Ideaphora Insights

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

In previous posts, we’ve explored a variety of theories and educational approaches, and as I’ve written, opportunities to reflect on my own teaching practice have arisen. When I look back over the years (I started teaching in 1980!), I realize that one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned came from one of my dissertation advisors, the great Donald Graves. Whether in class, participating in a research project or just living his life, Don reminded us that teachers must be practitioners of the skills we teach, and show our students how important reading, writing and critical thinking are to our own lives. We had to make our own learning and discovery visible to them, not just “preach” a curriculum. I teach writing, and it has made a huge difference for me to write with my students, allowing them to watch me struggle and think and find my way to a meaning I didn’t even know was there. 

As we’ve seen, the Ideaphora knowledge mapping environment offers a powerful way for students to work through their thinking, decode text and, perhaps most importantly, find connections between ideas to trigger new insights. But what about us sharing our own discovery and thinking with our students? Ideaphora also makes it easy for us to include students in the journey as we make our own inroads to learning.

As a participant in GSVlabs, a community of carefully selected startups, I had the opportunity to attend the ASU+GSV Summit earlier this week. The conference, designed for ed tech business leaders, startups and investors, featured a diverse range for speakers, including celebrities, authors, tech icons, nonprofit leaders and government officials.

One of the major themes stressed by speakers, Bill Gates and Tom VanderArk among them, was personalized learning—what it is and isn’t, and the aids and obstacles to implementation. VanderArk noted that while the technological capabilities now exist to fully realize personalized learning, it’s not implemented in all schools. Gates also stated that personalized learning is the future of education, but must scale up. Progress toward personalized learning varies widely due to a variety of factors such as insufficient infrastructure and funding.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

Recently on this blog, we’ve been exploring an important brain function – visual learning – and the theories that suggest ways of helping students acquire associated learning strategies. Dual coding theory tells us that information that is encoded both visually and verbally is retained longer and in more complexity than mere words alone. Cognitive load theory demonstrates how information that is linked together through shared associations can enter long term memory as a single chunk, rather than bit by bit, making the learning process more efficient. This week, we’ll add another theory to our series about how learning takes place: constructivism. 

Teachers and students can now take advantage of a broader range of open education resources in Ideaphora using PDFs and images. Ideaphora continually rolls out new features and enhancements based on our product road map and feedback from our users. Our goal is to enable teachers and students to use any digital content as source material and multimedia resources for their knowledge maps to provide a more enriching, visual, flexible, and meaningful learning experience. However, to ensure the most accurate and appropriate keywords are generated for the best possible learning experience, we must address different types of resources in various stages to adapt our semantic analysis engines to how best to work with them. Watch out for more coming soon!

This week we've enabled our technologies to deconstruct uploaded PDFs into relevant concepts that are automatically presented as keywords for users to drag and drop into their knowledge maps. We've also provided a way for users to easily grab images from resources already provided in Ideaphora, including PDFs and Wikipedia articles, as well as by simply copying and pasting images from other online sources, into their maps. 

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

Why do educators make such a big deal about recognizing patterns of information and organizing facts? These skills are necessary to developing expertise. Expert knowledge goes beyond mere recall of facts to the ability to connect new information to old and create new understandings. John Bransford, an educational psychologist whose findings have centered on these ideas, has gone so far as to say, "Helping students to organize their knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself, since knowledge organization is likely to affect students’ intellectual performance." Focusing on patterns of information (rather than just discrete facts) is also important because these patterns are visual in nature and easily recalled.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

In an earlier post, we explored the importance of dual coding in learning and retention. In short, when information is encoded in the brain both visually and verbally (that is, in the kinds of maps we create using Ideaphora) learning is enhanced. Dual coding facilitates making connections, understanding relationships, and recalling related details. Related to dual coding theory is John Sweller’s (1994) “cognitive load” theory. Sweller states that information may only be stored in long-term memory after first being attended to, and processed by, working memory.

Our beta testers and classroom pilots have shared amazing feedback with us over the past few months on what they see as the greatest benefits and features in Ideaphora, as well as what they'd like to see improved. While we started Ideaphora with a roadmap in mind for the product, the ongoing feedback and relationships we have with our users are paramount to our continued success and ensure our knowledge mapping environment evolves with the needs of educators and students at every level. We heard from them that they wanted greater flexibility and customization built into our platform. Today we're unveiling three new features that incorporate their ideas. 

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

In my previous post, I explained that reading depends on three cueing systems. As students create knowledge maps of the text they encounter, they not only break down meaning, but also encode it in their memories using all three cueing systems. There's more, though. Ideaphora's visual/verbal mapping environment helps learners tap into the power of dual coding, a cognitive theory proposed by Alan Paivio. Let me illustrate.

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.

It’s become a truism in education that every teacher is a teacher of reading. Sadly, that sentiment is more wishful thinking than it is a reality. While most teachers recognize that their students need support as they encounter increasingly difficult texts across the curriculum, very few of us have had intensive instruction in reading pedagogy.