Visualising our learning

While preparing for the start of next semester (and at the same time trying to help my daughter learn basic life skills) I keep thinking how useful it would be to be able to visualise our individual learning in a way that:

  • DNA doube helixhighlights the relationships between different learning areas in our lives (perhaps using distance as a measure of interconnectedness)
  • shows the pathways of these different learning areas through time - including where we plan to go with our learning
  • superimposes learning threads of our friends or classmates.
  • allows me to zoom in and add branches or annotate like an interactive mind-map

Any ideas?

5 Responses to “Visualising our learning”


  1. 1 Leigh Blackall

    Have you seen the touch graphs? Here’s mine

  2. 2 Michael

    Thanks Leigh - I was trying to find it when I did the post, but didn’t have it in my delicious! Added now… ta!

  3. 3 David Cary

    Yes, something that could do all that would be pretty cool. Something that could do even one of those things would be nice.

    Alas, I don’t know of any.

    I do know one tool that implements part of the “interactive mind map” idea — the “Freemind” does “folding”.
    It is one step closer to your vision than a static drawing.

    The Freemind “documentation” page lists a bunch of “Alternatives to using FreeMind”.

    Do you know anything that even partially implements these other ideas?

    p.s.: I get a “Error: please enter a valid email address.”
    You might want to look at the “best practices” for email validation
    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:JavaScript:Standards_and_Best_Practices
    Please don’t make me add you to the
    “wall of shame” of sites that reject perfectly valid email addresses.

  4. 4 Michael

    David, thanks for the tips.

    I can think of some social-education tools that do aspects of kind-of learning mapping, although not visually (that I’m aware of). For eg, elgg.net allows people to tag their learning interests - but not in a way that others with similar educational interests, and I you can’t annotate your learning topics with progressive updates.

    I was just trying to keep track of all the different things my 3 yr old is learning, and then thought it’d be great to be able to visualise the different aspects and relationships of learning within an adult course that I facilitate etc.

    Guessing the email validation didn’t like the ‘ ‘ in your email address - I’ll update it to accept email addresses including ‘ ‘ as soon as I get a chance (and maybe turn it off in the meantime). Cheers

  5. 5 Alex Hayes

    Hi.

    It used to be called Touch-graph ….the one that visualised any URL. Shame it’s been dropped off the functioning web 2.0 world.

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