randomly a topic one can possibly learn. He/she then can press on to go learn the topic and explore other topics related to it similar to exploring the wiki. As for the data source, the website will very soon be fully open to the public, thus anyone can contribute to adding resources to any of the topics and community can then decide which resources they find most effective.
  - oceanghost 9y ago
    That's more or less what I'm working on if you s/Rect/Vue/.
  - evv 9y ago
    Any topic on earth.. how ambitious!! I’m assuming your team is not qualified to review the map for every topic on earth. So, how do you plan on crowd-sourcing the review process? How does it compare with Wikipedia? If I were a qualified reviewer for a given topic, why would I spend my time reviewing this mind map in comparison to Wikipedia, which would arguably be a better use of my time?
    - nikivi 9y ago
      The difference between Wikipedia and Learn Anything is that Wikipedia focuses on the content. It gives a great overview of the topic and all the related topics. However Wikipedia is just one resource you can use to learn a topic. More often than not, there is a very great course or YouTube videos or articles you can read and watch to learn the topic more in depth. That's the problem we want to solve. We want to minimise the time you spend 'finding resources' and 'things to learn' and we want to visualise the entire learning process so you can explore and learn the content progressively similar to Khan Academy only instead cover all topics. The actual learning will still be done outside the website. The website only acts as a gateway to most effective resources as chosen by the community. As for reviewing resources being added. You are right that we can't manually review every single one and that poses a great challenge as our focus with the website is to present the most effective resources for learning which not necessarily are most 'popular'. The voting system we will have in place will be similar to Reddit in that more 'upvoted' resources will surface to the top. Another thing we need to check is that the resources being added are actually related to the topic where they were added. One solution to solve this, would be to allow to flag resources that are inappropriate. These are all quite challenging and I think interesting problems and there are really only 2 people working at the project currently and we really hope to bring more people into the project to help share ideas and help with solving some of these problems. Everything is Open Source and is built with React. Hope that answers your question.
slowmovintarget 9y ago
Link to the working system: https://learn-anything.xyz/ https://learn-anything.xyz/ It still has gaps, naturally, but it presents some interesting ways to start learning.
- mandeepj 9y ago
  i searched for 'car repair'. It keeps on giving me results for 'dna repair' :-)
white-flame 9y ago
Is editing purely through source files? Are there examples of good JS-based graphically editable mind maps out there?
- nikivi 9y ago
  Hey white-flame. Developers of Learn Anything here. The current version that is live on the website only allows users to edit content through JSON. However, we are working hard on releasing a brand new version of the website that allows editing and adding things to the maps from the website itself. And that process should be as simple as adding links to Reddit or making a FB post. The most up-to-date version of our new release can be seen here: http://dev.learn-anything.xyz http://dev.learn-anything.xyz Would really love to hear your thoughts on it. We hope to release it this Sunday to the world. Our main focus is however to bring as many interesting people in to contribute to the code base. Everything is Open Source and built with React.js.
gavinpc 9y ago
Interesting idea. An earlier iteration of this was on HN a while back. Renders nonsense if cookies are blocked. I can tell you without looking that you aren't using a try/catch to feature test localStorage. So many times but it's not getting to me.
hyperfekt 9y ago
Very interesting! Too bad this is only for finding instruction materials. An even bigger problem than finding learning materials I often have when autodidactically diving into a new topic is having to build a concept map, which is always extremely hard.

37 points by golanggeek 9y ago

I’ve been working on something along these lines. What is your data source and where are you planning on taking things if I may ask? We might have overlapping interests. :)

nikivi 9y ago
Our goals with the project is to present visually the most efficient paths for learning any topic on Earth. The focus is on progressive learning. That is if a person wants to learn React.js. The effective path to learning it would be to learn Javascript first as it is a Javascript library. Or in case of learning machine learning, one should ideally have knowledge of statistics and linear algebra. And another big focus is exploration. That is why we suggest new users randomly a topic one can possibly learn. He/she then can press on to go learn the topic and explore other topics related to it similar to exploring the wiki. As for the data source, the website will very soon be fully open to the public, thus anyone can contribute to adding resources to any of the topics and community can then decide which resources they find most effective.
- oceanghost 9y ago
  That's more or less what I'm working on if you s/Rect/Vue/.
- evv 9y ago
  Any topic on earth.. how ambitious!! I’m assuming your team is not qualified to review the map for every topic on earth. So, how do you plan on crowd-sourcing the review process? How does it compare with Wikipedia? If I were a qualified reviewer for a given topic, why would I spend my time reviewing this mind map in comparison to Wikipedia, which would arguably be a better use of my time?
  - nikivi 9y ago
    The difference between Wikipedia and Learn Anything is that Wikipedia focuses on the content. It gives a great overview of the topic and all the related topics. However Wikipedia is just one resource you can use to learn a topic. More often than not, there is a very great course or YouTube videos or articles you can read and watch to learn the topic more in depth. That's the problem we want to solve. We want to minimise the time you spend 'finding resources' and 'things to learn' and we want to visualise the entire learning process so you can explore and learn the content progressively similar to Khan Academy only instead cover all topics. The actual learning will still be done outside the website. The website only acts as a gateway to most effective resources as chosen by the community. As for reviewing resources being added. You are right that we can't manually review every single one and that poses a great challenge as our focus with the website is to present the most effective resources for learning which not necessarily are most 'popular'. The voting system we will have in place will be similar to Reddit in that more 'upvoted' resources will surface to the top. Another thing we need to check is that the resources being added are actually related to the topic where they were added. One solution to solve this, would be to allow to flag resources that are inappropriate. These are all quite challenging and I think interesting problems and there are really only 2 people working at the project currently and we really hope to bring more people into the project to help share ideas and help with solving some of these problems. Everything is Open Source and is built with React. Hope that answers your question.

slowmovintarget 9y ago

Link to the working system: https://learn-anything.xyz/ https://learn-anything.xyz/ It still has gaps, naturally, but it presents some interesting ways to start learning.

mandeepj 9y ago
i searched for 'car repair'. It keeps on giving me results for 'dna repair' :-)

white-flame 9y ago

Is editing purely through source files? Are there examples of good JS-based graphically editable mind maps out there?

nikivi 9y ago
Hey white-flame. Developers of Learn Anything here. The current version that is live on the website only allows users to edit content through JSON. However, we are working hard on releasing a brand new version of the website that allows editing and adding things to the maps from the website itself. And that process should be as simple as adding links to Reddit or making a FB post. The most up-to-date version of our new release can be seen here: http://dev.learn-anything.xyz http://dev.learn-anything.xyz Would really love to hear your thoughts on it. We hope to release it this Sunday to the world. Our main focus is however to bring as many interesting people in to contribute to the code base. Everything is Open Source and built with React.js.

gavinpc 9y ago

Interesting idea. An earlier iteration of this was on HN a while back. Renders nonsense if cookies are blocked. I can tell you without looking that you aren't using a try/catch to feature test localStorage. So many times but it's not getting to me.

hyperfekt 9y ago

Very interesting! Too bad this is only for finding instruction materials. An even bigger problem than finding learning materials I often have when autodidactically diving into a new topic is having to build a concept map, which is always extremely hard.