Concept Maps

Excuse me, but what do you see in your head while you're thinking? That's not something we're used to talking about. Of course, we know how to organize things in the "real" world. For instance, we can fit blocks through holes or rearrange the living room furniture.

What about larger spaces, such as Buffalo? I'll bet that your mental map of Buffalo is different from mine, which looks south and is centered around the mile-long street between my house and my classrooms.

What about ideas?

How do you organize historical events?
How do you visualize the sides of an argument?
How do you remember the points in a lecture?

More to the point, how are you going to visualize your digital project for this course? You're designing an information system. If you can visualize it as connected objects (whether "pages" or "ideas"), you can communicate to colleagues and customers by drawing boxes for the objects and lines for the connections.

What is a concept map?
A purposeful arrangement of nodes and links.

parts nodes links attributes shape size color position

InfoWorld Electric, the news and info site of InfoWorld, the weekly information technology magazine, has a site map that uses color effectively. What could they have done with shape, however?

Most people use concept maps for brainstorming their own projects. You can also use them to analyze and describe the structure of other people's Web sites and hypertexts.

How are these basic units organized?
If you hand in a ten-page term paper essay, neither you nor I have to give much thought to orientation and navigation. One staple; ten page numbers. Maybe instead of the staple you slide the text into a slick blue plastic sheet with a white strip to grasp it on the left. Should the pages come flying out, the ten numbers will let me quickly reassemble them. I read top to bottom, left to right. You can count on it. I might follow a reference to the Works Cited. I might flip back from page 8 to check something on page 3.  

How else do we navigate? Some of you may have had occasion to look for a recipe in a printed and bound cookbook. As long as there was a table of contents, you could find your way around pretty well. If there was an index of ingredients used, even better.

Navigation in hypertext is a little different. It's harder because each writer (author? designer? developer? builder?) gets to make up his or her own navigation and orientation system to replace the staple and the linear 1, 2, 3 page order. You can pretty much count on the top / bottom left / right as everyone's default behavior. But you've had your eye bounce around enough Web pages. You know that the way you integrate text and graphics opens up a world of page-reading possibilities. People are more than willing to abandon the linear text if you reward them with attractive, accessible content. Even better, let them interact with it. Let it behave.

What about nodes?
On this concept map of a generic Medaille course disclosure, the blue oval shapes represent the four course objectives. The relative sizes reveal the teacher's idea about the relative importance and their relative position make me think that it's the second objective on the list that is the most important. The squares can show, in chronological order, the written (red), tests (gold), and oral (green) assignments. I made all the squares the same size because they all count the same 10%. What other relationships of shape, size, color, and position do you see?

Course Disclosure

What about links?
Why bother with links? Because if the nodes are like the nouns in a sentence, if the attributes are like the adjectives, then links are like the verbs. And verbs are where the action is. The teacher can use lines to link the tests with specific objectives and help the students integrate the parts of the course. Those lines can also be thick or thin, solid or dotted, colored and overlapped. In context, reading those visual cues can help.

This line-drawing exercise process might enlighten all of us. Let's say I had a version of the above concept map specifically for this course.

before the course, I draw the lines between the squares (assignments) and ovals (objectives) representing what I intend to teach

after the course, I draw the lines -- thick, thin, broken, solid -- between the squares and ovals according to what I think I ended up teaching

after the course, on a separate map, you draw the lines according to what you think you learned

finally, we compare our concept maps of the course

Hypothesis: grades tend to be higher when the students' and teachers' concept maps are more similar.

Where can I find out more?
For some basic step-by-step instructions on making concept maps, try Exploring the Environment. Note also the links to other problem-solving techniques on that site: Classroom of the Future.

If concept mapping is a new idea, you can find some background at the Concept Mapping Workshop developed by Douglas McCabe at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His concept mapping page has other resources worth your while, especially those at the University of Twente.

Although McCabe concentrates on hierarchical maps, many other kinds are possible. The AIM Lab at the University of Illinois has a page called Kinds of Concept Maps showing a half-dozen others. The next page up has more resources.

If you want to pursue the larger ideas behind mapping, a good place to start is Concept Mapping and Other Formalisms as Mindtools for Representing Knowledge, an article by David Johassen of Penn State and Rose Marra of AT&T.

For an introduction to an academic application, try the article WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web by Brian Gaines and Mildred Shaw at the University of Calgary.

The Mindtools and WebMap sites, you'll note, are a couple of years old and are examples of first-generation sites. Compare them to the second-generation pages showing off the leading commercial mapping software, Inspiration, published by Inspiration Software Inc. Download a demo of their latest version to see some of the differences. If you download and use the demo, I'd be happy to put your map on this page.

last update: April 06, 1999
http://toLearn.net/marketing/cmaps.htm