The Gnowledge lab builds a “roadmap to knowledge”

Our friends at the Gnowledge Lab at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education have just published a new portal to build a “roadmap to knowledge.” The collaborative platform lets users add concepts and dependency relations between the concepts and activities. The idea is that for learners to understand a concept, they should first grasp the underlying concepts and have accumulated certain experience by performing certain activities. The goal is then to build a complete concept map.

The tool is especially interesting for teachers and students, but everyone interested is encouraged to participate in building the roadmap to knowledge. When you join you can easily add new concepts and links.

Let us, just as an example, look at the concept “mass”: its depmap (dependency map) tells us that it depends on “volume” and “weight”, and it is a prerequisite for understanding the concepts of “force” and “momentum”. So a learner will first have to learn the concepts of volume and weight before trying to understand the concept of mass. And first mass before learning the concept of force.

Of course many more concepts and relations should be added. You might want to help the Gnowledge team, especially when you know that both the platform and the knowledge are in the hands of the community, as respectively free software and free knowledge.

By the way, the gnowledge.org system to create concepts and links is based on the same as the SELF Platform: Gnowsys. So in a later stage we might see such interesting visiualisation tools added to the SELF Platform also.