MU draft

Meta University(MU), is an abstract specification of idealized learning organizations. It is an implementation-neutral document that welcomes any attempts of concrete implementations of this specification. This specification is intended to be universally applicable to all learning organizations.

Context

As Moore's Law shifted the paradigm of data processing by claiming that data processing capabilities will grow at an exponential pace. This exponential growth assumption has not only guided the development of technologies, but also challenged social and economic believes around the world. It also becomes a theory that shapes our perception of the half-life of useful knowledge. Since all knowledge must be representable in some form of processable data, the functions of universities in general are about creating intuitive data presentation, effective data processing, and providing of highly-available data content.

Goal Statement

The goal of MU is to enable all learnable organizations to become self-aware through the following tri-fold knowledge organization framework:

1. Establish a sound cognitive foundation grounded on data: Data Structures and Algorithms to process the data.
2. Support decisions with effective methods: Teach computational thinking to improve upon mental models and the awareness and skills to use computing tools.
3. Improve upon the system of knowledge: Publish knowledge content and create data manipulation methods and tools to attenuate unnecessary information asymmetry.

Success Criteria

1. Organizations and individuals that contribute to MU-based learning activities must be able to exchange data in a consistent format that is compliant with a common data exchange format defined by the MU community.
2. MU-related data content should be labeled by a common time-stamping system that defines the partial ordering sequences of data updates across all MU data sets.
3. The degree of MU success will be continuously measured by the amount of published knowledge content that reached consensus according to the consensus reaching process defined by MU community.

Implementation Strategy

To make this happen, we decide to leverage the Web Tech Stack as an operational platform and leverage the resources and tools in this open ended platform to govern the evolutionary trends of MU. MU has three explicit functions:

1. MU is an data container for Learning Activities, it captures physical activities in concrete data elements for the organization.
2. The Data Content of MU is governed by the participants of these learning activities, implemented as smart contracts authorized by the said participants.
3. MU invites verification and validation, through namespace management, time stamping and data linkages, MU associates physical meaning to data by encoding content knowledge based on the observable patterns of the physical universe.

The goal statement mentioned above also indicates that MU will provide a curriculum that enables minimal footprint to the core content knowledge, while covering the broadest possible content areas. In other words, MU's existence can be thought of as the core/kernel of an operating system of knowledge acquisition in this data-intensive era, and it will help organize learning activities in a structure that best adhere to this fast changing world. Specifically, MU will offer a curriculum structure that follows the above assumptions, and try to link all knowledge content using a unifying data management strategy.

Individuals and their Societies

Knowing that all content knowledge cannot exist in isolation. MU is intended to be a social learning tool that allows individuals to maintain one's private content, while maximize its ease of exchange with other interacting parties. Therefore, MU will explicitly spell out project management tools and practices for both individuals and team members, and offer data governing policies for all participants. The logic of how data evolve, is the foundation of computing science, and that is where all projects on MU-supported projects will leverage its project management/governance features. This requires users to be highly aware of data security and data privacy related issues.

In layman's term, MU will organize content knowledge in the units of languages, starting with the foundation of all languages, the meta language, or the logic of data in general. Then, MU will introduce domain-specific languages, including linkages to natural languages as ways to demonstrate the power of information compression in languages. Therefore, MU participants can continuously leverage a single repository of languages, to organize their own knowledge content in privately controlled data storage containers.

A Universal Container

The first principle of MU is to assume that certain universal principle exists. The principle that we will introduce to all MU students is the notion that all data can be represented using the same type, a type called: "Lattice" or bounded "Partially ordered set"(POSet). This universal data type can be mapped onto human's daily experience in terms of space, time, and energy. The reason that we must introduce this common notion of data structure is to offer a universal data framework that will be applicable to situations across all spatial and temporal contexts. To guarantee this universality, some logical assumptions must be made, and we assume that all spacetime complex follows the logical boundaries of POSet.

Foundational References

MU differs from other universities by starting its curriculum in a sequence that is almost opposite of what most popular curriculum are designed. This is suggested by Gregory Chaitin, that many accomplished mathematicians are taught the most advanced mathematics from a young age and in a sequence that delights their interest to pursue mathematical content. When properly administered, this strategy may apply to learn and teach content knowledge of many kind. For example, we will provide a universal data structure, a.k.a. lattice, to approximate the boundary of our logical reasoning scopes.

Prior work

A Google Document on Meta University that lead to this document is available.

MetaUniversity

Programs in MU will be organized in languages, as in managing vocabulary, syntactical rules, and pragmatic uses. This classification will enable a unifying framework and data analytics tools for learning outcome assessments as well as enabling the compositional opportunities of knowledge content.

The Notion of Unviersality

Universality is a operationalized definition according to logicians.

A Generalized Process for Knowledge Acquisition

A university is an agency that embodies collective Intelligence. The process model for such intelligence can be modeled after ideas originated in Carl Jung and Thomas Kuhn's theories.

Containers for all Knowledge

Using Wikidata as an example.

1. Leverage Existing Data and Learning Assets on the Internet
2. Capture visitation data for all these assets
3. Provide annotation and create new content
4. Publish it using PKC

Conceptual Space and Repeatability

As I talking with 郭逸舟， he mentioned Gutenberg can make more impact was due to the size of alphabet in European languages are smaller than Chinese. So that he was able to leverage his work to create Renaisance.

Functional Roles in Society

The initial vocabulary of Roles in MU will be based on two camps of knowledge, Holacracy's roles and Ansible's roles.

Data as the Medium

Core Curriculum:Reliable Data as the Medium

Data identity is given measurable degrees of trust worthiness based on timestamps and namespace references.

According to Prof. Gautam Dasgupta, this curriculum will be organized in various methods of counting:

1. Arithemtic:Counting in Numbers (See Gasing Counting)
2. Geometry:Counting in Space
3. Music:Counting in Time
4. Astronomy and Geography:Counting in Spacetime

Skill Mastery

A univeresity is also a place where skills and knowledge of persons get refined to a point of mastery. To ensure this experience of incremental improvements and shaping of good habits, while avoiding addiction, we need a general framework to observe the process of entering mastery. The program will be initiated with past experience accumulated in the previous programs:

1. Gasing Method
2. Extreme Learning Process
3. Habit Formation and Addiction Avoidance

Smart Contracts to operationalize accountability

All students in Meta University must use Smart Contracts to organize their shared tasks.

Measuring Metrics: All learning activities will be accounted for

Learning activities will be registered using common databases. Detail actions for each participants will be tracked by Matomo.

Working with Concurrent Data Events at Scale

Teach all students the basic notion of sets, orderings, and compositions in precise languages. Moreover, allow them to present the data and information content in tools and platforms that would matter to their daily lives.

1. Content-wise Linked Open Data
2. Processing Capacity Scale Up and Scale Out

An Exchange Platform

There are some existing literature that already covers content related to this proposition. Financial and labor market places will be set up to enable exchanges. Ideally, some form of financial rewards should be directly written into smart contracts for people who are competent to conduct their work professionally.

Organizational Sustainability

Participation model,Reaching Consensus, and Failure Handling

Actor Model, Decentralized Identity Authentication, and Game Theoretic Decision-Making.

Branching and Exiting

Since all types of organizations must evolve and change over time, mention Thomas Kuhn and his book.

Merging and Joining

All organizations evolves in a similar way, mention Kuhn's Cycle and his book.

Data is the Asset

To help students assess the values of knowledge content, value of data content is dynamically evaluated in covertable currencies. MU will provide an exchange market place for students to verify and validate the transaction of data content, while measuring these transactional activities to assess the social value of individual data assets. Both factual and counterfactual data content can be computationally synthesized to create a single source of truth.

Score Keeping: Manage incentives

Offering currencies to quantify data asset transactions can be an incentive mechanism for learning. It is operationally feasible to record all data transactions between users in MU. In the universe of data, any data exchange could cause a cascading effect throughout the community. Therefore, score keeping should be managed by sustainable governing mechanisms. Data from the past, present, and future should all be given credits and therefore, create a perpetual incentive system for all. Instrumentation such as PKC will keep these transactional data records as a form of evidence for accumulative efforts or contributions. In educational practices, they are often called degree certificate/badges or gamification. Put it simply, it is one of many scoring, or assessment mechanism in traditional teaching. The most important aspect is to establish a formalized metric to continuously assess learning accomplishments using highly-available and consistent data.

Namespaces: Managing Data Dictionary over Time

To ensure all data content are tracked within MU, a set of highly-available, automated data dictionaries will be utilized to track the above mentioned transactional activities in terms of frequencies and amount of data exchange. This transactional activity log will provide a mechanism to measure the focus of interests of the utilizing parties.

Time:the symmetry-breaker

Become Productive and Offer Services to Society

All the above mentioned knowledge should enhance the participants' capability to create better products and services in their respective society. MU intend to have all participants to be productive in offering data, information, knowledge, and actual services/products while they are learning at MU. The data-intensive environment articulated earlier will enable people to contribute to a data-linked supply chain of services and products. More importantly, it should reduce the unnecessary barriers and middle persons in the economic process. MU will enhance students' and the overall MU community's productivity by offering a number of foundational guidance:

1. Governance Template in terms of Constitution
2. Economic Template in terms of Exchange Marketplaces and Currencies
3. Technology Template in terms of DevOps and Linked Open Data APIs

Value assessment workflow

MU also provide reference implementation and experimental programs to verify and validate approaches to turn data into valuable assets. These are considered to be workflows that includes explicit speficiations of tools and data content.

Related Pages

Has Logic Model:True, Was created on:02 14, 2022