domenica 11 novembre 2007

many different kinds of concept mapping

We are becoming more and more aware of the different uses of concept mapping. Learning-constructing knowledge, presenting, representing-reproducing models of realities, organizing shared knowledge models, are not the same kind of concept mapping. Each one can be made collaboratively, but only the former and the latter can be considered as strictly related to a pedagogical task.
In this "Concept maps as strategies for learning" web, as an example, we can see a cmap that tries to represent a piece of reality about a metabolic activity, here: http://www.eaa-knowledge.com/ojni/ni/602/strategies.htm.
Such cmaps need to "work", as they were engines (linking words are all influences among subsystems: "increase", "activate", "raises", "phosphorilates" etc.). Moreover, at the nodes of such a cmap, there are not concepts, but names of subsystems or objects.
As prof. Ahlberg maintains, these "pieces of reality" are not feasible to be represented as a whole hierarchical pattern. Functional relations in the real world aren't "concerned" with hierarchies. In fact that cmap has not a recognizable hierarchy of concepts. As a consequence, novel and unexpert people has not any chance to grasp the tinged meanings from that cmap. Secondly, a student can face such a cmap only after he has studied and masters deeply all the stuff. For this student, the task of representing as a cmap a knowledge domain following certain syntacic rules, is a further difficulty that often doesn't add anything to the understanding of the knowledge domain of that student.
It worths to remember that in similar attempts to "represent how a real system works", we have often different symbolic languages that have been developed inside of each subject (mathematics, biochemistry, etc.), that are probably a better choice to represent similar complex domains.
On the other hand, when you use concept mapping as a metacognitive tool, and as a pedagogical language that helps you to mediate teaching-learning, the concept map change its features: there are more concepts, class names, that are related in a classificatory pattern; the cmap become an attempt to assure every concept an "epistemological" rank and role, even though it is not part of the mechanism or of the causal relationships that make possible to answer a specific focus question. The cmap constructed during the learning process doesn't say how everything influences dinamically every other subsystem, but it just says how every concept is "generated by" or related to the more inclusive or general concepts.

This is a natural process that happens in the space of the mind of the learner, that is different from the processes that may occur in the real world.

We can help our students if we are aware of this difference and if we don't ask them to make concept maps aimed at both representing the progress of apprehension of an epistemplogy and the mechanism-flow-chart of all the influences about a "piece of real world".

A few words should be written about concept maps as organizer of knowledge domains. This is a second process that is of great interests to the pedagogist, that is subsequent to individual concept-mapping: how a knowledge domain can be organized, can be a viewed as a task for a learning community. This process happens in the space of a learning community. At this level collaborative learning can be very useful, both as a distance collaboration or as a local class peer interaction. But this organization purpose is again to be intended as a social learning process, not as a technical utility aimed to produce a final clear hypertext or a fine web interface (informative purposes).

This is just a reflection about our role of teachers and our view of concept mapping that is compatible with Ausubels-Novak theory and inclined to separate concept mapping as a process accompanying learning as a different one from representational or organizing purposes.