This past year has been awesome. We've hunkered down and we've programmed (a lot) and we're just about ready to start beta testing a few of our open-learning tools.

Our immediate goal over the last year has been to build tools which can easily and intuitively create educational materials from web content. We structure those educational materials onto knowledge paths; essentially outlines of a particular learning goal which act as scaffolding onto which users can attach educational materials, what we call actions.

Each step on a knowledge path challenges the user to learn something, and each action offers a different source and/or method for learning that particular step. This give learners the ability to dictate how they want to learn and from where.

The paths themselves can be shared, merged, forked, and stacked into larger nested paths, letting anyone learn for free from potentially hundreds or thousands of different sources.

These tools have another, larger function. Every knowledge path created, and every knowledge path followed, adds to the framework of our ultimate goal, something we're calling the Knowledge Horizon Navigator. The Knowledge Horizon Navigator will eventually be an open navigable structure of human knowledge that will allow users to:

(1) Visually symbolize the boundaries of humanity's collective knowledge and represent the active areas of discovery. We hope to entice people towards discovery by offering clear paths from the person's current knowledge to the edge of knowledge, where new discoveries are made.

(2) Create, share and compare knowledge profiles, visual representations of a person's knowledge overlaid onto the collective knowledge of humanity. People visually compare and contrast their knowledge profile with that of their friends, celebrities or scientists, and then draw paths from their current knowledge level to that of another's.

(3) Visually represent the growth in human knowledge by featuring discoveries as they occur.

We are trying to create mechanisms to drive people toward discovery, focusing on curiosity as the basis for learning.

Our project began with brothers Eric and Dan Leininger, along with Adam Garland. Along the way we've had significant help from a bunch of people.

As we begin beta testing in 2012, we are looking for institutions, teachers (traditional or not) and students to help us weed out the bugs and offer feedback on user-experience. If you are interested in helping out, please let us know.

If you have questions or comments, or if you want more info on how you can contribute, or if you find yourself in the New Orleans area and you want to sit down and talk, give us a call, or an email and we'll be in touch shortly.

Happy Fun Planet
Building Block @ the Icehouse
2803 St. Philip Street
New Orleans, LA 70119

info@happyfunplanet.com