[WikiEN-l] Twitterpedia will win

[Jay Litwyn]

"Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:a4359dff0905051244n460c6bfap24e8eb8262985906 at mail.gmail.com...
> 2009/5/5 FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com>:
>> It raises the interesting philosophical question, when is the meaning in 
>> the
>> message, and when is it in the decoder? And what if it's in neither or
>> both?
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
(...)

[[Socratic method]] teaching has more relevance to the question. In the 
method, students are led to conclusions in their own words, from questions 
that a teacher raises. Those questions can be binary, open or closed. If I 
read Isaac Asimov in "The Edge of Tomorrow" correctly, Socrates entertained 
a slave with Euclid's fifth postulate, which is a definition of parallel, 
and one that mathematicians do not always use. Naturally, the difficulty in 
escaping your initial conclusions is of use to a lawyer in persuasion. It 
hard to use the socratic method outside of a small classroom in real time 
(without paper). It is relatively easy to use it in mail, which has no 
real-time requirements, nor any penalty for delays or the null response. In 
short, you learn more about mathematics from exercises than anything a 
teacher will say.