Knowledge Mapping for Open Sensemaking Communities

By analogy to cartographic representations of spatial worlds, Knowledge Maps provide an ‘aerial view’ of a topic by highlighting key elements and connections. Moreover, just as spatial maps simplify the world and can fuel controversy, maps of conceptual worlds provide vehicles for summarising and negotiating meaning. In conjunction with the UK Open University’s Open Educational Resources OpenLearn project, we are investigating the role of such maps for both learners and educators to share – and debate – interpretations of OERs. In this brief update, we describe how a mapping tool (Compendium) has been integrated with OpenLearn’s elearning platform (Moodle) in order to support tasks such as concept analysis, problem-solving, literature review, learning path planning, argument analysis and OER design

Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques

Knowledge Cartography is the discipline of mapping intellectual landscapes.The focus of this book is on the process by which manually crafting interactive, hypertextual maps clarifies one’s own understanding, as well as communicating it.The authors see mapping software as a set of visual tools for reading and writing in a networked age. In an information ocean, the primary challenge is to find meaningful patterns around which we can weave plausible narratives. Maps of concepts, discussions and arguments make the connections between ideas tangible and disputable. With 17 chapters from the leading researchers and practitioners, the reader will find the current state–of-the-art in the field. Part 1 focuses on educational applications in schools and universities, before Part 2 turns to applications in professional communitie

Mapping knowledge transfer in early childhood education and care in South Africa

This pilot study explores through participative methods the implicit models, situated understandings and processes of early childhood care and education in South Africa in the context of poverty. The intention is to expose and reconcile potential tensions between ‘official’ Western and classed child-rearing practices and indigenous beliefs and realities of poor communities in KwaZulu-Natal

Ontological Foundations for Scholarly Debate Mapping Technology

Mapping scholarly debates is an important genre of what can be called Knowledge Domain Analytics (KDA) technology – i.e. technology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysing specialist knowledge domains. However, current KDA technology research has emerged from diverse traditions and thus lacks a common conceptual foundation. This paper reports on the design of a KDA ontology that aims to provide this foundation. The paper then describes the argumentation extensions to the ontology for supporting scholarly debate mapping as a special form of KDA and demonstrates its expressive capabilities using a case study debate

Concept mapping and other formalisms as mindtools for representing knowledge

We seek to provide an alternative theoretical perspective on concept mapping (a formalism for representing structural knowledge) to that provided by Ray McAleese in this issue of ALT-J (auto-monitoring). We begin with an overview of concept maps as a means of describing a learner's knowledge constructs, and then discuss a broader class of tools, Mindtools, of which concept maps are a member. We proceed by defining Mindtools as formalisms for representing knowledge, and further elaborate on concept maps as a formalism for representing a particular kind of knowledge: structural knowledge. We then address McAleese's use of the term auto-monitoring and some of the steps in his model of concept maps. Finally, we describe some limitations of concept mapping as a formalism and as a cognitive learning strategy

Exploring the relationship between knowledge management and organizational learning via fuzzy cognitive mapping

The normative literature within the field of Knowledge Management has tended to concentrate on techniques and methodologies for codifying knowledge. Similarly, the literature on organizational learning, focuses on aspects of those knowledge that are pertinent at the macro-organizational level (i.e. the overall business). There remains little published literature on how knowledge management and organizational learning are interrelated within business scenarios. In addressing this relative void, the authors of this paper present a model that highlights the factors for such an inter-relationship, which are extrapolated from a manufacturing organisation using a qualitative case study research strategy, supplanted by a cognitive mapping technique: Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM). The paper looks at the Information Systems Evaluation (ISE) process within a manufacturing organisation, the authors subsequently presenting a model that not only defines a relationship between KM and OL, but highlights factors that could lead a firm to develop itself towards a learning organisation