...my 80%/ 20% summary of my research into your work. All summaries extract a semantically weighted 20% of your work and includes of the 9 weighted key words.

Key Words: ideography dynamique skills communication images learning medium language tree

Any serious consideration given to the future of education and training in the new cyberculture must be preceded by a careful analysis of the profound changes occurring in the way we learn and acquire knowledge.

In this regard, we must first acknowledge the speed at which knowledge and know-how appears and is being updated.

For the first time in the history of humanity most of the skills a person acquires at the beginning of his career will be obsolete at the end of his professional life.

The second observation, which is related to the first, concerns the change in the way we work, where the amount of time devoted to the transfer of knowledge is constantly increasing.

Work is more and more synonymous with learning, transferring know-how and producing knowledge.

Third observation: cyberspace supports intellectual technologies which amplify, materialize, and transform a number of human cognitive functions: memory (data bases, hyperdocuments, digital files of all kinds), imagination (simulations), perception (digital sensors, telepresence, virtual reality), thinking (artificial intelligence, modeling of complex phenomena).

* new ways of accessing information: hyperdocumentation, finding information using "search engines", knowbots or software agents, contextual explorations using dynamic data maps.

* new ways of thinking and reasoning: such as simulation - an industrialized form of thought experiment that cannot be equated with logical deduction or induction through experience.

Due to the fact that these intellectual technologies - particularly dynamic memory - have been materialized in digital documents or softwares that can be consulted by network (or easily reproduced and transferred), they can be shared with a large number of people thus augmenting the potential collective intelligence of human groups.

The knowledge-flow, the work-transaction of knowledge, the new technologies of collective and individual intelligence are all dramatically altering our approach to education and training.

What must be learned can no longer be planned and precisely defined in advance.

The traditional representation (linear, parallel step-ladders with pyramids structured into levels) geared by the concept of prerequisite and converging toward "higher" education, must be gradually replaced by a representation of open, emerging spaces of knowledge that are continuous, evolving, non-linear, and are reorganising according to specific objectives or contexts and where each individual enjoys a distinct, evolving position.

First, the wider use of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) -- both in spirit and practice -- in daily normal education.

Of course, ODL exploits various remote teaching techniques, including hypermedia, interactive communication networks, and all the intellectual technologies available in cyberculture.

In this context, the teacher has to inspire the exchange of knowledge and collective intelligence between his students rather than dispensing information unidirectionally.

The second reform has to do with the recognition of acquired knowledge.

In his book "L'idéographie dynamique" (The dynamic ideography) Pierre Lévy postulates the existence of a new language that would go beyond the distinction between text and image to provide a dynamic representation of thought models.

We believe that Lévy's work opens up important perspectives which is why we'd like to make this text available here.

To date all language systems have been designed for a static medium.

It would be easy to show that the cinema is not a language due to the fact that it is not an interactive medium, that it is linear and that it does not permit expression of abstract concepts, or only indirectly.

We do not think by making logical deductions or following formal rules; we think by manipulating mental models which, most of the time, take the form of images.

Envisage possible scenarios based on these models: consider the standard scenario provided, alter the behaviour of the actors, invent other scenarios, etc. and then maybe send the new scenario back to the originator of the standard scenario or share it with others.

Such tools could help enormously with decision-making, which brings me to another book "Les arbres de connaissance" (Trees of knowledge), which I wrote with the mathematician Michel Authier.

How can you create a virtual reality expressing the whole range of relationships that the members of a particular group of people have with one another.

Called the "tree of knowledge", it is a map of all the skills present within a given community organised on the basis of the order in which they were learnt.

On the basis of these curricula, a computer charts the skills of the community, not on the basis of a re-established theory of knowledge, but on the order in which people have learnt things and the co-existence of skills in the curricula.

-Ideography could be used as a simulating kit, groupware, software support for the production of synthesis films, "tableau de bord", interface man - machine.

Part of the lego pieces would simply be an interactivity tool that would help people navigate in the labyrinth.