[Edu-sig] Knowledge Technology Toolkit

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 04 Jan 2004 13:40:03 EST, "portal" writes:
>I speak in my langauge, and do the best that I can.  The jargon that I use I
>explain so why is there a problem?  

We aren't understanding very well, so something is not working.  I think
it is too much language-which-you-use-to-mean-concept-A while the rest
of us use the same language to mean something not-A.  This is what
happens with jargon -- people working in a field end up using a
subset of the language in an extremely specialised fashion.  It is
precise within members of the field.  But the people within the field
have a tendancy to forget that they ever used the words to mean something
different.  Then when they go and try to communicate their ideas to
people who are outside of the field, they get incomprehension, of the
particular frustrating sort where not only do you not understand, but
you don't even know what it is that you do not understand -- all the
phrases make sense up until a point, but the whole lot does not come
together.  It becomes a game of 'guess which words he is using in a
non-standard way'.

If you have ever played with Markov Chains, then you know that this can
be a lot of fun as a game -- to try to find meanings for generated
things -- but if your real life conversations sound like Markov chains
to the uninitiated, then you are deep within the realm of jargon, and 
non-standard word usage.  This is what I think is happening here.

We'd like the 'explanation for 10 year olds'.  What are you trying to
do, and why?

Laura Creighton