This is what’s exciting for me. I don’t code, unfortunately. As a writer I am constantly frustrated by the terribly bad tools coders make for editing and working with ideas, and the terribly bad decisions they make in industry-standard tools like Word. Another example is the fact that Sili-Valley tech elites constantly complain about how antiquated math education is when the infrastructure they built, the infrastructure they congratulate themselves about constantly, doesn’t allow people to do basic things like play with math equations and visualizations. Instead those issues are part of a niche market locked down by patents and very defensive, closed-source companies like Wolfram and Autodesk. If children could send math equations and data and plots to each other via SMS on their phones, if classrooms weren’t chained to what remains the most straightforward pedogogical tool for math, the whiteboard, math education and understanding would advance.
As you say, if this were to change, the web’s ability to make an end-run around institutional stasis would advance more thoroughly into scientific and social-science fields. The text-based diversity of opinion and discourse we’ve developed on the web is still profoundly limited by the inability to properly talk econ and science. It’s too easy for people’s eyes to glaze over when confronted with new ideas (as mine did when looking through your comments above), and too easy to bury discourse under a mountain of reflexive, gestural restatement of what everyone already “knows”.
All that said, the map you posted seems to address only one part of the issue, the debating part. I would hesitate to call it pedagogy. The thing that would make it pedagogy is a map that does a better job of conveying your actual 99th percentile science to 96th percentile minds like mine. That would require the development in the online culture of conventions for how to visualize and explore multidimensional data sets and the mathematical models that might account for them.
I’m going to go hunt for some concept-mapping software so I can fiddle with it.
