Concept Mapping with Compendium

Image by ryan2point0  I do a lot with concept mapping. I use it in my work as an instructional designer and I use concept maps in writing fiction and technical work, and I am really interested in Compendium right now. What is Compendium? It is more than just concept mapping software. "Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data." Compendium is a free concept mapping software package by the Compendium Institute, a group formed by Knowledge Media Institute of  the Open University of UK, Verizon, Center for Creative Leadership, and others to promote the compendium methodology. "Our own particular interest is in visualizing the connections between people, ideas and information at multiple levels, in mapping discussions and debates, and what skills are needed to do so in a participatory manner that engages all stakeholders." What is really exciting about this is the techniques they are exploring with collaborative concept mapping:

"Extending Compendium's support for personal sensemaking, we have a particular interest in what we term collective sensemaking, and have developed a technique called Dialogue Mapping, and its extension, Conversational Modelling. Our experiences with these techiques for capturing and managing -- often in real time and under pressure -- the perspectives in meetings that emerge in open discussion or in collaborative modelling, lead us to claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling some of the key challenges in managing knowledge and making meaning:

• improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems
• real time capture and integration of hybrid material (both predictable/ formal, and unexpected/informal) into a reusable group memory
• transforming the resulting resource into the right representational formats for different stakeholders.

There is a tremendous amount of useful tutorials, videos and articles on the method at the The Compendium Exchange.

I am interested in seeing how this software holds up against CMaps which is what I currently use. I have used Gliffy and Inspiration occasionally for group projects but I am always on the look out for open source solutions. Especially one like this that asks the users to be thoughtful about what kinds of connections they are making to and with the information they are using.

Related articles

• Elements of Connectivism (downes.ca)
• Cathy Moore on Saving the World from Boring eLearning (downes.ca)
• Time management and mindmapping: "getting things done" with Freemind | Pronovix (pronovix.com)
• Setting a Course (rdkahn.com)

Brainstorming: order from chaos

Image by MikeOliveri via FlickrBrainstorming is a method for rapidly gathering ideas from a group. These ideas can help individuals in the group solve problems and discover solutions. Brainstorming sessions allow members to express their ideas and creativity, and to discover connections between ideas and participants. There are marginalized voices in your class or organization that have something unique to contribute. Brainstorming can help bring forth these voices from the back of the room. By their nature, brainstorming sessions allow everyone to have an equal voice.

Ordo ab Chaos: Six Rules for Brainstorming Sessions:

1. Suspend criticism and judgment.
   Everyone must agree to accept all answers; there is no good or bad idea. For five minutes, everyone is brilliant. Reviewing and sorting of the ideas will come later.
2. Wild is permitted.
   Wild is good. Wild ideas give birth to great ideas.
3. Quantity not quality.
   The more ideas you can work from the better.
4. Everyone participates.
   All and any ideas will contribute to the whole. There are no bosses or teachers in a brainstorm.
5. Invent and recycle.
   Utilize ideas already stated and combine them with others. Do not fear your creative voice.
6. Record everything.
   Let people call out their ideas, but if the ideas are not written down, people will forget what was said. Use a white board or a computer projector. Misspelling, shorthand, and doodling are acceptable. Suspend criticism of the recording process as well; this is a creative process.

Guidelines for facilitating a brainstorming session:

1. Schedule a brainstorming session during a regularly scheduled meeting or class time. The participants will appreciate the added interaction.
2. Have the group or class help define the brainstorming topic. A facilitator may want to discuss general problems, but allow the group to decide on the question together.
3. Assign a facilitator for the session. This person will keep everyone involved and will encouraging everyone to give ideas and keep the session moving. The facilitator can keep the session moving by repeating what was said and keeping others focused.
4. Assign a recorder. This person will write down everyone’s ideas. The recorder’s goal will be to get everything down quick and dirty.
5. Review the rules before starting. Everyone must agree to commit to the process. The facilitator should encourage wild ideas, and if participants laugh, they should be reminded that no criticisms or judgments are to be made.
6. Set a time limit (for five minutes or so), but if ideas are flowing, let the process keep going.
7. After the brainstorming is complete, read through the list of ideas and discuss, sort, and analyze them.
8. Afterwards, have the recorder send out the results to participants as a document or webpage. Ideally, there will be some tangible record to promote further discussion. 

  Image by World Economic Forum via FlickrThis is where mind maps or concept maps come in handy. You can use an online concept map to record ideas and then send that map out to your students or co-workers. We typically use Gliffy or the web version of Inspiration. Gliffy, like Google Docs, allows the user to invite participants to the document via email. The email contains a link to the document and then it can be edited by that user as well. We will be using CMaps for this purpose in the future as part of an on-going experiment. We will report back here on the results of our investigations. We would love to know if you are using a combination of brainstorming and concept maps. Feel free to email me or to make a comment below.
 

Related articles

• Brainwriting Getting More from Your Idea Sessions (startouch.wordpress.com)
• 10 Ways to Encourage Innovation (linked2leadership.com)
• After the brainstorm (theglobeandmail.com)
• Step by Step Guide to Brainstorming (jagdidit.com)
• How To Enhance Creativity: Why Lady Gaga Works & Brainstorming Doesn't (entrepreneurs-journey.com)

Explaining Web 3.0

I wanted to share some notes on the semantic web or Web 3.0. The only way to really understand Web 3.0 is by knowing the history and maybe some of the future directions.

Web 1.0: Information is stored and shared on the web.

Web 2.0: Users interact with internet and one another via social networks and new media made possible by advanced coding such as Java, Php, and Ajax, etc.

Web 3.0: Machine readable metadata allows machines to interpret the semantic "meaning" of information allowing more intelligent use of the web.

Web 4.0: Through the increasingly complex array of networks, the internet gains partial sentience and begins to anticipate and interpret our needs.

Web 5.0: The internet is now able to handle the intricacies of transfinite symbolic logic, yet does not laugh at even the most rudimentary jokes. Gaining full sentience, the internet works harder than ever and applies simultaneously for a U.S. social security card and membership in the EU.

Web. 6.0: The internet has its first existential dilemma and for 6 weeks the world shuts down as it debates the teleological suspension of the ethical with an old NeXT cube server running an iteration of ELIZA.

Web 7.0: The internet, nearing late middle-age, runs off with a hot little smart phone to California. The internet now takes acting lessons, works in a health food store, and becomes a Buddhist.

Image via Wikipedia

On My Semantic Radar

Image via Wikipedia

There is some interesting news about the focusing of standards for the semantic web by the W3C today. The semantic web is the idea that by combining different kinds of metadata, it will be easier to find, share and combine information on the internet. According to Wikipedia: "At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications."

One interesting way to learn more about the semantic web is to take a look under the hood at webpages that use semantic data.

Uldis Bojars and Sergio Fernandez at the SIOC project have written a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to do just that:

"Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Mozilla Firefox.

• Install Semantic Radar

Available at Mozilla Add-ons site. It is a browser extension which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and informs about presence of it by showing an icon in browser's status bar. Currently it supports RDF autodiscovery (SIOC, FOAF, DOAP and any type) and RDFa metadata detection.

New: Semantic Radar can now ping the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata are detected. This allows for a community based discovery of the Semantic Web data."

Right now the semantic web is a hodge-podge of many different kinds of data and systems. That is changing some with SKOS - (Simple Knowlege Organization System) which was announced by W3C as the standard.