A Visualisation Design for Sharing Knowledge

This thesis proposes a general structure for knowledge sharing to represent knowledge that allows a group of users to share concept meanings and their relations and to organise information about a specific knowledge theme or context. Recently, many developments were introduced for presenting information concerning the use of visualisation techniques, including 3D interactive visualisations and virtual environments. The way a group shares information about the meanings of concepts used, defined here as structure for knowledge sharing, is considered an important issue for knowledge sharing and knowledge construction. However, visualisation potential for representing and exploring knowledge has not yet been totally explored. The study of existing practices in collaborative learning and education environments serves as an initial starting point to get insight into ways of using abstract information and how it can be of value for and between students. Research areas such as CSCL, CSCW, visualisation, and graphical knowledge representations were investigated in order to inform the research. This study has provided the main motivation for the research on how to provide knowledge sharing support for collaborative learning use. The work also presents the development and evaluation of a partial prototype to test the above ideas. Its aim is to assess how users can collaborate and take advantage of using a common structure for knowledge sharing and a visualisation design for collaborative learning support. An empirical study conducted suggests that users were able to specify structures for knowledge sharing, use the 3D interactive visualisation to explore the structure and to contribute to the enhancement of the common structure. It also shows that using a particular structure for knowledge sharing provides learning value as a tool for collaborative learning in a higher education context. The novel aspect in the thesis is the proposal of the use of a structure for knowledge sharing to render a 3D interactive visualisation and allows combining data source information with the use of integrated information. Together these facilities provide an environment for collaborative learning support. The thesis concludes by discussing how to improve current work, new directions for further work and produces a number of recommendations.