Hi, I'm new here, but I've been lurking a while, and it seems this list is a really awesome mutli-disciplinary sort of community. I'm really impressed with all you bright people on here and the quality of discussions.. :) Anyway, I thougt I'd bring this up: Any of y'all ever read the theory of constraint books by Eli Goldratt? He teaches (perfectly logical but quite unconventional) business practices through socratic methods and story. Here's a quick example: http://www.goldratt.com/chpt11.htm One of his big things is a set of thinking tools (described in a novel called "It's not Luck").. The idea is you figure out the cause-effect relationships that lead to a current undesireable situation, and work your way back to the core issues. This is called a current reality tree. I made one for myself not too long ago: http://www.sabren.com/upgrade/charts/CRT20000930.gif Once you understand the current system, you can map out a future reality tree that shows in precise logical steps what you want to happen. Then you build a transition tree to connect the two. The interesting thing is that you can also think of it as a teaching tool. You can map out trees of current and desired thinking habits, and build a transition tree that leads logically from one way of thinking to another. Now it takes a great deal of human thought to come up with these trees, but once they've been mapped out, just about anyone can follow them. (Look at the link above. The if/then flow goes from bottom to top unless there's an arrow pointing the other way) I think it would be really cool if a computer could be programmed with a tree like this to teach people using the socratic method. That is, it asks the user questions, and based on the answer either helps the user to understand things better, or progresses along the tree to the next step.. I don't know too much about computer aided instruction, but I know I've never seen a computer that used socratic methods to inform people.. They usually present information rather than ask questions. (or if they ask questions, it's like a test, not a conversation).. Anyway, I'd like to build a system like this to help with my own thinking and to help other people. The system's called plato [python logic and truth objects; it'll have a lot of prolog concepts in there, and double as a general mechanical-reasoning library for other python programmers] Anyway, is anyone interested in helping, or at least discussing it on this list? :) Cheers, - Michal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ www.manifestation.com www.sabren.com www.linkwatcher.com www.zike.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------