My Sandbox & Concept Mapping

Considering that I believe I am primarily a visual learner, it's not be surprising to me that I am drawn to concept mapping as a powerful learning tool. It was, though useful, somewhat impractical prior to the internet. That may have changed. What is it and where did it come from?
According to Joseph D. Novak in his article, co-authored by Alberto J. Canas , "The Theory Underling Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them", published by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola Fl, 32502 (www.ihmc.us) in 2006 and revised in 2008;

"Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course of Novak’s research program at Cornell where he sought to follow and understand changes in children’s knowledge of science (Novak & Musonda, 1991). During the course of this study the researchers interviewed many children, and they found it difficult to identify specific changes in the children’s understanding of science concepts by examination of interview transcripts. This program was based on the learning psychology of David Ausubel (1963; 1968; Ausubel et al., 1978). The fundamental idea in Ausubel’s cognitive psychology is that learning takes place by the assimilation of new concepts and propositions into existing concept and propositional frameworks held by the learner. This knowledge structure as held by a learner is also referred to as the individual’s cognitive structure. Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s knowledge in the form of a concept map. Thus was born a new tool not only for use in research, but also for many other uses."

I'll leave it to the reader to delve deeper into the article. It's a great read!

There seem to be three leading online concept mapping, aka "Mind Mapping" tools; Inspiration, Bubbl.us and Cmap tools. At the risk of oversimplification, Bubbl.us is basic in nature and is easily learned. Inspiration and it's little brother, Kidsperation, have more bells and whistles and are not free. CMap Tools are a high level serious tool with a somewhat steeper learning curve.

What, exactly are concept maps? Again, Novak says:

One of the powerful uses of concept maps is not only as a learning tool but also as an evaluation tool, thus encouraging students to use meaningful-mode learning patterns (Mintzes et al., 2000; Novak, 1990; Novak & Gowin, 1984). Concept maps are also effective in identifying both valid and invalid ideas held by students, and this will be discussed further in another section. They can be as effective as more time-consuming clinical interviews for identifying the relevant knowledge a learner possesses before or after instruction (Edwards & Fraser, 1983). People often confuse rote learning and meaningful learning with teaching approaches that can vary on a continuum from direct presentation of information (which may be conceptually obscure or conceptually explicit) to autonomous discovery approaches where the learner perceives the regularities and constructs her/his own concepts. Both direct presentation and discovery teaching methods can lead to highly rote or highly meaningful learning by the learner, depending on the disposition of the learner and the organization of the instructional materials. These distinctions are shown in Figure 3. There is the mistaken notion that “inquiry” studies will assure meaningful learning. The reality is that unless students possess at least a rudimentary conceptual understanding of the phenomenon they are investigating, the activity may lead to little or no gain in their relevant knowledge and may be little more than busy work. In fact, the research basis for support of widely recommended inquiry learning is largely absent (Mayer, 2004; Kirschner et al., 2006; Sweller et al., 2007).

I have worked with Bubbl.us and it is quite practical and refreshing simple; however my sandbox activities have moved on to CMaps Tools. If you would like to see more examples created and posted by Cmap, go here and drill down through the "child" cmaps. It's quite enlightening. Further examples, (some very basic and others complex) are as follows:

Our Solar System The Crow and the Pitcher Canada's Geography Speech Production Impingment Syndrome Political Participation & Elections Several Chess Openings Modal Verbs Catechism of the Catholic Church Centre for Teaching Excellence Weather (incredible!) A Book Review? Cmaps in Schools

Note that some use only linking mechanisms and others use the resource attachments and nested Cmaps. All of theses examples are located on IHMC servers and are public. They can be accessed at these servers on line.
If you have downloaded Cmaps Tools, you can collaborate with others with maps in construction. Further, you can build your own maps and when and if you wish, load them to these public sites. Is your curiosity piqued? Download from here.
View these Cmaps Tools on YouTube.
Enough for now. In future blog posts I'll share some of my sandbox efforts with Cmaps, scaffolding and it's theoretical constructs.

Funding & Financial Issues

Paul Lamping and his Funding & Financial Issues subcommittee recently posted a Powerpoint presentation on the wiki. The Action Items in the presentation have been posted on our wiki.
Paul has asked all committee members to contribute where they can, relative to the Action Items. This can be done with "comments" or in the "Notes" section of the Objective 8 page. Any expense items; tactical or strategic must ultimately find their way to Paul's report.