Groups, Group Cognition & Groupware

Groupware refers to programs and softwares that help people work together collectively while located remotely from each other. Such software systems as email, calendaring, chatting belong to Groupware category.

Microsoft Exchange is the typical example of Groupware, which facilitate calendar sharing, e-mail handling, and the replication of files across a distributed system so that all groupware users can view the same information.

There are two different chat patterns of Groupware technique:

i) Expository narrative

ii) Exploratory inquiry

The Expository narrative involves one person dominating the interchange by contributing more and longer texts, for example if one person in a group finds the solution of given problem, he just distibutes his solution and all the persons in the group have different reasoning on that solution. In Expository narrative, Cooperation analogy involves in which people divide the work up, each working by themselves on their own part and then joining their partial solutions together for the group solution.

In Exploratory inquiry the group members work together to explore a topic. In Exploratory inquiry , Collaboration analogy involves which involves a group of people working on something together.

In an online chat discussing a series of 11 math problems given to the students and collaborate them in a chating room group.

From the result, i was clearly shown that the
problems answered by the students more correctly in a group as that in individuals.

Also its observed from the test that

i) In some cases, everyone proposed the same answer and it was easy to establish a consensus.

ii) In some other cases, only one person proposed an answer and the others simply went along with it

iii) In more interesting cases, when someone proposed an answer that contradicted other people’s opinions or was questionable for some other reason, the proposer was required to give an explanation, justification or accounting of their proposal.

If researchers studying the use of groupware focused on processes of collaboration and the methods that groups used to solve problems, as opposed to treating exclusively individuals as cognitive agents then research methods might focus more on conversation analysis , video analysis and their application to discourse logs than on surveys and interviews of individual opinions.

There are some suggestions for groupware design principles like

a) The group work visible and persistent so that everyone in the group can easily see what has been accomplished by all members.

b) Patterns of references among proposals, adjacency pairs and responses between different group members could also be displayed.

c) The groups should be like Virtual Workspaces.

d) The group memebers in a group provide computational support to the work of their users.

e) Groupware can provide structured access to information, tools and other resources available on the Internet.

f) Groupware could facilitate the building of open-ended networks of individual, group and community connections, or the definition of new sub-communities.

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The Unless Switch: Adding Conditional Logic to Concept Mapping for Middle School Students

Concept maps can be used for both teaching and assessment purposes. It has been demonstrated that showing students a concept map detailing the structure of a domain better prepares students to assimilate information from that domain.

Betty's Brain is a learning-by teaching environment where students "teach" Betty by constructing a concept map that models relations between domain concepts. Betty then assesses her knowledge in a performance venue, such as by taking a quiz. Based on how well Betty performs, students can revise their agent’s knowledge.

Betty implements both uses of concept maps. Students receive a passage and are asked to teach it to Betty. As a novice learner, Betty forces students to formalize their knowledge by having them create concept maps in order to teach it. These concept maps can then be assessed by
comparing them to an expert concept map. How well the student’s map matches the expert map determines how well the student has structured his or her knowledge

We also consider about the incorporating conditional logic into Betty. There are two goals for that:

i) Develop an interface that reflects the semantic structure people naturally use to think about
thresholds and activation states.

ii) Represents the reasoning within Betty’s concept maps.

The notion of thresholds within a concept map. Students often create multiple nodes representing different levels of the same concept and link them together.

For example, in the domain of water ecosystems, students sometimes create both an “algae” and a “more algae” node to indicate that increasing “algae” increases the amount of oxygen in a pond, but that “more algae” decreases the amount of oxygen. In this case, Betty tells the students that it is confused about the relationship between the two nodes and asks them to resolve the conflict.

INITIAL PROTOTYPE

We used triangle in the initial prototype to show the state of the source node.

Arrows leading from each state to the target node
Red color indicates the high state

Green color indicates the normal state

White color indicates the low state

For example, if we increase nitrogen, and nitrogen is high (red state), we decrease plant growth.

But in first prototype the students complained that, having scattered colored triangles throughout the concept map made it difficult to see the overall structure due to the clutter.

2nd Prototype

In this prototype we investigate the application of statecharts instead of triangles. At the high level, statecharts look vary similar to concept maps. The boxes in a state chart represent a state and the processes that happen within that state.

But in the case of state chart representation, students still exhibited confusion about whether to treat the boxes as states or nodes.

Final Prototype

In the final design, instead of thinking about the concept maps, we used "unless" clauses because this protype is a more natural way of presenting the information than that of Ist and 2nd prototypes.

Second, it emphasizes the normal relationship (nitrogen increases plant growth), and indicates that the alternative is atypical (unless it is too high). Our previous prototypes gave equal emphasis to all states. Finally, it does not require illustration of state changes.

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CMAPTOOLS: A KNOWLEDGE MODELING AND SHARING ENVIRONMENT

Concept mapping is a process of meaning-making. It contains a list of concepts (events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label ) and organizing it in a graphical representation where pairs of concepts and linking phrases.

CmapTools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) is a software kit developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) which is used to:

i) Construct Concept Maps.

ii) Capabilities of annotation of of the maps with additional material such as images, diagrams, video clips and other such resources.

iii) It provides the capability to store and access concept maps on multiple servers to support knowledge sharing across geographically-distant sites.

The CMap tools have two concepts:

a) The use of concept mapping for knowledge elicitation ( a toolkit for knowledge acquisition)

b) The use of collaboration and sharing the knowledge among the participants.

The objectivies of CMap tools are:

i) CMap tool having user friendly interface and anyone can make a verity of concepts maps.

ii) CMap enable users to graphically express their understanding of a domain of knowledge.

iii) CMap provides the collaborative learning environments in order to share the knowledge of all ages.

iv) CmapTools was designed based on a modular architecture, in which components can be added or removed as needed from a Core module.

The CMap tool contains the very powerful distributed peer to peer features of collaboration of files, documents and knowledge. This tool automatically find new places in the network and also provides the public places where user can his knowledge models.

There are two types of collaboration types on designing the maps.

i) asynchronous collaboration (don’t need to be working on the maps at the same time)

ii) synchronous collaboration (two or more users are working on the maps at the same time)

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Research Paper Use of Concept Mapping Techniques and Technologies for Education and Performance Support

I have read the research paper about the Conceptual mapping techniques, the history of conceptual maps, structure of conceptual maps, usage in Educational, Business, and Governmental areas, comparison of conceptual maps with other mapping technologies and softwares or tools in which conceptual maps delevelop.

Conceptual maps are visual representaion of graph like structure that represents the knowledge consists of concepts and the relationship between them.


In the Concept Mapping process, the first step is the identification of the problem, after identification

The focus question are identifying and listing the most important or “general” concepts
that are associated with the topic, ordering the concepts from top to bottom in the
mapping field, means that the general concepts are on the top in the hierarchy and less general are at the bottom of tree. Then adding and labeling linking phrases. Once the preliminary Concept has been built, cross-links are identified and added, and a review of the map for
completeness and correctness is performed.

Conceptual maps used in Educational, Business, and Governmental areas,

In Educational areas one of the original uses of conceptual mapping is the assessment of what a learner knows. It also used to to improve affective conditions for learning, and to teach critical thinking.

In Business, and Governmental areas Concept Mapping can be used for knowledge capture – for the elicitation of expert knowledge that an organization might wish to preserve and share with others.

Concept Maps with other types of mapping systems, such as Knowledge Maps, Cognitive Maps, and Mind Maps. The Concept Map representation subsumes all the other types of graphical
representations of knowledge. The great thing with the concept mapps that it has not such limited rules or limitations like in all other mappings.

There are huge number of softwares and tools which support to build Conceptual maps (graph like structures): like Inspiration, SMART Ideas, Hypersoft Knowledge Manager,
Axon Idea Processor, LifeMap etc. There are some other softwares which is regarding to
Semantic Networking Tool and Mind Mapping Tools.

Project Milestones

In the meeting with Massimo Zancanaro (my supervisor of Conceptual Mappings) on 20th May 2008 , he gave some idea about the Concept Maps, Cooperative learning and Conceptual maps.

1. Concept Maps.

The concept maps is the graph like technique used by the teachers to allow the children to build the maps, and to understand the relationship between the maps or concepts. These maps are in tree like hierarchical structures.

2. Cooperative learning

The idea of cooperative learning is that the people work better in the group as compared to work in alone or individual. The idea was given by the teachers for students to learn better in the group activities and in assignments.

*** I have to build the application in tabletop in order to work together (collaborate) to share concepts.

3. Conceptual Matching

The conceptual matching is the technique of matching two graph like structures in order to pick out the similarities or differences of concepts between the two graphs.