Space Education with The Living Textbook, A web-based tool using a Concept Browser

The ability to recognize the relationships between concepts is a crucial aspect of meaningful learning. Expert-generated concept maps have been shown to help students in forging connections by acting as scaffolds for cognitive processing. The Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente is developing a Living Textbook which combines an online knowledge repository with an interactive map visualizing the relationships between concepts. Our teachers and students have started to use this in the core modules at the start of our MSc programme. Tests show that this is a promising approach that drives us to further develop its procedures and applications

Digit@l Did@ctics: Development of Teaching Staff

In: A.J. Kallenberg and M.J.J.M. van de Ven (Eds), 2002, The New Educational Benefits of ICT in Higher Education: Proceedings. Rotterdam: Erasmus Plus BV, OECR ISBN 90-9016127-9This paper presents an innovative way of development of teaching staff. Teachers prefer to learn and to receive support 'just in time'. As an answer to this demand this project has developed an educational knowledge base containing didactical materials and an educational call centre

A putative mechanism for bog patterning

The surface of bogs commonly shows various spatial vegetation patterning. Typical are ¿string patterns¿ consisting of regular densely vegetated bands oriented perpendicular to the slope. Here, we report on regular ¿maze patterns¿ on flat ground, consisting of bands densely vegetated by vascular plants in a more sparsely vegetated matrix of nonvascular plant communities. We present a model reproducing these maze and string patterns, describing how nutrient-limited vascular plants are controlled by, and in turn control, both hydrology and solute transport. We propose that the patterns are self-organized and originate from a nutrient accumulation mechanism. In the model, this is caused by the convective transport of nutrients in the groundwater toward areas with higher vascular plant biomass, driven by differences in transpiration rate. In a numerical bifurcation analysis we show how the maze patterns originate from the spatially homogeneous equilibrium and how this is affected by changes in rainfall, nutrient input, and plant properties. Our results confirm earlier model results, showing that redistribution of a limiting resource may lead to fine-scale facilitative and coarse-scale competitive plant interactions in different ecosystems. Self-organization in ecosystems may be a more general phenomenon than previously thought, which can be mechanistically linked to scale-dependent facilitation and competition