VISUAL UNDERSTANDING ENVIRONMENT Ranjani Saigal and Anoop Kumar Academic Technology

1. VISUAL UNDERSTANDING ENVIRONMENT Ranjani Saigal and Anoop Kumar Academic Technology Tufts University

2. Academic Technology Academic Technology (AT) at Tufts is a university-wide resource that provides consultations, collaborative partnerships, and faculty development focusing on the use of instructional technology to support teaching and research initiatives.

3. Overview • Teaching and Learning with Digital Resources – The Problem • Educational Foundations • Concept Maps in Education • VUE – The Solution • VUE – Architecture • VUE – Implementations • Fedora • Artifact • Demo • Future Direction

4. Teaching & Learning with Digital Resources – The Problem • Valuable digital resources for teaching and learning have grown exponentially over the past several years. • Custom digital libraries hold these collections of digital resources • Lack of tools that provide the flexibility and responsiveness required to support critical and creative thinking with digital resources.

5. Educational Foundations • Constructivism – Students learn best when they are actively engaged in constructing their knowledge – in structuring and restructuring information • Individual Differences – Cognitive differences among people influence their approach to learning.

6. Educational Foundations • Learning takes place by the assimilation of new concepts and prepositions into existing concept prepositional frameworks held by the learner • Meaningful learning occurs when it is relatable to the learner’s prior knowledge. • Concept maps are useful tools to bring about meaningful learning.

7. Concept Maps in Education • Tools for organizing and representing knowledge. • Concepts are semantic units of learning • Include concepts usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line between the two. • Words on the line specify the relationship between the two

8. Concept 1 Relationship Concept 2

9. Concept Mapping Tools • CMap • Smartdraw • Visio • Kmap • Inspiration

10. Concept Mapping Tools - CMAP

11. Concept Mapping Tool – Smartdraw

12. From Concept Maps to Content Maps • Linking content to concept enhances value of concept maps and transforms them into content maps. • Digital content sources: • Local Drives • World Wide Web • Remote Drives • Digital libraries

13. Teaching & Learning With Digital Resources - The Problem • Valuable digital resources for teaching and learning have grown exponentially over the past several years. • Custom digital libraries hold these collections of digital resources • Lack of tools that provide the flexibility and responsiveness required to support critical and creative thinking with digital resources.

14. VUE - A Solution • A visual environment for structuring, presenting and sharing digital information that allows faculty and students to integrate digital resources into teaching and learning • A way to access different kinds of digital resources stored in different digital repositories • Has tools for teachers and learner to navigate through these resources to support critical and creative thinking.

15. Leveraging Open Standards It leverages open and extensible development platform of OKI and FEDORA digital repository to facilitate collaborative open source development.

16. Goals for VUE • In support of teaching, provide faculty with a flexible, visual tool for semantically structuring and creating pathways through digital materials in a manner most consistent with the ideas and concepts that they must communicate to their students. • In support of active learning, provide students with a flexible tool for manipulating and extending existing instructional presentations (concept/content maps) in support of personal reflection on course topics as well as support for the creation and communication of new, personally meaningful concept/content maps. • Extend the value of FEDORA-based digital libraries and their collections by providing a flexible, visual tool for viewing and organizing digital content in pursuit of individual learning and research goals. • Leverage OKI technical standards to enable the sharing, distribution and integration of this new educational tool in educational environments and systems beyond Tufts University.

19. VUE – Architecture • Concept map components • Nodes • Links • Pathways • Resource components • Resource objects • Data sources • Auxiliary components • Panels • Drawing tools • Menus • Tool bars

20. Resource Interface • Resource Interface • getTitle • getSpec • getPreview • getProperties • getExtension • displayContent MapResource (implements all the above methods for VUE map) AssetResource get/setAsset (oki.dr.Asset) CabinetResource (oki.filing.Cabinet)

21. Data Source Interface • DataSource Interface • getId • getDisplayName • getAddress • getPublishMode • isAutoConnect VueDataSource (implements all the above methods for VUE ) FedoraDataSource (connect to Fedora) GoogleDataSource (Conduct google search) Local/Remote DataSource (oki implementations) artifact.DataSource (connect to artifact repository)

22. VUE Implementations • Fedora • Digital Repository Architecture • Artifact • Art History database at Tufts

23. VUE Implementation - Fedora OKI Bridge • Fedora Object Model • OKI.DR API • OKI.DR asset model • Fedora – OKI bridge

24. Fedora Object Model

25. OKI.DR API

26. OKI.DR Asset Model

27. Fedora OKI Bridge

28. VUE Implementations - Artifact • ASP, MS SQL Based web application to organize art history contents • Developed XML object generator for Artifact • Design and develop resource and data source classes in VUE to work with Artifact object model

29. Future Direction • Interface for any datasource • Federated search • Front end to course management tools • User interfaces to view complex maps • Semantic zoom • Fish eye view • 3- dimensional views

30. Web-site • http://vue.tccs.tufts.edu/