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Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

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Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#1

Post by mathnmusic »

Hello HN,

Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://learnawesome.org

This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_

The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos, articles, MOOCs, tweetstorms, slack/discord groups, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters, online conferences, apps & games, interactive explorables and much more.

For now, I am building it as a social network for lifelong learners. It's open-source, built with Rails + PostgreSQL, and complies with standards like Dublin Core's LRMI extension of schema.org and ActivityPub for integration with Fediverse. A GraphQL API is also available if others want to build alternative clients.

I have made decent progress so far: Imported thousands of courses and book summaries, built a browser extension for quick lookup/addition to the repository, a spaced-repetition based flashcard practice module. Users can even discover learning resources by recommendations ELSEWHERE (for eg: "Show me books on History which are highly recommended by venture capitalists")

I originally started building this as something to help with my daughters' and my own learning. But it made sense to build this as a public good.

It would be great if you can give it a try, and share ideas on what would make it better.

Re: Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#2

Post by mathnmusic »

Clickable link: https://learnawesome.org

Code repositories for:

- Web application: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn (license is AGPL 3.0)

- Browser extension: https://github.com/learn-awesome/webextension It cleverly generates a question/answer pair from a simple text selection from your Web reading: https://medium.com/learn-awesome/practice-what-you-learn-usi...

- Reusable flashcard practice widget: https://github.com/learn-awesome/flashcard This is built with VueJS and lets anyone create articles with spaced-repetition built-in similar to Andy Matuschak's fantastic posts on Quantum computing.

- There's even an absolutely rudimentary mobile app on Android built with Flutter: https://github.com/learn-awesome/mobile-app which just makes it easy to look up links or add them to the repository

Re: Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#4

Post by mathnmusic »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #3

If knowledge has dependencies on other knowledge, you could represent that (a la package managers). If something's general enough, you could have multiple virtual packages teaching it.

Yes, the topic/knowledge taxonomy is an important part of it. There are ideas from ConceptNets to Faceted classification. For now, I have taken a pragmatic call to have maximum two parent topics for every topic node here. This allows me to show the hierarchy here: https://learnawesome.org/topics

This taxonomy design is being discussed here: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/14

Feel free to suggest better approaches.

Re: Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#6

Post by blauditore »

I used a suggested filter, but changed the topic to something else ("Tribology", randomly picked). There were no results, and I removed filter after filter, but still nothing until I had removed all other filters. In the end, there was just one Tweet.

It would be nice if removing filters was easier and quicker, perhaps even a button to remove all filters but topic.

Re: Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#7

Post by qznc »

mathnmusic wrote: post #4
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #3

If knowledge has dependencies on other knowledge, you could represent that (a la package managers). If something's general enough, you could have multiple virtual packages teaching it.

Yes, the topic/knowledge taxonomy is an important part of it. There are ideas from ConceptNets to Faceted classification. For now, I have taken a pragmatic call to have maximum two parent topics for every topic node here. This allows me to show the hierarchy here: https://learnawesome.org/topics This taxonomy design is being discussed here: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/14 Feel free to suggest better…

Probably not directly applicable to your project but do you know about a project with much more granular skill dependencies? An example are this three skills:

"juggling 3 balls" depends on "juggling 2 balls" depends on "throw 1 ball to your other hand without that hand moving much".

I'm thinking of a big skill tree like Path of Exile: https://media.esportsedition.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/...

Re: Show HN: Learnawesome.org – Open-source learning map for humanity

#9

Post by falcor84 »

qznc wrote: post #7
mathnmusic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the topic/knowledge taxonomy is an important part of it. There are ideas from ConceptNets to Faceted classification. For now, I have taken a pragmatic call to have maximum two parent topics for every topic node here. This allows me to show the hierarchy here: https://learnawesome.org/topics This taxonomy design is being discussed here: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn/issues/14 Feel free to suggest better…

Probably not directly applicable to your project but do you know about a project with much more granular skill dependencies? An example are this three skills: "juggling 3 balls" depends on "juggling 2 balls" depends on "throw 1 ball to your other hand without that hand moving much". I'm thinking of a big skill tree like Path of Exile: https://media.esportsedition.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/...

I'm also really interested in this. Khan Academy used to have a wonderful one, for pretty much all of math up to about undergrad level, but it's gone, for no reason I could find [0]. This seems to be the code that was used to lay it out [1].

[0] https://khanacademy.fandom.com/wiki/Knowledge_Map [1] https://github.com/beneater/kmap-editor

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