VISUAL UNDERSTANDING ENVIRONMENT

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 learners prior knowledge.
• Concept maps are useful tools to bring about
  meaningful learning.

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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

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Concept 1
Relationship
Concept 2
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Concept Mapping Tools

• CMap
• Smartdraw
• Visio
• Kmap
• Inspiration

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Concept Mapping Tools - CMAP
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Concept Mapping Tool Smartdraw
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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

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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.

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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.

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

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VUE Architecture

• Concept map components
• Nodes
• Links
• Pathways
• Resource components
• Resource objects
• Data sources
• Auxiliary components
• Panels
• Drawing tools
• Menus
• Tool bars

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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)
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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)
artifact.DataSource (connect to artifact
repository)
Local/Remote DataSource (oki implementations)
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VUE Implementations

• Fedora
• Digital Repository Architecture
• Artifact
• Art History database at Tufts

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VUE Implementation - Fedora OKI Bridge

• Fedora Object Model
• OKI.DR API
• OKI.DR asset model
• Fedora OKI bridge

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Fedora Object Model
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OKI.DR API
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OKI.DR Asset Model
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Fedora OKI Bridge
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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

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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

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Web-site

• http//vue.tccs.tufts.edu/

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