Concept&Go
Concept&Go is a web annotation tool aimed at concept mapping. A concept map is a diagram or graphical tool that visually represents relationships between concepts and ideas. Its simplicity is both its strength and weakness. Their graphical appeal makes concept maps very popular among academics and practitioners alike to account for the early stages of domain analysis. Indeed, concept mapping can be a powerful tool in the world of education, helping students to perform at higher cognitive levels and helping teachers to explain complicated subjects and assess student understanding. Likewise, Concept mapping is a group process, making it an ideal activity for teams or groups of stakeholders, and it is especially when solving problems, whether they be in marketing, new product design, or administration. These diagrams are excellent storytellers, helping in the ideation and inspiration phases. When it comes time for implementation, concept maps help with instruction, documentation, and communication.
Concept Mapping is based on the constructivist approach to learning, which highlights the active role played by learners in constructing and developing knowledge and extracting meanings from their prior knowledge, experiences, and beliefs. Concept mapping is also often linked to Ausubel’s assimilation theory of meaningful learning. Ausubel emphasized the centrality of relating concepts within a cognitive structure in learning and thinking processes. The cognitive structure pertains to the learner’s organization and clarity of knowledge in a particular topic. In a process termed assimilation, he pointed to learners’ proclivity to relate novel ideas to existing cognitive structures so as to reduce the meaning of the novel idea to that of the established one. Learners construct knowledge meaningfully when they organize knowledge hierarchically from general to specific and use analysis and synthesis techniques to sort and relate concepts. At this point, it should be noted, that the term 'learners' should not be mapped exclusively to students but to any person who faces a learning experience. Requirement concept mappers, analysts, and decision-takers can be labeled as 'learners' insofar as they face an uncharted scenario with the assistance of their prior experiences. The bottom line is that Concept Mapping is a learning approach.
Learning is defined as "the transformative process of taking in new information that—when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced—changes what we know and builds on what we do". If 'new information' is acquired through reading and 'what is already known is represented through a concept map, then concept mapping as a learning effort can be regarded as the interplay of reading, discussing and diagramming concept maps. From this perspective, concept mapping goes beyond concept maps to integrate 'reading' and 'discussing'. Despite this obvious fact, most support for concept mapping stops at diagramming concept maps, leaving learners unassisted when it comes to tracking the readings and discussions behind. For generating concept maps, a variety of software exists, e.g. Inspiration, Hozo, CmapTools, Protégé, or Sero. Utilizing such software provides significant support in creating, manipulating, storing, and reusing concept maps. Yet, in ill-structured, wicked problems where a formal representation does not exist yet, the confidence on a concept map is that of the process that generates it.
One of the main premises of this work is that in ill-structured domains, the confidence of concept maps can be leveraged by tracing concepts back to the readings/discussions that ground these concepts. Readings and discussions often leave traces in terms of annotations. Annotating includes highlighting text, adding comments, or classifying the annotated readings. Different studies consider annotation to be a common practice among both academics and practitioners. Here annotations help to bridge the gap between the documentation realm and the conceptual realm.
The main hypothesis is that concept mapping can be rephrased as an annotation activity. Rather than leaving learners alone in the process of drawing maps out of their recalls, annotations provide the digital trace to ground the concept mapping. The benefits are twofold. First, annotations provide physical support for the reading material. If the annotation process takes place on the web, the annotation becomes `web annotation', and therefore, a web resource that is addressable by an URL. Second, annotations provide the link between the reading material and the concept map, so that stakeholders can have a deeper insight into concept mappers' misconception that does not stop at the concept map but the ground reading that root the misconception.
Concept&Go is a web annotation tool aimed at concept mapping. A concept map is a diagram or graphical tool that visually represents relationships between concepts and ideas. When the reading material (PDF or Web content) is opened in a browser tab, Concept&Go can be activated with a single click. This causes a sidebar to show up on the left part of the document. This sidebar contains the concepts collected so far (see Fig. 2.1).
Compared with other Web tools (e.g., Diigo), Concept&Go does not stop at highlighting quotes from text paragraphs but elaborates on the so-gathered quotes to come up with concepts and relationships. From this perspective, Concept&Go is not stand-alone but requires two companions: Hypothes.is as the annotations’ persistent storage, and CmapCloud (the cloud service of CmapTools) to depict the developed concept map with its annotations.
The first step to start using Concept&Go is to install it from the Chrome Web Store. You can search the web extension by its name in the Chrome Web Store or access it from this link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/conceptgo/oacbaceaekfkgeegdfknnhnjdghaokpa?hl=es
SETTING UP CONCEPT&GO
Access to local files
Once you have installed Concept&Go, you will find the web extension icon in the right part at the top of the toolbar. We recommend pining it in the toolbar to facilitate the use of the tool.
The next step is to prepare the setup to prepare the application before using it. First, in the “Manage extension” menu you have to activate the permission to allow access to local files.
In order to do that, you have to activate the “Allow access to file URLs” option.
Hypothes.is and Cmap cloud user configuration.
The next step is to configure your Hypothes.is and CmapCloud accounts to be able to annotate and export your concepts and relationships. In this case, you have to open the “Options” menu.
In the following page, first, you have to Log in to your Hypothes.is account and authorize access to it. Then, in the next box, you have to provide the credentials to set up your Cmap Cloud account and click the “Validate account” button.
Once both configurations have been properly set up, the page will show you that you are logged in to both services.
You can change your credentials whenever you like in the same menu by clicking the “Log out” and “Change user credentials” options.
Once completed the setup, you are ready to enjoy Concept&Go. See the user manual to learn how to use it.
In order to use Concept&Go you will need the following requirements.
First of all, Concept&Go by itself does not support all the functionality required. It works together with two other applications for completing the whole concept map assessment.
On the one hand, Hypothes.is is used as persistent storage to allow users to save and retrieve created annotations when necessary. It is a widely-used annotation server that requires users to have an account in Hypothes.is to be able to store annotations there. If you are not registered in Hypothes.is, you will need to create an account at the following link: https://web.hypothes.is/
On the other hand, if Concept&Go also uses CmapCloud (the cloud service of CmapTools) to depict the concepts and relationships gathered during the map construction to visualize them as a concept map with the annotations that support the trace of the map element. In this case you will need a CmapCloud account that can be created in the following link: https://cmapcloud.ihmc.us/login.html
The map construction is carried out with Concept&Go, which allows to annotate the content of the different types of resources. Then, the results are exported to Cmap Cloud to visualize and edit them in a map editor.
A concept map assessment is composed of two parts: (a) a concept mapping task, and (b) concept map evaluation. The concept mapping task is defined by those procedures that result in the construction of a concept map representing a student's knowledge. When Concept&Go web browser extension is activated, this tool extends and tailors the web browser interface with the aim of providing additional functionality over the reading resource that must be read by the student. Concept&Go is designed for following the Concept Map Construction Method defined by Novak & Gowin. As it is stated in the construction process, the first step is to define the focus question or topic of the new concept map.
Create the concept map and set the focus question
If it is the first time that you use Concept&Go, automatically the tool will ask you about the name of the new concept map when you activate it in a browser tab. On the other hand, if you have already used Concept&Go, you can create a new concept map clicking in the arrow displayed next to the concept map name and selecting the option of “Create concept map”.
Figure. UI for establishing the focus question & the Sidebar after creating the concept map's codebook.
Once the topic is defined, the topic concept is established as the root node of the concept map and it will be displayed as a button in the sidebar that will appear on the right side of the web browser. This sidebar contains the concepts in the form of buttons and also the required tools for elaborating the concept map: a button for creating concepts and another for creating relationships.
Identify concepts
The next step is to identify and list the most important concepts. When the student identifies a new possible concept during the reading process, he/she has to select the concept in the document she/he reads to understand the problem domain and click the create new concept button. Once the concept is created, an annotation is created over the selected text and also a new button is added in the sidebar in order to annotate more evidence of the concept.
Figure. Annotations over the reading material that support the extracted concepts.
Create relationships
The next step is to create the relationships between concepts. Relationships are made up of two concepts that are linked by a linking word. As well as with concepts, users can find concept-link-concept triples propositions in reading materials. These relationships can be found written explicitly, implicitly or in a table form. Therefore, the user has to be able to capture the relationship by annotating the linking word in the same way as with concepts. To complete a relationship it is necessary to provide the "from" and "to" concepts together with the lin
king word.
Figure. Creation of a relationship with Concept&Go.
Export to Cmap Cloud
After capturing the map elements that are relevant for the student, the student has to export the annotated content as a concept map to review the result. Concept&Go provides the option to export a concept map and the created annotations to a CmapCloud account. For that, the student has to provide his/her CmapCloud user credentials to associate the tool with the CmapCloud account. Once the association is done, students are able to export the concept map. You can export the concept map by two ways. If you click the first option of the toolset, you can download all the files of the concept map and upload them then manually to your CmapTools. Instead, if you select the second button all the files (except the one on the map (.cxl)) are exported automatically to the Cmap Cloud account. The cxl file is downloaded in the browser and has to be uploaded manually in the corresponding folder of Cmap Cloud. For both options, you have the chance to export the concept map with the Concept&Go generated URL or with the Hypothes.is generated ones.
The concept map is exported in a folder that is automatically generated in the CmapCloud home folder with the name of the concept map and its version. The folder contains the file that represents the concept map and the web annotation resources (URLs) that are referenced within the concept map.
Figure. Resources exported from Concept&Go to Cmap Cloud & Depicted Concept map. The concept mapping task is finished with the revision of the concept map, it consists of reorganizing the map elements and reviewing the map content before sharing it with the instructor or teacher.
Go back to the annotation space
By supporting annotations as URLs rather than mere text, it is possible to navigate back to the reading material. The next figure shows the case for ‘organisms’. Concepts are now displayed together with their annotation counterparts. Click on the annotation icon (), for opening the annotations in subsequent browser tabs (see Fig. 2.3). Students can then go back to the reading sources where the annotation appears, check back their annotations, update as appropriate, and when convenient, move back to see the whole picture again in CmapCloud.
