Visual understanding environment alternative

#Visual understanding environment alternative how to#
#Visual understanding environment alternative series#
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Grouping and sub-grouping of map areas is possible. Notable features include the ability to customize the nodes and links with color, arrowhead styles, and line weights. Its interface is sophisticated yet very easy to use. VUE is a free, Open Source, desktop application that is easy to install. As mentioned earlier, several other tools were tested (including Compendium, Gliffy and Visio), but VUE had all the necessary features necessary to support Professor Eisenberger's class assignment.

#Visual understanding environment alternative series#

Through a series of meetings with the professor and teaching assistant, it was determined that the concept mapping tool should be free, allow file export for sharing, and be easy to use to ensure that students with no prior experience with concept maps could freely brainstorm at first try. Students were able to envision the relationship dynamics in multiple ways, thus reinforcing the course pedagogy. A concept mapping exercise was assigned to guide students through the broad ranging complexity of problems in the Earth/Human system. Professor Eisenberger aimed to illuminate the relationship and networks of course concepts and knowledge so that students from a wide range of fields might be more prepared to address sustainability problems from a truly interdisciplinary point of view. (Below is a small segment of a larger map that explores the relationships among energy issues).

#Visual understanding environment alternative how to#

In case study format, students created 'systems maps' to learn how to analyze and understand the complex problems of sustainability by studying concepts related to their own specialty (in biology, physics or the social sciences) and other fields by working with students from different backgrounds of study. This interdisciplinary course focuses on the basic scientific issues and problems of sustainability in our Earth/Human system. One, Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) from Tufts University, was selected for use in Columbia University professor Peter Eisenberger's 'The Earth/Human System' course for advanced undergraduates.

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There are many free online concept-mapping tools, each with its own feature set supporting different kinds of concept mapping activity. Since it is a great way to see how individual ideas form a larger whole, students may find it an effective means of learning by analyzing connections among course concepts in the material.

In the classroom, instructors may use concept maps to help their students develop logical thinking and systems analysis skills. Typically the relationship can be categorized as cause/effect or part/whole, but often concept map links include linking phrases that specifically define the relationship.

In general, a concept map diagram includes 'nodes' that are the concept (idea, image, word) and 'links' that define the relationship connecting the nodes. It is an umbrella term that encompasses many diagramming approaches also known as knowledge maps, systems maps, or mind maps.

A concept map is a way of visualizing and graphically representing relationships between ideas, images, and words.