University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

Change and complexity are creating a need for increasing levels of literacy in science and technology. Presently, we are beginning to provide students with clear contexts in which to learn, including clearly written text, visual displays and maps, and more effective instruction. We are also beginning to give students tools that promote their own…

The current historical moment is marked by the gradual transition from a print culture to a digital new media culture, and this shift carries material effects for how education research contexts are perceived and represented. This discussion uses the concept of materiality to demonstrate how the conceptualization of inquiry through digital…

Describes a computer-based concept mapping tool that provides rich representational capabilities, including dynamic imagery (video, animated images, sound) and multiple levels of abstraction. The tool can automatically translate a concept map into an alternative representation-an outline-that contains all of the knowledge contained in a…

A concept map is a graphical representation of a person's (student's) knowledge of a domain. Concept maps have been used in educational settings for some time and many computer-based implementations of interactive concept map building tools exist. These concept mapping tools often provide for a solely prepositional, primarily textual, knowledge…

Maintains that region familiarity is an important prerequisite in the instructional use of cartograms. Cartograms are value-by-area maps that increase or decrease areas in order to illustrate various data (e.g. book reading in the western United States). Discusses necessary cognitive processes for the visualization of data. (MJP)

Reintroduces and updates the geographic profile as a visualization technique for representing and analyzing the structure of geographical information. A computer software-generated profile focuses on specific information (persons per square mile in selected cities) and represents that information spatially on a graph. (MJP)