Idea mechanics: Utilizing technology to better communicate ideas

Abstract

Ideas are the building blocks of every human endeavor, yet anyone who has ever tried to explain an idea he had conceived knows the difficulties involved in making his audience understand the idea. People will not understand the idea as is, but as it seems to them. They will associate other ideas or things which have nothing to do with the original intent of the idea's author. The method described in this paper attempts to create and use a new methodology to present any idea in such a way that it will be understood as is, eliminating as much as possible any other "interferences" in the transmission of the idea. This is done by breaking an idea into its elements, and placing them into the "idea diagram" schema, which is a diagram-based representation of the elements of an idea. This process of breaking the idea into its elements and placing them into the idea schema is extremely helpful for the author in order to verify that what he is trying to convey is actually expressed in his work, or in other words, that his idea is not lost to his audience by some wrong or unclear explanation. Ideas, once they are converted to objects that software can use, give many possibilities to software solutions. XML schemas that hold the idea, its elements, and related information or media, can be then transformed into various presentation platforms. One use of this method was on-line educational software that consisted in interactive tutorials on complex subjects. The development of "idea mechanics" is at its very beginning, and still requires a lot of practical implementation in order to judge its real value. Nonetheless, the educational applications that were developed using this methodology and the theoretical implementations both proved to be extremely promising.