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

Case-based analysis in user requirements modelling for knowledge construction

Context: Learning can be regarded as knowledge construction in which prior knowledge and experience serve as basis for the learners to expand their knowledge base. Such a process of knowledge construction has to take place continuously in order to enhance the learners’ competence in a competitive working environment. As the information consumers, the individual users demand personalised information provision which meets their own specific purposes, goals, and expectations. Objectives: The current methods in requirements engineering are capable of modelling the common user’s behaviour in the domain of knowledge construction. The users’ requirements can be represented as a case in the defined structure which can be reasoned to enable the requirements analysis. Such analysis needs to be enhanced so that personalised information provision can be tackled and modelled. However, there is a lack of suitable modelling methods to achieve this end. This paper presents a new ontological method for capturing individual user’s requirements and transforming the requirements onto personalised information provision specifications. Hence the right information can be provided to the right user for the right purpose. Method: An experiment was conducted based on the qualitative method. A medium size of group of users participated to validate the method and its techniques, i.e. articulates, maps, configures, and learning content. The results were used as the feedback for the improvement. Result: The research work has produced an ontology model with a set of techniques which support the functions for profiling user’s requirements, reasoning requirements patterns, generating workflow from norms, and formulating information provision specifications. Conclusion: The current requirements engineering approaches provide the methodical capability for developing solutions. Our research outcome, i.e. the ontology model with the techniques, can further enhance the RE approaches for modelling the individual user’s needs and discovering the user’s requirements

Computing as the 4th “R”: a general education approach to computing education

Computing and computation are increasingly pervading our lives, careers, and societies - a change driving interest in computing education at the secondary level. But what should define a "general education" computing course at this level? That is, what would you want every person to know, assuming they never take another computing course? We identify possible outcomes for such a course through the experience of designing and implementing a general education university course utilizing best-practice pedagogies. Though we nominally taught programming, the design of the course led students to report gaining core, transferable skills and the confidence to employ them in their future. We discuss how various aspects of the course likely contributed to these gains. Finally, we encourage the community to embrace the challenge of teaching general education computing in contrast to and in conjunction with existing curricula designed primarily to interest students in the field

Classroom research as teacher-researcher

In the field of education, research projects that involve both the researcher and teacher being the same person are common today, as attested by the significant number of teacher-researcher studies. One issue confronting the dual role of teacher-researcher is the nature of interaction between the underlying goals that come with each of these roles. There are some researchers who express concern that the combination of these goals within the teacher-researcher may compromise either or both of the work of teaching and research in an unproductive way. This paper is an account of my adventure in attempting to fulfil both teaching and research goals in my work as teacher-researcher in a year 7 (Secondary One) geometry class in Singapore. My experience is then re-interpreted in the context of the ongoing conflicting-versus-complementary talk on the interaction between teacher/researcher &lsquo;selves&rsquo;. A model is proposed to account for the seemingly opposite sides of the camp as reported in the literature on this issue.<br /

A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia can support the development of such multimedia systems. Such an architecture needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, to describe them in the human-computer context, and to integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction

Adolescent Literacy and Textbooks: An Annotated Bibliography

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, provides an annotated bibliography of research on textbook design and reading comprehension for fourth through twelfth grade, arranged by topic. Calls for a dialogue between publishers and researchers