Multimedia in Concept Maps: A Design Rationale and Web-Based Application.

A concept map is a graphical representation of a person's (student's) knowledge of a domain. Concept maps have been used in educational settings for some time and many computer-based implementations of interactive concept map building tools exist. These concept mapping tools often provide for a solely prepositional, primarily textual, knowledge representation scheme and do not fully capitalize on the functionality offered by the computational medium. This paper offers psychological and pedagogical design rationales for inclusion of multimedia in computer-based concept maps. It also describes a concept mapping application named Webster whose goals include more comprehensively representing students' knowledge of a domain, providing facilities that make concept maps more pedagogically effective for students using them to learn new concepts, and in doing both, capitalizing more fully on the capabilities of the computational medium. There are a number of characteristics of Webster that attempt to achieve these desiderata but this paper focuses in particular on Webster's use of multimedia to realize these goals. (Contains 19 references.) (Author/AEF)