Hi Rodinhooders,
Hope the last week treated you well.
Thanks for taking out time to read this post. I am Arjun. Recently I started working on a project named Knowledge Maps and wanted to share it with you all.
Online learning has been a real pain for me. Although there are some amazingly awesome resources that are available on the internet, the challenge lies in discovering them and then shunting out the ones that actually prove useful.
This process involves a lot of hit and trial. For example, when I started learning coding online, I used various different google queries to find out the relevant resources. All of these queries showed up a shit load of web pages, all of which seemed to be useful at first sight (the reason — all of them had good seo and catchy headlines). But the problem — only about 10% of these web pages provided any utility to me.
Going through this hit and trial process time and again, I realized that I am not the only one who is doing so. Other people who wanted to learn stuff online were also doing it. The key insight was— all online learners were doing the same thing again and again and they were doing so inside a bubble — that is — no one knew the resources that proved useful to the other person.
I started thinking about a solution to this problem. One day, a friend of mine asked me about the resources that I used to learn PHP (a coding language). I mailed him the ones that I had referred to. A day later he reverted saying that the resources proved quite useful to him.
And then it hit me. What if, everyone who was learning something shared their learning journey with others? This way rest of the people can get to discover the resources that others are using to learn stuff that interests them. And rather than searching from the very beginning, they can build upon other people’s research.
For example, you could discover how Asha writes such amazing newsletters or the resources that Alok refers to increase his insights about online branding (of course apart from the personal experience that he has gained over 100s of years. FYI, 10 years of learning in a regular life = 1 year of learning in an entrepreneur’s life).
And, so I created Knowledge Maps.
Knowledge Maps lets you discover and share the roadmap that other people followed to solve a problem or learn something new.
I have personally found that solving a problem or learning something new doesn’t require more than 10 great quality links. And therefore, each map is limited to just 10 links.
A Knowledge Map
In each resource you can discover the highlights and annotations the creator made.
A Knowledge Map structures content based on the problem it helps you solve. With so much content being published online, it is becomes difficult to find the best and the evergreen content. But with Knowledge Maps, the evergreen content always surfaces on the top.
You can follow the topics that interest you
My profile on Knowledge Maps
To make the process of Map creation uber easy, we have developed a Chrome Extension. You can get the extension from the platform. It lets you highlight and annotate any page on the web and add it to a Knowledge Map.
And lastly, I firmly believe that – if we can learn together, we can build the world together.
Please be sure to check out the platform and spit some blunt feedback on my face.
Looking forward to some amazing maps from you – yes you – the one reading this post! I know you are so knowledgeable and have so much to share 🙂
If there’s any way in which I can help you, please mail me at arjuntuli.alpha@gmail.com or ping me on twitter at @arjun_tuli or maybe message me on facebook @arjun.tuli1
asha chaudhry
arjun,
i love the way you see a problem and just put yourself out there to solve it! very entrepreneurial. i’m intrigued by knowledge maps – will have a look at it aaram se and share some feedback.
ps: thank you for the newsletter compliment 🙂
Arjun Tuli
Thank you so much asha! Getting a compliment from you means a lot 🙂 Will look forward to your feedback…
Mubaid Syed
Hi Arjun,
Its a great idea. I can relate to this. While learning anything, we have to go through hundreds of sites to finally come up with something which has value.
Your site gives me a feel of MEDIUM platform.
How can I search for a particular topic? Suppose I want to know how to setup a wordpress blog, I could not find any search on the sites. One suggestion, apart from the main page which is like a feed, there could be a categories or tags page having categories like Blogs, Programming, Social Media etc. User can go in a particular category and read all relevant links. They can again be divided into sub-categories. OR you can just make use of tags to make it easier for user.
Arjun Tuli
Hi Mubaid!
First of all thank you so much for taking out time to visit the platform. Hope it treated you well.
1.) Yes the platform looks and feel a lot like medium. The reasons for that are:
a.) We really love medium, and that’s why it has been an inspiration
b.) We don’t really have a designer on our team or a mentor who can guide us in UI/UX. If you happen to know one, please introduce me to him/her
2.) Searching is a feature that will be available soon. It’s there on my to do list 🙂
3.) I understand the necessity of having tags Mubaid. They are there on the platform. If you see the section on the right in your feed, you can see the popular tags. Here’s the link to the startup tag – https://knowledgemaps.org/tag.php?id=10. You can follow it to get relevant maps in your feed.
Mubaid, once again thank you so much for such a detailed feedback. And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the chrome extension.
Would love to see a Knowledge Map from you 🙂
Sridhar Rajendran
Hi Arjun,
I checked out your website and in short it is AWESOME. I spend a lot of time reading and writing on Medium and love the layout. KnowledgeMaps makes curating information so easy and painless. At a glance it feels like a news curation app – getting the crux of the link through a short highlight and then deciding to open the link. I hope to spend more time to play around and learn more.
Arjun Tuli
Hi Sridhar,
Thank you so much for taking out time to visit the platform. I am so thankful to you. You got it completely right. The thing is we are focused on helping people discover how to solve a problem rather than news curation. But I’m really happy that you got the point of highlights and notes. We are looking for some early adopters. I hope you’ll be one. 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
EXCELLENT IDEA
Love it…
I just hope people keep sharing knowledge as they learn it
The challenges i see are :
1. 98% people give up learning new skills (data of coursera/udacity)
2. Sharing means communicating – people suck at it
3. The FIRST place to learn is now becoming the MOOCS (that have grades per course etc) – So how will you get discovered?
Arjun Tuli
Thank you so much Alok! It really means alot to us that you checked out the platform.
1.) Exactly, Alok! We are talking to our users to see how far they continue while learning from someone’s journey and how effective does it prove for them. Also, a map is focused on the roadmap of solving a problem or learning a topic, but not intended on teaching it (like MOOCs). The people sharing the roadmap give their insights on the resource (how, why and what proved useful to them), but are not actually teaching it.
3.) So true. So we are targeting the forums of MOOCs, interacting with people out there, figuring out their problems, and then projecting the apparent value of Knowledge Maps to them. Apart from forums, we have joined groups on facebook where these people hang out and discuss their problems. If we there’s a Knowledge Map that is solving their problem, we share the link there. Thirdly, we are cold messaging prominent online learners on facebook and trying to get them on the platform. Fourthly, we are leveraging Quora and reddit and doing guest blogging on educational topics.