The evolution of concept mapping has benefitted from the robust theoretical basis provided by Ausubelian learning theory. However, for concept mapping to maintain its relevance and to keep pace with the evolutionary changes in the educational context, it is vital that educational researchers and classroom practitioners can augment this theoretical…

Concept mapping, a tool originally developed to facilitate student learning by organizing and visualizing key concepts and their relationships, can also be used to represent the composition of the knowledge contained in a course. In this paper, the authors describe a specific application of concept mapping to help instructors and students…

The Ideational Knowledge Map is an individual's representation of her or his ideational (propositional, declarative, or conceptual) knowledge, and it includes 4 kinds of graphic components: concepts, concept clusters, multi-component links, and texts. The Map has visual and abstract dimensions, whose local, intermediate and global values are…

In the Walking Out Graphs Lesson described here, students experience several types of representations used to describe motion, including words, sentences, equations, graphs, data tables, and actions. The most important theme of this lesson is that students have to understand the consistency among these representations and form the habit of…

Procyon LLC had re-launched and renamed their music discovery site, Electra, to Capella, in 2008. Its core strength had originated from Electra's proprietary technology, which used music libraries from real people, its members, to generating "automated word-of-mouth" recommendations, targeted advertising and editorial content. With the re-launch,…

A student conceptual model can be defined as a set of interconnected concepts associated with an estimation value that indicates how well these concepts are used by the students. It can model just one student or a group of students, and can be represented as a concept map, conceptual diagram or one of several other knowledge representation…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

Digital-humanities centers have sprung up on many campuses, and the field has already launched many careers--but not always smoothly. A panel at the Modern Language Association conference in December focused on a particular subset of work that the organizers described as "literary geospaces." Two of the featured projects--Janelle…

Computers may not be able to master poetics like Aristotle, but they have become smart enough to know a metaphor when they see one. An online database called The Mind Is a Metaphor, created by Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a searchable bank of phrases, verses, and lines from literature that…

This article examines concepts and propositions from a theoretical perspective, and establishes the need for and develops an extension to Concept Maps (CMaps), called Cyclic Concept Maps (Cyclic CMaps). Cyclic CMaps are considered to be an appropriate tool for representing knowledge of functional or dynamical relationships between concepts. CMaps,…

Change and complexity are creating a need for increasing levels of literacy in science and technology. Presently, we are beginning to provide students with clear contexts in which to learn, including clearly written text, visual displays and maps, and more effective instruction. We are also beginning to give students tools that promote their own…

This educational software was developed to aid teachers and students in their understanding of how the process of identifying the most likely quantitative trait loci (QTL) position is determined between two flanking DNA markers. The objective of the software that we developed was to: (1) show how a QTL is mapped to a position on a chromosome using…

The field of instructional design has traditionally treated concepts as discrete learning outcomes. Theoretically, learning concepts requires correctly isolating and applying attributes of specific objects into their correct categories. Similarity views of concept learning are unable to account for all of the rules governing concept formation,…

In this work is proposed that an adaptation tool that is for the automatic generation and personalization of courses of a general-purpose LCMS that is named A Tutor. A Tutor is a Learning Content Management System. The architecture of the adaptation tool that allows a personalized sequencing of LOs in A Tutor for the learner's learning goals,…

This paper gives an overview of the Inspiration Software, a package that is designed to facilitate the construction and use of concept maps in the classroom. The first section discusses concept mapping, defined as any graphic production that is constructed specifically to represent knowledge. The following basic functions of Inspiration are then…