‘Jack of all trades, master of none, ofttimes better than master of one.’   [Wikipedia: “Jack of all trades, master of none”]

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Soc. I mean to say that the composition was mostly playful.  Yet in these chance fancies of the hour were involved two principles which would be charming if they could be fixed by art.

Phaedr. What are they?

Soc. First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea; — the speaker defines his several notions in order that he may make his meaning clear, as in our definition of love, which whether true or false certainly gave clearness and consistency to the discourse.

Phaedr. What is the other principle, Socrates?

Soc. Secondly, there is the faculty of division according to the natural ideas or members, not breaking any part as a bad carver might.  But, as the body may be divided into a left side and into a right side, having parts right and left, so in the discourses there was assumed, first of all, the general idea of unreason, and then one of the two proceeded to divide the parts of the left side and did not desist until he found in them an evil or left-handed love which the speaker justly reviled; and the other leading us to the right portion in which madness lay, found another love, having the same name, but yet divine, which he held up before us and applauded as the author of the greatest benefits.

Phaedr.  That is most true.

Soc. I am a great lover of these processes of division and generalization; they help me to speak and think.  And if I find any man who is able to see unity and plurality in nature, him I follow, and walk in his step as if he were a god.  And those who have this art, I have hitherto been in the habit of calling dialecticians; but God knows whether the name is right or not….[Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Benjamin Jowett]

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This is a follow-up post to my post on “White Power.”  I have stumbled onto some information which presents peculiar considerations for our theory of “liberal education.”

While reviewing my server’s visitor logs, I saw that I had received a visit from a robot/crawler with the following user-agent listed:

 Everest-Vulcan Inc./0.1 (R&D project; host=e-1-26; http://everest.vulcan.com/crawlerhelp)

This is not the first time the crawler has visited my site.  I have followed the link previously, out of curiosity, but found the simple help text only mildly interesting:

“Everest” is a next-generation Web services technology being developed by Vulcan Inc., the parent company of investor Paul G. Allen. This new technology is enabled by crawling and monitoring a variety of Web sites.

Claims of “next-generation Web services technology” occur frequently enough.  It is a good advertisement, even if it is hyperbole.  Vulcan Inc., however, may be on the right path; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, was also the financial backer of SpaceShipOne, the first commercially launched suborbital spacecraft.  The mission statement for Vulcan Inc. says, in part, “Our vision is to engender lasting social, cultural and economic progress - no small undertaking.”  If you visit the homepage of Vulcan Inc., you will see a very streamlined web design which utilizes Macromedia Flash throughout the site; and, when I say “streamlined,” I mean that even on dial-up it loads pretty quickly, and it operates smoothly.  (From the homepage, click on the far left box for the Vulcan main pages.  I have not visited their capital investment pages, nor their real estate pages.)  It is from the homepage, made curious by the mission statement, that I discovered an intriguing project which may bear heavily on the future of liberal education: Project Halo:

About Project Halo

Aristotle, the ancient Greek teacher, scientist and philosopher, had an extraordinary command of all the scientific disciplines of his day, as well as an ability to teach that knowledge to his students in a way they could understand. Today, the sheer volume of knowledge existing in the world precludes a modern-day human Aristotle, but current knowledge systems and technologies may one day fulfill this role.

Project Halo is an effort by Vulcan Inc. towards the development of a “Digital Aristotle”—a staged, long-term research and development initiative that aims to develop an application capable of answering novel questions and solving advanced problems in a broad range of scientific disciplines. The Digital Aristotle is being developed with a focus on two primary functions: as a tutor capable of instructing and assessing students in the sciences, and as a research assistant with broad, interdisciplinary skills to help scientists in their work.

“Today, the sheer volume of knowledge existing in the world precludes a modern-day human Aristotle…” — This reminds me of something I recently discussed in my consideration of Nanny States and Big Brothers, that “We must wonder if the complexity of our modern world, the explosion of information, the speed at which information shapes and reshapes our interaction with the world, have dis-empowered the individual in his struggle with the so-called ‘State.’ “  But it also casts an interesting light on something else I considered in my exploration of liberal education, since it suggests a limitation on cross-disciplinary approaches that can hardly be denied: What human can learn the full body of knowledge within his lifetime; and does a too-broad approach to learning dissipate our powers?

A February 12, 2004 press release from Project Halo presented an outline of where the project is heading:

The [pilot] project also identified two closely related challenges: (1) knowledge and question formulation requires highly specialized and expensive personnel (knowledge engineers), which pushes the development cost to about $10,000 per page; and (2) most of the evaluated system failures reflected insufficient expertise in AP Chemistry by the knowledge engineers creating the system’s knowledge modules.

Halo Phase II will address these two issues directly by developing technology that will allow domain experts to formulate knowledge with decreasing dependence on knowledge engineers, and to pose questions and problems to the knowledge systems. Vulcan believes that achieving those goals will reduce the cost of knowledge formulation to levels comparable to textbook development, and will encourage scientists and educators to build an expanding body of machine-processable knowledge that will facilitate the Digital Aristotle’s role as a tutor and research assistant.

Highly specialized “knowledge engineers” are too expensive — thus, perhaps the insular single-disciplinary approach in liberal education will prove too expensive for the Halo Project — yet “domain experts” might prove more profitable — but they are likely to focus on a limited domain.  These “domain experts” remind me of my concept of Compilers, previously mentioned in Scattered Notes:

Yes, today’s bloggers babble on, and their words are quickly swept away by other bloggers and by themselves tomorrow; but next year’s Internet users may not all be bloggers. If I linked ZenPundit today, someone ten years from now might find that discussion via my link (if Phatic Communion endures that long, which I doubt; but hey, why not?) This is so basic, it may seem a stupid realization. But I look for Compilers in the future, people who trawl the endless ocean of supposition, futurism, philosophy, and punditry, and who put their rescued little treasures together into better, more endurable works than today’s bloggers deign to create on their own. I don’t mean only historians, nor future pundits who try to spin the past; I mean compilers who can actually make more sense of world events and human lives than those who are currently fumbling about trying to do that now.

In truth, compilers (or, domain experts) will rely on specialists for their material. 

Also interesting: the list of inspirations at the Project Halo site, particularly the small pdf document linked from that page, “How We Will Learn,” written by Danny Hillis:

Let’s put aside the World Wide Web for a moment to consider what kind of automated tutor could be created using today’s best technology. First, imagine that this tutor program can get to know you over a long period of time. Like a good teacher, it knows what you already understand and what you are ready to learn. It also knows what types of explanations are most meaningful to you. It knows your learning style: whether you prefer pictures or stories, examples or abstractions. Imagine that this tutor has access to a database containing all the world’s knowledge. This database is organized according to concepts and ways of understanding them. It contains specific knowledge about how the concepts relate, who believes them and why, and what they are useful for. I will call this database the Knowledge web, to distinguish it from the database of linked documents that is the World Wide Web.

The article is quite intriguing, and it suggests that even specialized knowledge will be learned differently by different students and applied differently by them.  The automated tutor will learn about the student — his pattern of thinking, what he knows and does not know, etc. — while quizzing the student, and will apply this information to future lessons:

Aristotle plans its lessons by finding chains of explanations that connect the concepts you need to learn to what you already know. It chooses the explanatory paths that match your favorite style of learning, including enough side paths, interesting examples, and related curiosities to match your level of interest. Whenever possible, Aristotle follows the paths laid down by great teachers in the Knowledge web. Aristotle probably also has a model of how you want to be paced: when you have learned enough for one day, when it needs to throw in an interesting side story, etc. Along the way, Aristotle will not only explain things to you but will also ask you questions—both to make you think and to verify for itself that concepts are being learned successfully. When an explanation doesn’t work, Aristotle tries another approach, and of course you can always ask questions, request examples, and give Aristotle explicit feedback on how it’s doing. Aristotle then uses all these forms of feedback to adjust the lesson, and in the process it learns more about you.

If Project Halo follows this general outline, quite possibly the specialization of its knowledge engineers will be arrange by domain experts in such a way that a student can specialize away from the insular discipline; If educators spread memes, they spread these through their students. (from White Power.)  This, of course, might lead to insularity for the student, a self-referential learning cycle, or the specialization witnessed in ant colonies; or, some might become Renaissance Men and Renaissance Women.  Either way, I suspect that the influence of individual educators will be diminished; or, dispersed.

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I am terribly out of time for the moment.  There is so much more to be considered; I’ve only glossed the idea behind Project Halo.

I included the quotes leading into this post because 1) I thought the Wik/[ipedia-tionary] page was ironic, given the “oftimes better than master of one” tag; specialization v cross-disciplinary studies bear on the Wiki split; and 2) Plato’s thoughts on the approach toward knowledge also seem to bear on this split.  But I’m out of time for now!