Using Twine to enable learning current science

I first started reading Nova Spivack‘s blog “Minding the Planet” when I was beta testing Six Apart’s Typepad blogging tool. I remember a post in 2004 titled, “Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind”. I have been waiting four years to be part of this vision and my wait is almost over.

Over 30,000 of us are anxiously waiting to be invited into a group of beta testers to test Twine. With its product Twine, Radar Networks is pioneering the mainstream adoption of the Semantic Web, or what is sometimes called “Web 3.0.” Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people.
To learn more about Twine you could check out Robert Scobles video interview about Twine (10 minute or hour version) or Carla Thompson’s blog post about testing Twine.

I am part of a team of bloggers providing content about current science on the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Buzz Blog (I post as ARTiFactor). Every day I use my feed readers to scan more than 100 websites for current science developments. I bookmark several dozen articles every week, but because of budgetary constraints can only write up a couple. As a team we average more than a dozen posts per week. If we could use Twine, I think we could leverage our collective data mining to allow our number of bloggers to explode. We just received a 1.8 million dollar grant to develop what we are calling a “mentor” program. Students in this program will learn science by being exposed to current science articles and with the help of a mentor will write up a blog post on our Buzz Blog about that topic.
Our Buzz Blog project allows anyone to post about current science and to have discussions about topics posted  (see our Chicken and Egg post with 420 comments). We already have hundreds of users and thousands of readers. I envision Twine enabling us to make a quantum leap toward our goal of promoting more involvement with current science topics.