Schools in Florida adopt concept mapping

An interesting article in MIT's Technology Review describes how some schools are starting to use Cmaps -- a tool to help students become knowledge constructers rather than  information consumers.  The tool teaches the students to link knowledge and describe inductively, i.e. top-down.   Could Norwegian schools try this please?

Cmaps can be used to assess student knowledge, encourage thinking and problem solving instead of rote learning, organize information for writing projects and help teachers write new curricula.

"We need to move education from a memorizing system and repetitive system to a dynamic system," said Gaspar Tarte, who is spearheading education reform in Panama as the country's secretary of governmental innovation. "Concept maps was the best tool that we found."

A Cmap is a series of concepts, usually nouns, linked by phrases or verbs. Alberto Canas, the institute's associate director and leading Cmap researcher, cites a simple Cmap on birds as an example.

One of several lines radiating from the main concept -- "birds" -- is labeled "have" and links it to such attributes as "beaks," "hollow bones" and "feathers." Another line is labeled "lays" and connects "birds" with "eggs."

"It's really saying 'birds lay eggs' -- that's a proposition -- 'birds have beaks,' 'birds have hollow bones,"' Canas said. "So it's knowledge expressed as propositions."

The software can be downloaded for free at http://cmap.ihmc.us/

Other commercial mind mapping programs:

• Mindmanager from Mindjet.  Great for mindmapping, and can export map to Powerpoint, Word, Excel (requires extra plug-in) and can also import to map from Word and Powerpoint. 
• DecisionPro (cost about $500 for a licence) - great for business modelling.
• Inspiration  - good for process descriptions.