Software Requirement Specification

1. Functionality

2. External Interfaces

3. Performance

4. Attributes

5. Design Constraints

Compare two different conceptual maps

why compare two different conceptual maps???

Students are given some preliminary information such as a list of concepts, or an initial arrangement of concepts. This is often the case in classroom examples, where concept maps are used to assess student learning about a particular subject.
To compare different maps we counts levels of hierarchy, matches corresponding hierarchical clusters, and automatically identifies cross-links would be useful for concept map evaluation.

In comparison of two conceptual maps we…………

Evaluates the skeleton of the concept maps, asking only whether the concepts are connected to one another in the same way

Focuses on the agreement of the linking proposition used to define the relationship between each matching pair of concepts

Up to what degree the concepts, links and directionality of relations match

For teachers who want to see how their students are doing, this allows quite an efficient way to do it. As different students have different way of thinking to understand the logic of specific knowledge, the teacher can easily see her students’ progress, strengths and weaknesses and can help her in future studies.

Problem: Graph to tree conversion

I have found one algorithm which convert graphs into trees like structures:

The link of that algorithm is:

http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/content-model.html

Infact this algorithm convert "RDF graph" which is the sameone as "concept maps" to trees.

So we dont re-invent new algorithm for the conversion of graphs to trees, because the main part of my work is to build the concept maps application on the table top that students can build and collaborate with each other.

How to convert conceptual maps into trees

Problem::

From the point of view of the matching task, the biggest problem is how to convert the conceptual maps into trees for semantic matching!

Project Specfication

PROJECT SPECFICATION

Background Information

"Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.... It was not an advantageous individual here and there who did so, but the group. In human societies the individuals who are most likely to survive are those who are best enabled to do so by their group."
(Ashley Montagu)

Cooperative learning is one of the best researched of all teaching strategies. The results show that students who have opportunities to work collaboratively, learn faster and more efficiently, have greater retention, and feel more positive about the learning experience.

Joseph Novak, a Cornell University professor who developed the idea in the 1960’s about Conceptual mapping. Conceptual maps are visual representation of graph like structure that used by the teachers to allow the children represents the knowledge consists of concepts and the relationship between them. These maps are hierarchical like structures.

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.

Motivation for the Project

The motivation of this project is to facilitate the development of tabletop application that allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps which containing all necessary features of collaboration and knowledge sharing. The new system will bring all necessary functions for the students to collaboratively interact with each other on a tabletop to build concept maps

Project Goals and Scope

The goal of this project is develop a Tabletop application in “C #” and “Microsoft s wpf (Windows Presentation Foundation). The application allows a group of students or more to cooperatively develop conceptual maps on the tabletop. The developed application will provide different features to the students to create, edit, and delete concept maps on the tabletop.

How Results must be evaluated

When the application of tabletop will be ready, we will take different tests with the group of students in order to check that up to what extent they will create concept maps on tabletop.

Related Works

There are lot of research going on about the collaborative management of digital maps. Like TabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape andsize, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.The first case of study has been tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach.

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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