Monday, January 20, 2003

Cognitive Maps and Topic Maps Dr. Bruce Landon of Douglas College in British Columbia introduced me to the subject of Topic Maps when we had a chance to share ideas about cognitive psychology and online instructional resources at the October 2002 WCET Conference in Denver. Topic Maps (see http://www.topicmaps.org/) are at a higher level of abstraction than the study of Cognitive Mapping in psychology, although the two subjects definitely overlap. Psychologists want to discover how people (and animals) represent their worlds; they want to empirically study cognitive mapping phenomena and construct theories to explain the mapping processes. Of course, with people, we can actually have them describe or show their maps, and we can interview them to get more details, or we can infer cognitive maps from behaviors; with animals we can only infer what map and mapping process an animal is using. Consult this article for a quick introduction, http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/teach/atc/1999/web/verenah/. A full Scirus search for web sites and articles related to the subject "cognitive mapping" pulled 5.973 items, 561 journal articles and 5,412 web sites. Many research studies attempt to evaluate the accuracy of cognitive maps, both for the "real world" and "virtual worlds." E.g, in the paper "The Use of Sketch Maps to Measure Cognitive Maps of Virtual Environments" the researchers concluded, "In this study we have investigated the applicability of sketch maps as an external representation of an individual's cognitive map of a virtual environment. We have found that sketch maps reflect differences both between worlds and within worlds. In two of our test worlds, Virtual Valley and Neighborhood, map goodness and object class number scores correlated significantly with the subjects' self-reported sense of orientation within the virtual world. These two results suggest that sketch maps do indeed accurately represent the topological aspects of subjects cognitive maps." (http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/simonl/papers/papers/048%20Billinghurst%20Weghorst%201995.htm). Topic Mapping is devoted to the effective and efficient mapping of knowledge; it's a significant contributor to the nascent field of knowledge management (http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/all_about_facets_controlled_vocabularies.php). The implications of Topic Mapping are important for concerns about Metadata classification systems, digital libraries, the use of XML to create a Semantic Web, and for Course Management Systems (http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/itms.html). EasyTopicMaps (http://easytopicmaps.com/index.php?page=WhatAreTopicmaps) describes What are Topic Maps? this way: "they are the most powerful metadata format we have;" "XTM is an XML based language for topic maps;" "they contain things like Topics, Associations, and Occurrences." "A topic map consists of a bunch of topics, and is often written in XTM. Or it can be kept in a database. Or written on paper. Or carved in stone, you get the idea. Apart from topics (like: "the play Hamlet"), it also contains associations (like: "the play Hamlet was written by the author Shakespeare.") And a topic map also contains occurrences. (Like: "At this URL: http://hamlet.com you can find a description of the play hamlet.") 3:43:12 PM    COMMENT []

Inspiration Software, Cognitive Maps, and the Web I enjoy this old joke about the farmer and the tourist: the tourist stops by the side of the road and asks the farmer how to get to the local lake. The farmer says "Well, I'm not sure." The tourist is irked and says, "You don"t know much do you?" The farmer, "No, but I ain't lost." I remembered this joke recently when I was thinking about how to organize the many web sites that I've identified that relate to higher education online instructional resources. What I want to do is categorize and organize the resources so that the EduResources portal that I'm designing will be easy to use; I want the portal web site to be an effective entryway to online instructional resources for faculty and instructional designers. As I attempt to organize the hundreds of relevant web sites I sometimes feel like the tourist and sometimes like the farmer; sometimes I know where I want to go, but don't know how to get there, and sometimes I know where I am but I don't know how to tell someone else how to get to where they'd like to be. One tool that I've been using to plan the portal design is a mapping/outlining instructional software package called Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com/productinfo/index.cfm). The software is designed to help students (and teachers) organize subject matter so that they can better learn a subject and better organize and track what they are learning. "Inspiration is a Visual Learning Tool. In Inspiration, you think and learn visually. Inspiration provides you with the tools that let you create a picture of your ideas or concepts in the form of a diagram. It also provides an integrated outlining environment for you to develop your ideas into organized written documents. When you work with visual representations of ideas, you easily see how one idea relates to others. Learning and thinking become active rather than passive. You discover where your deepest knowledge lies, and where the gaps in your understanding are. When you create a visual map of ideas, you can recall the details better than if you had read a paragraph. That's because you can see it in your mind" (Inspiration Software Online Manual; also see "Visual Learning" at http://www.inspiration.com/vlearning/index.cfm). Here's what one mapping of the EduResources website design looks like in Inspiration (http://facstaff.eou.edu/~jhart/resourcesmap.gif). Files from Inspiration can be saved in the Inspiration special format or as gif or html files. Users can work from either a diagram display or an outline display and easily translate from one to the other. If you quickly compare the previous diagram display of the EduResources portal with an outline for the portal, you'll see that the diagram is much easier to apprehend than the outline (http://facstaff.eou.edu/~jhart/resourcesoutline.htm). The visual representation--with different line thickness, different shapes, and different proximities of one graphic item to another--is easier to assimilate than words. After all we don't see traffic signs of text-only directions, instead symbols and pictures are employed to convey vital information. One thing I particularly appreciate about the Inspiration diagram display is its ease of use; it passes the "how much can you do without reading the manual" test very readily. This is important because many mapping and planning software packages are so complicated to learn that people won't bother to use them; a learning aid should not take more time to learn than the project or subject that the aid is supporting. (There is even a simpler version of Inspiration available from the company, called Kidspiration, for children in grades K-5.) I've been interested in cognitive mapping for many years. It seems to me to be one of the most fascinating areas of cognitive psychology and one of the subject areas within psychology with practical importance for learning and teaching. One way that I start courses and workshops is to ask the new students to separately draw a map of how they would tell a visitor to get from the classroom building we are in to another building on campus, say the student union or the library. Discussion of the students' various maps makes it absolutely clear that different students map the route in very different ways; it's also completely clear to students that telling and showing someone how to go somewhere depends upon evaluating what they already know; is the visitor the tourist or the farmer?. After a short mapping exercise like this it's a smooth transition to asking students to map what they know about the subject that we are about to study. Simply giving students an elaborate map or outline from the beginning doesn't allow them to display what they already know--or what they want to learn. Tim Berners-Lee used a kind of mapping process when he designed the first WWW tool, Enquire; he called the design process, Circles and Arrows (http://www.w3.org/History/1980/Enquire/manual/). "Informal discussions at CERN would invariably be accompanied by diagrams of circles and arrows scribbled on napkins and envelopes, because it was a natural way to show relationships between people and equipment. I wrote a four-page manual manual for Enquire that talked about circles and arrows, and how useful it was to use their equivalent in a computer program" (Weaving the Web, pp. 9-10.) Mapping, drawing, diagramming and other kid stuff can be very important. 10:14:54 AM    COMMENT []