introducing rigor in concept maps

i have been working in the area of refined concept maps for science education. so far we have communicated our research in conferences on science education, concept mapping, etc.

recently, our work got published in Springer’s LNAI  book.  the paper ‘introducing rigor in concept maps’ was presented in the 18th international conference on conceptual structures 2010 at kuching, malaysia. the paper talks about applying rigor by focusing on relation names, the re-representation of sentences to propositions in RDF triples format, and how the refined concept mapping methodology can act as a bridge between informal and formal models of knowledge bases.

Meena Kharatmal & Nagarjuna G.: Introducing rigor in concept maps. In M. Croitoru, S. Ferre, and D. Lukose (Eds.), ICCS 2010, LNAI 6208, pp. 199-202, Springer Verlag 2010.

I acknowledge:

• HBCSE for providing with funding support for the conference

• ICCS 2010 for providing sponsorship for tutorials and workshops

SELF Platform—A Teacher-Centric Collaborative Authoring System

I am glad to share that an article on SELF Platform has been published in the Journal of Applied Collaborative Systems.

Meena Kharatmal & Nagarjuna G. (2009).  SELF Platform—A Teacher-Centric  Collaborative  Authoring System. Journal of Applied Collaborative Systems, 1(2), pp. 67-82.

The full article can be downloaded from the journals website or from the publications page of my blog.

concept mapping – article in indian journal

I have been always thinking to publish our research work for an Indian audience. Atleast in India, the community of educationists, teachers, etc., get to know what we are working on. With this objective, I had
submitted some preliminary findings of my Ph.D. work to an Indian Journal. The following research paper has been published in the Indian Educational Review (a journal published by NCERT).

Kharatmal M. (2009): Concept Mapping for Eliciting Students’ Understanding of Science. Indian Educational
Review. 45(2), pp.31-43.

The article is on display in our library. I have also uploaded the article which can be downloaded from the publications page of my blog

SELF-Platform—A Teacher-Centric Collaborative Authoring System

HBCSE – Gnowledge Lab has developed the SELF Platform as part of the European Commission funded SELF Project # 034595 (2006-2008). A paper on SELF Platform as a teacher centric collaborative authoring system has been published at the NCOSS conference organized by CDAC, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, May 2009.

The SELF Platform caters to a teacher to create learning materials.

The full paper is available from the publications page of my blog.

what is so different about GNOWSYS

Gnowsys can be used to represent structural knowledge, process modelling, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned. But then there also exists several other modelling tools such as—OBO-edit, Protege, OPM, KEGG, Virtual Cel, Cell Designer, Reactome, GO, etc. which can as well represent knowledge. So then, an obvious query that comes to my mind is  what is so different about Gnowsys? Isn’t it just an addition to the existing modelling tools. Nagarjuna explained that the differences are in the form mentioned below:

One of them is the architecture of Gnowsys itself being different with the other tools. As per the gnowsys architecture, everything that goes in is a node for e.g. concept, concept type, instance, relation, relation type, attributes, attribute type, are all stored as nodes, but in the form of networked nodes. A node cannot have meaning on its own. Its meaning is established only by its neighborhood. For instance, X is related to Y, and it can have many such simple relations.  This is in accordance, with the theory that knowledge exists in a network. If we want to understand what is force, then its understanding can be acquired depending on what relations does the concept force shares with other concepts like, mass, inertia, acceleration, etc.

Gnowsys can create versions even if there is a single (simple) change to a node. This change can be in the form of either adding a node, editing a node, adding a relation, editing a relation, deleting a relation. From this list even if there is change in just one kind, then also it can create versions and record the history. This kind of change is accordance with the degrees of conceptual change that Paul Thagard explains in his book Conceptual Revolutions. According to Thagard,  conceptual change can occure when there is addition of concepts, addition of relations. With this model of versioning, gnowsys can record the changes that ocurs in people’s conceptual framework, thus enabling to trace the conceptual changes.

Another difference is that gnowsys does not store knowledge in any kind of file system. It is on the web, in another way to put it, gnowsys does not ask in which file format should it save the knowledge created. But at the same time, it can possibly exchange to various formats that of OWL.

The other difference is that gnowsys can store multiple ontologies. Using just one application of Gnowsys, it would be possible to store structural knowledge, process, metabolic pathways, etc. It will be interesting to see the multiple ontologies by importing a few of the existing ontologies (can be cell division, gene ontology, metabolic pathways, environment ontology,  etc.)  from the public domain and from several different places and allow these ontologies to store in gnowsys.

It would be useful to know, if there are other differences.

This excerpt is based on discussion over tea.

visit to somaiya college for depmap workshop

Today I planned a visit to K.J.Somaiya college of science, vidyavihar with regard to plan for organizing depmap workshop for teachers. I met the faculty from physics, chemistry, biology, botany, microbiology, education departments of junior as well as senior college.

I explained about the objectives of the depmap workshop and since it is to build a teaching sequence, it would be useful if teachers themselves create their dependency maps using the web based portal in the hands-on workshop to be conducted in gnowledge lab, hbcse.  Teacher have got a fair understanding as I also showed them some featured maps picked out from the portal.

Overall, all the teachers whom i met are interested to participate in the depmap workshop. Teachers from each department will be participating in the workshop in april, may, june.

Initially the visit was planned for about an hour, but my visit got extended for more than 2 hours. Actually I have studied for H.S.C., B.Sc. & M.Sc. from Somaiya college. When i was meeting the teachers, i too got nostalgic and to my surprise, most of the teachers could remember me as their student. So my visit got extended as I met my teachers in the corridor, labs, and was talking about my work and research. A few teachers also were keen to know about my Ph.D. work in the area of biology education. My teachers were glad to know about my progress, i being an alumni of somaiya.

I was thrilled to go back to my college, to my teachers and convey my contribution to science education.

depmap on activity—who got the food

i was mapping the topic who got the food from chapter 4- looking at
animals from the small science curriculum for class III. and this is
the route that i followed to map.

depmap on food eating habits

an interesting depmap to build a thread as :
inorder to understand the concept of animals, one need to first
observe some animals, their food eating habits. the latter can be
understood in the context of an activity. once these activities are
performed one can categorize and classify which animals eat what kind
of food and then may be understand the concept of a dog, cat, and then progressively the concept of an animal.

Small Science Curriculum is an activity based curriculum developed by
HBCSE. It focusses on teaching science through activities.

“what the learner already knows” & depmap

I have been reading Ausubel’s classroom assimilation theory (1978) from time to time as his theory has form the basis of the prevailing science education research especially in the area of concept maps.

Ausubel’s principle, “what the learner already knows” means that students come to the classroom with a prior understanding of science through their everyday experience, commom sense knowledge, etc. He further goes ahead and suggests that we as science educators need to ascertain this fact first and “teach the learner accordingly”.

Now that we are creating a network of pre-requisite concepts or a dependency network for a teaching sequence, we are claiming that there are certain concepts which the learner should understand first and then progressively learn the further depending concepts.

I am just trying to make connections with the depmap work and Ausubel’s principle.

People are welcome to create dependency network (depmap) atwww.gnowledge.org.

One can view some featured maps. A few sample of depmaps from physics, chemistry and biology are featured for providing a glimpse of the depmaps.

focus group meeting

During the episteme3, our presentations on Refined Concept Maps, gnowledge.org generated interest among few participants. A focus group meeting for more interaction, collaboration was planned after today’s lunch. The members included Dr. Vrunda Prabhu, Dr. Brian, Prof. H.C.Pradhan, Dr. Nagarjuna, Ms. Meena. The group from City University, New York have  a repository of concept maps on mathematics based on their research work, students’ essays, etc. Prof. Pradhan shared his research on concept maps on physics and ways to analyze the concepts based on the links, distance. Our research group (Nagarjuna and Meena) shared our  research work on refined concept maps on biology  domain, and how the gnowledge.org can help build a  roadmap of knowledge from any given domain. The group also discussed on how to use the cognitive distance, semantic proximity for analyzing the concepts in a network.

This seems a useful outcome of the episteme-3 conference for our research group. Let us see how it proceeds.

promising strands for future episteme conferences

Today, on the last day of the episteme-3 conference, we had a round table discussion on two issues: promising strands for episteme conferences; to build a community  of STME research in India. I was involved in the first round table. We reviewed the last episteme -1, episteme-2, and the current epistme-3 for the strands (or themes) of the conferences, and the outcomes. The main strands that episteme conferences will always be based on are: History and philsophy of science: its implications for science education; Cognitive basis of learning, pedagogy and curricular issues. From the discussion, atleast four strands have emerged which the participants are interested in the future epistemes. These have been: classroom based practices; affective factors in learning, science technology studies issues, integrating STME, assessment (to bring into focus), universalization of education.

The other topic also got a good involvement from the participants to building a community for science, technology, and mathematics education in India. Some of the suggestions are: to build research standards, develop knowledge portals, create summer programs, evaluate projects with collaborators, engaging with scientific institutes, universities, etc. etc.

These two topics of the round table discussion would enable us to concretize the strands of our future episteme conferences of HBCSE.