de do do do, de da da da

Sting believes metaphor is everything to songwriting: "…without a central metaphor, you ain't got nothing." Yvonne Aburrow, Liz Falconer and Manuel Frutos-Perez have been thinking about the Metaphor and meaning in e-learning.

In designing metaphors for e-learning we have borrowed heavily from the book and from the classroom. This is not suprising given the observation that, in the first stages of technology adoption, new technology is used to emulate the old. However, in an age when information resources are no longer scarce the relevancy of these metaphors must be questioned.

Aburrow et al. argue that maps provide a more relevant metaphor for navigating information spaces. They are proving their concept at the Research Observatory, a research resource that uses a star map as the metaphor for navigation, grouping related resources into constellations.

Coming back to Earth for a moment, my prefered navigational aid is the concept map—I've blogged about this before, so forgive my indulgence. Concept maps have several benefits for learning: they promote meaningful learning through the recognition of prior knowledge and make explicit, conceptual inter-relationships, which assist in the identification of misconceptions. Two tools take advantage of these benefits:

1. Tuft University's VUE project allows teachers and learners to visually organise content, whether stored locally or within FEDORA-based digital repositories. Learners can create their own pathways through the content, or explore paths predefined by their teachers. The VUE project team provide cases which outline some exciting possible uses.


2. CmapTools is another free Java-based concept mapping application with similar functionality to VUE. Unlike VUE, CmapTools cannot delve inside digital repositories, however significantly CmapTools' client-server architecture supports network-based collaborative development of maps.

Rather disappointingly concept maps created in either application are not interoperable. VUE will bundle content and map together, exporting them as an IMS Content Package; CmapTools will export maps as a Topic Map.

Update: Sting has also provided the inspiration for Brian Alger to eloquently question "What have we learned from history?" Sting's metaphor in this case is written history as a catalogue of crime.