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The benefits of using the CGS method of concept mapping
A conceptual graph structure, or CGS, is a mental model which can present macro or micro views. A CGS makes information explicit and clear by organizing concepts and procedures. This leads to cognitive breakthroughs, discoveries and innovation. Implicit relationships are revealed.
Types of CGS substructures and how they are built
There are four kinds of conceptual graph substructures, which correspond to four types of knowledge: causal network, goal hierarchy, taxonomy, or spatial relationships.
Within each type of substructure, there are a group of “legal” combinations of nodes and arcs. This grammar is inherently applicable to human endeavors since it is based on the cognitive psychology and story comprehension research by Arthur Graesser.
With spatial relations, the easiest one to remember, concept nodes are connected to other concept nodes, by means of any type of spatial relations arc.
Taxonomies use five types of connectors to connect concepts, events, states, goals and goal-actions.
Causal network and goal hierarchy substructures are more complicated, and that’s why I’ve provided this cheat sheet of how to “legally” connect nodes to arcs:
Download PDF file of legal node/arc combinations when making conceptual graph structures
Other posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures
http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/28/conceptual-graph-structures-part-2/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/04/conceptual-graph-structures-visio-stencil-download/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
You can jumpstart Agile IxD processes with concept graphing
As an Agile interaction designer, you need to be able to quickly represent problems.
Using the lightweight concept graphing approach I described in yesterday’s post on Concept Graphing, you can rapidly make mental models. This gives Agile teams a metacognitive scaffolding for user-centric solution design.
Semantic relationships and built-in grammar make Conceptual Graph Structures unique. Nodes and arcs can only be connected in “legal” ways, an approach derived from cognitive task analysis and research in story telling.
As I described yesterday, six types of agency can be linked via eighteen interaction types to indicate relationships (e.g. “event” and “goal” connect via an “initiates” arc). Workflows, taxonomies, domains, goal hierarchies, causal relationships, and more are built by simply snapping arcs to nodes.
At a high level, understand what you’re going to build
You can use the process of building revisits requirements throughout the lifecycle of a project.
It’s not a quick and easy, down and dirty approach. There is rigor to it, a formal process. It requires research with end-users, and analysis using cognitive tools that have to be learned. However, it is collaborative, and it works.
Download a presentation on how concept graphing fits into an overall requirements elicitation process. I delivered this presentation with colleague Scott Confer at the Information Architecture Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, and then again in Barcelona at the EuroIA 2008
Other posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures
http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/04/conceptual-graph-structures-visio-stencil-download/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
A section of a Conceptual Graph Structure, showing grammar
It’s not easy to figure out how real live people and learning systems interact.
A big challenge is that the human context is generally unstructured and dynamic.
Nonetheless, people tend to interact with each other, and with non-human systems, in ways that can be mapped with amazing precision, using a simple syntactical approaach.
The act of making these maps is sometimes referred to as cognitive task analysis.
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed a formal approach to cognitive task analysis, which she described as the building of Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS). CGSs are semantic networks with specific syntax, unlike the many varieties of concept maps which are out there, which don’t have a syntax. CGSs are comprised of nodes, connected by arcs only in certain “legal” ways. Think of the nodes as nouns and the arcs as verbs. I’ve shown a snippet of a CGS, above.
Why build a Conceptual Graph Structure?
Generally, you’ll use this cognitive tool at the beginning of a new program or project, to tease out requirements or acceptance criteria. I like using Conceptual Graph Structures to build mental models, because this method is very helpful in helping me tease out interactive relationships between agents, which I might otherwise overlook using the armchair philosopher method of thinking. You can use the CGS approach to analyze a variety of source material:
- documents,
- structured and unstructured interviews
- video recordings of usability tests
- etc., etc.
Here’s your reference material for understanding the six types of nodes:
Conceptual graph structure nodes
Download CGS node reference as a PDF file
There are six kinds of nodes. The nodes can be simple concepts, but they also can be other places and ways of being in space-time and mental space, such as goals, actions, events, states and styles.
Each node is a graphical representations of one piece of declarative knowledge. Declarative knowledge, or propositional knowledge, is expressed in sentences that declare and propose facts about a topic. For example, I am not awake. The coffee is hot. I am awake.
This is different from procedural knowledge, which is a statement of how a goal is reached, or how best to perform a task. For example, researching a trip to Spain, or making coffee are procedural types of knowledge.
A goal node indicates a circumstance, situation, state of affairs, or event desired by a person or an agent (such as a software application). It does not indicate how the goal is accomplished. For example, “stay awake.”
A goal-action node indicates either actions performed by the person or agent to attain a goal, or a mix of both goals and activities of a person or agent, toward a goal. For example, “make coffee”
An event node indicates a transition between one stable state and another stable state. For example, “coffee brews”
A concept node indicates a single entity, idea, or construct, with a single name, which can be a word or phrase. For example, “stimulating drink”
A state node indicates a relatively stable situation, circumstance, manner or condition of being. For example, “hot coffee ready”
A style node indicates a quality of a goal-action, such as duration or speed, or an instrumentality of a goal-action. For example, “home-brewed”
Now, here’s the cheat sheat on arcs:
Conceptual Graph Structure Arcs
Download CGS arc reference as a PDF file
There are 18 types of arcs, each with a specific meaning: reason, means, before, during, after, initiates, has consequences, refers-to, and, or, manner, is-a, equivalent-to, has-instance-of, has-property, has part, implies, and spatial relations.
These arcs are drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. As I mentioned above, Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. These guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.
Other posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures
http://onemind.com/2010/01/28/conceptual-graph-structures-part-2/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/04/conceptual-graph-structures-visio-stencil-download/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
A few weeks ago I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, outlining some of my thoughts on the topic, What is Learning?
Here is a wrap-up of people who’ve influenced the development of my learning theory of Relationalism.
- Lev Vygotsky described how people use a semiotic process (language and sign systems) to mediate (external) social relationships into (internal) psychological functions. He also had quite a bit to say about the role of play in learning.
- Benjamin Lee Whorf described the relationship between language and the rest of the culture of the society which uses the language, in his volume, Language, thought and reality
- James Zull, professor of biology and biochemistry at Case Western Reserve, in his book, The Art of Changing the Brain describes how knowledge is situated in growing, evolving network configurations in the brain. Those neural configurations are activated in the future when presented with the same types of experiences, and apparently, they reconfigure and grow some more.
- Ted Panitz, for example, suggests that learners create knowledge as they collaboratively and cooperatively work to understand their experiences in nature, in society and culture, growing their own meanings.
- In his theory of connectivism, George Siemens situates learning in the creation of network connections. He says, “Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.”
- Howard Gardner describes a cognitive architecture of multiple intelligences.
- Cognition itself is now being seen by some as distributed, as described, for example, in James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of the Crowd. These multiple intelligences belong not just to the person, but to the person’s community.
- Paivi Hakkinen and Sanna Jarvela have found that social negotiation of meaning in an online forum is dependent on the presence of multiple articulated viewpoints, and may be tied in part to the design of the learning activity
- Peter Checkland‘s soft systems inquiry focuses strongly on agents and agency.
- Terry Anderson has described social learning in terms of user interfaces and technologies for distance learning and online learning. These technologies live on the Internet, World Wide Web and private networks, and are accessed through personal computers and mobile devices.
- Jon Dron has described how increasingly complex online user interfaces provide a venue in which individuals can socially construct knowledge, from the bottom up. If the software is well designed, the interactions are organic, self-organizing, evolutionary and stigmergic. Learning experience designers can embed in the user interface the kind of control over the learning trajectory that a teacher role would normally take. Learners can choose whether to control their learning or to delegate that control to the group. In principle, then, social learning appears to offer the best of both worlds, assisting dependent learners through the provision of structure yet enabling autonomy at any point.
You’re tasked with architecting or designing the user experience for a new project.
But what do you do if you don’t have a good set of requirements or acceptance criteria? You can work from raw interview notes, whiteboard sketches and assumptions, and draw a Rich Picture.
Drawing a Rich Picture is a way to find out about any problem situation and express it through cartoon-like diagrams which are a preliminary mental model of the situation. The mnemonic “COW TEA” is used to help people remember the elements of the Rich Picture: customers, actors, transformation, worldview, owner, and environment. The Rich Picture is typically drawn before the analysis phase.
After you’ve drawn your Rich Picture, you can go on to engage in more research and other cognitive calisthenics, in order to create more robust mental models.
Below is an example of a hand-drawn Rich Picture, showing COW TEA elements for the process of making coffee!
The Rich Picture depicts things like:
- the structure of user interactions
- the functions of the new feature and how they integrate with existing functions
- basic elements of the process flow
- environmental factors, such a legal, ethical or economic considerations
- “hard” or “soft” information relevant to the project
- types of requirements that will have to be developed
- primary tasks involved in understanding each requirement type.
After you’ve drawn a Rich Picture, you will be ready to write a short (10-word) summary: “We are building a system to transform X into Y.”
Peter Checkland introduced the concept of the Rich Picture in 1981 in his book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, the textbook on his soft systems approach to creating solutions to human problems. Checkland’s examples are all hand-drawn. But what if you want to revise your drawing? Share it with others? So sometimes I use Visio or Omnigraffle to draw my Rich Picture. Below is an example of a more complex Rich Picture which I drew a few years ago, for a project to integrate a third party event and meeting registration site with a web site used by corporations for managed business travel.
Joanna Wiebe speaking at the Information Architecture Summit, 2007, Las Vegas, on UX design tools and processes
In recent elearning forums (elearn magazine’s predictions for 2010, and eLearning Guild discussion about learning design on LinkedIn, for example) there has been much talk about learning experience design. One of my favorite comments is from Jonathon Levy that “I’ve been a broken record on the subject of user-centricity for the past 10 years, but in 2010 the tectonic plates are finally beginning to move. The intelligence of the users—individually and collectively—trumps the intelligence of the designer. Online learning will become much more adaptive and collaborative, more dynamic and less static in design, leveraging and activating the collective intellectual capital of the organization. Semantic technologies, taxonomies and ontologies will become critically important as filters for user-directed learning that bends time and space, allowing the learner to assemble needed knowledge, data, tools and ideas in real time. “Expertise” will extend beyond the individual to the group, from something one has, to something one uses. This shift impacts the design of online solutions more than any time in the past.” This sort of hints at the (very challenging) design of that beast which Stephen Downes and others call Personal Learning Environments (PLE).
From reading about one hundred comments about instructional design/learning experience design in the past couple of weeks, I deduce that there is not a clear understanding of the scope of cognitive tools and processes that are at our disposal. So I thought I’d offer a quick outline that merges some UX tools that we can use in designing user interfaces and entire systems for truly learner-centric learning, with some pedagogical tools and processes.
This outline below is drawn from the guides, tools, templates and checklists I personally use in web site and applications design, in my position as an information architect at a public international e-commerce company, my studies at Athabasca University’s Center for Distance Education (CDE), where I obtained my degree in distance education, and my experience as an instructional designer in both the corporate and academic worlds. This list is not comprehensive, but it touches almost everything I’ve ever used.
Other areas which I haven’t addressed specifically in this list include methodologies for designing the best technological solutions, for managing ethical considerations, and for ensuring that business and institutional goals are met.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE DESIGN COGNITIVE TOOLS AND PROCESSES
Project Management
- Project start checklist
- LxD practitioner’s task timeline
- Folder naming structure
Research and analysis
- Research plan
- User research and reports (surveys, focus groups, ethnographic field research, statistical data, etc.)
- Usability testing and reports
- Competitive analysis and reports
- Heuristic evaluation and reports
- Task analysis and reports
- Card sorting
- Gap analysis and reports
- Persona development
- User stories/scenarios
- Process flows
- Concept graphing for user goal heirarchies
- Concept graphing for causal networks in agent interactions
- Taxonomy development
- Rich Picture
- Design pattern development
Solution Exploration
- Brainstorming
- Early concepting
- Content inventory
- Content outline
- Course measurement plan
- Lesson plans
- Curriculum plans
- Site maps
- Low fidelity concepts
- Concept wireframes
- Functional descriptions
Solution Definition
- High fidelity concepts
- High fidelity prototypes
At work, we are evolving our Agile development process so that the stories we write, backlog, and iterate are informed by carefully crafted personas. This helps us focus on the types of people who use our site and products, and the types of people internally and externally who will use our knowledge management and training. Our information architecture department, of which I am a member, will own the personas.
In the world of experience design, a persona is a mental model, or archetype, of a class or type of user. It’s a one-page psychological profile of an imaginary person who represents a distinct set of goals and the behavior patterns that may cascade from those goals. A persona is methodically crafted from a synthesis of rigorous research.
I’ve been thinking about how to best roll out our new personas, so that folks will really get to know them in a way that brings the personas to life.
One idea I had is to develop Facebook pages for the personas. The personas would friend everyone in our organization. Then, each day, I’d add news for each persona. I would add photos over time. But I have a few doubts about my idea.
- Is there an ethical issue in creating a Facebook page for a person who isn’t real?
- Is there a problem with confidentiality of the information, in that it would be too easy for another company to access our personas?
- How would our people react to the idea? Would they think it was fun and useful?
Limestone one-room Kansas schoolhouse, built May 1882
Yesterday, Matthew Moore of Innotecture, sparked a lively discussion on the eLearning Guild discussion board on LinkedIn.
“Do we need to move from instructional design to experience design?” he asked.
Matthew highlighted some gaps in common approaches to elearning design, such as:
- insufficient user research
- product-oriented, rather than managing a learning experience
- a focus on test scores, subjective ratings or completion rates, rather than meaningful metrics
Others jumped into the discussion with wide-ranging comments, from renaming the discipline currently called “instructional design” (I suggest Learning Experience Design — LxD ), to borrowing liberally from other disciplines to hone our craft, which I also endorse.
I’ve been on a quest to find others who care as much as I do about a designed approach to learning experiences. I’ve been looking for this kind of dialogue ever since I graduated from the Center for Distance Education at Athabasca University last April. I knew there were some people who share this orientation. Recently, for example, I discovered that a relative of mine by marriage, Ken Badley, of George Fox University, shared my interest in applying the patterns approach of Christopher Alexander to the design of learning experiences. So I’ve been looking for others, and when I read all the responses to Matthew’s post, I was excited. Yes, I have a community!
So I am wondering if you can tell me if we are all just missionaries, or if there there currently any organizations, in academia, the corporate world, or anywhere, where:
- practioners of LxD employ rigorous research and analytical methodologies to deeply understand learners?
- LxD is a collaborative, Agile process?
- learner and organizational outcomes are measured meaningfully?
- those measurements are incorporated into future iterations of the learning experience design?
Dale Chihuly sculpture, Milwaukee Art Museum
My own theory of learning is called relationalism.
Relationalism draws a picture of learning as simultaneously personal and social. People grow neural configurations, and groups evolve their networks, when they attend to and interact with human and non-human agents, in complex socio-cultural and environmental contexts.
This is a bit like the constructivists. Ted Panitz, for example, suggests that learners create knowledge as they collaboratively and cooperatively work to understand their experiences in nature, in society and culture, growing their own meanings.
Relationalism is similar to the learning theory of connectivism, which situates learning in the creation of network connections. I am not even going to try to summarize the tenets of connectivism here, except to retiterate George Siemens‘ statement that “Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.”
Relationalism extends connectivism by:
- being more rigorous in the definition of connections, through the development of a taxonomy of learning interactions between agents in a learning network
- emphasizing the radical responsibility of learners for their own learning
- understanding that learners are part of larger groups which exhibit different levels of engagement between agents. These larger groups are variously described as communities of inquiry, learning communities , community of learners, classroom community, communities of practice, group, network and collective.
- understanding that a dependency for learning is the creation of a safe container, to create a trustworthy environment, where engaged people feel free to generate shared narrative, and play with new ideas and ways of being.
- understanding that nothing but sheer love drives a kid to interact with the same toy over and over again. This behavior was well described by C. J. Jung, who said, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
