Concept mapping to design, organize, and explore digital learning objects

Abstract

This chapter investigates the problem of connecting advanced domain knowledge (from geography educators in this instance) with the strong pedagogic descriptions provided by colleagues from the University of Southampton, as described in Chapter IX, and then adding to this the learning materials that together comprise a learning object. Specifically, the chapter describes our efforts to enhance our open-source concept mapping tool (ConceptVista) with a variety of tools and methods that support the visualization, integration, packaging, and publishing of learning objects. We give examples of learning objects created from existing course materials, but enhanced with formal descriptions of both domain content and pedagogy. We then show how such descriptions can offer significant advantages in terms of making domain and pedagogic knowledge explicit, browsing such knowledge to better communicate educational aims and processes, tracking the development of ideas amongst the learning community, providing richer indices into learning material, and packaging these learning materials together with their descriptive knowledge. We explain how the resulting learning objects might be deployed within next-generation digital libraries that provide rich search languages to help educators locate useful learning objects from vast collections of learning materials.