Knowledge mapping with Compendium in academic research and online education

This paper focuses on mapping information, ideas and arguments in virtual learning environments, as part of ongoing research into how this can contribute to distance education, open content learning communities, and distance research training. We introduce the idea of cartographic representations for learning, before describing the freely available Compendium hypermedia knowledge mapping tool developed at the UK’s Open University (OU), which provides an open architecture, information management environment supporting multiple ways to manage connections between ideas and documents. We then summarise several contexts in which it is being deployed with promising results: (1) e-PhDs: supervision and knowledge management for distance doctoral students; (2) Literature Analysis: mapping argument structures in order to identify emergent themes and cross-paper connections; (3) Online Tutoring of e-learning students, investigating a postgraduate online course at PUC-Cogeae, Brazil. We conclude by outlining how ongoing and future work is integrating knowledge mapping with replayable video conferences, and a major new investigation into knowledge mapping to support self-organising communities of learners and educators around OU Open Content