Proposal: Concept Mapping the Literature Landscape

Author: Miles Berry

Summary:

Concept Mapping – the literature landscape

The paper presents an overview of academic research into the use of concept mapping in school aged education, focused on presenting a number of key studies in context, and in such a way that findings be accessible to classroom practitioners. Rather than presenting a single, linear narrative of the field, brief summaries of each study are presented within a concept-map like hyperlinked web, together with ‘tag clouds’ of the important concepts covered in each study. The links within the web include the unidirectional links resulting from one paper’s reference of another, the connections between works by individual authors, and the implicit linkage through reference to particular ideas, as tagging affords. Readers may thus explore the literature landscape for themselves by following the thread of references which link studies together, or by focussing on particular concepts. More linear, ‘guided tours’ of the landscape are provided by a number of narratives which discuss particular themes within the literature, linking to the individual article summaries themselves, together with an overall introduction to the field intended to provide a starting point for those exploring this
work for the first time."

I have in mind a couple of possible ways for others to contribute, either by simply suggesting references to /important/ papers, or by writing their own (100-200 word?) summaries of the papers straight onto a wiki (somewhere) and giving a list of key words / concepts for that paper: these could be socially constructed, as I don't know enough about the field to create a taxonomy/vocabulary at this point.
From a technical perspective, I think we're looking at a wiki for the overview, and perhaps citeulike for pulling together the references, although this could be done in the wiki too. At the risk of over committing myself, it should be possible to get these set up sooner rather than later. I think there would be ways of representing the wiki content visually at some future point, but that's not an immediate requirement.

Keywords:

literature review, wiki, collaborative, concept map

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