Constructivist theory has been one of the latest catchwords in higher education circles in recent years. It not only emphasises active and collaborative learning, but also requires students and teachers to discover and construct knowledge together. This paper analyses the characteristics of environmental science and the teaching methods of Beijing Normal University, and discusses how to use con...

When faced with complex situations, it can often be hard to put into words and accurately express it appropriately. This becomes increasingly difficult when specialist expressions are required that are not used in everyday language. The problem is faced when trying to express in words to another person the wine that you just drank, or a wine that you want to drink to a waiter at a restaurant or...

In this paper we investigate a new interaction technique that enables users to capture You-Are-Here maps using their smartphone, and then manipulate the captured image in such a way that it can be used for navigation purposes. This technique utilises groups of similar You-Are-Here maps, which we call map constellations. Results from our field study, in which we tested a working prototype of our...

We propose a method to mine novel, document-specific associations between terms in a collection of unstructured documents. We believe that documents are often best described by the relationships they establish. This is also evidenced by the popularity of conceptual maps, mind maps, and other similar methodologies to organize and summarize information. Our goal is to discover term relationships ...

Affected by the factors like population, economic and geographic conditions, accommodation offerings are inherently different at different cities and characterized with their specific features. This heterogeneity is not limited to the supply-side but covers the demand-side as well. For instance, business and leisure tourists may favor different travel destinations. Therefore, the development of...

Cognitive/causal maps have been widely used as a powerful way of capturing decisionmakers’ perceptions about a problem, representing it as a causes-effects discourse. Several ways of making causal inferences from this type of model have been proposed in the Operational Research and Artificial Intelligence literatures, but none, as far as we are aware, has attempted to use a causal map structure...

We describe the slim approach for making presentations using mind maps, which is particularly useful to assist the “slide maker” while thinking about and structuring her presentations. As presentations become larger, like for teaching purposes when creating and updating a course, we believe this approach to be particularly effective, and that common tools like PowerPoint fail to provide support...

We propose a new metric to automatically evaluate the confidence that a student knows a certain concept included in his or her conceptual model. The conceptual model is defined as a simplified representation of the concepts and relationships among them that a student keeps in his or her mind about an area of knowledge. Each area of knowledge comprises several topics and each topic several conce...

Innovative teaching methods such as collaborative learning, teamwork and mind maps were introduced to a Statistics course at tertiary level and compared to traditional teaching methods. These innovative teaching strategies, which are considered generic and therefor applicable in any educational environment, proved to be successful. Collaboration and teamwork is an important factor in the develo...

This paper describes the latest accomplishments on the current research that is based on the master’s thesis “Ein System zur Erstellung taktiler Karten für blinde und sehbehinderte Menschen” (German for “A system creating tactile maps for blind and visually impaired people”) (Hänßgen, 2012). The system consists of two parts. The first part is new software especially designed and developed for c...