Foreword
This book “Cognitive Cartography: Knowledge Maps for Research, Learning and Teaching” is another important contribution to bring to educators important studies and advances that have taken place in recent years to use concept maps and other tools to help people learn, create, and use knowledge. It extends the contributions in an earlier book by Okada, Buckingham, and Sherborne, Knowledge Cartography: mapping software tools and techniques, currently in press with Springer-Verlag.
The 21 chapters present some of the most important efforts to apply knowledge representation tools to help learners learn, to improve teacher education, and to improve research quality and productivity. The various authors provide examples of their successes in using concept mapping and other tools at the secondary and tertiary levels.
When we first developed at Cornell University the concept mapping tool in 1972 as a tool to express changes in children’s understanding of science concepts, we knew that this would become a valuable tool for educational researchers. However, we did not see at the time how the use of concept mapping and other knowledge representation tools would find dozens of new applications, including helping learners learn, helping research teams improve research productivity, capturing and archiving expert tacit and explicit knowledge, providing metacognitive instruction and metaknowledge instruction, and searching and organizing large data bases. The latter has been especially useful to the USA National Security Administration’s efforts to identify and monitor terrorist activity, although details of this work are classified. Similarly, the work I did with Procter and Gamble Corporation to accelerate research productivity, improve product marketing, and other applications remains confidential. However, some of the chapters in this book illustrate these kinds of applications.
From my perspective based on a half-century of efforts to improve education, there has never been a time when I saw the opportunities to improve education and knowledge creation that we have now. Powerful knowledge representation tools such as CmapTools created by IHMC (www.ihmc.us) and the explosive development of the World Wide Web now permit a New Model for Education for school, corporate, and governmental applications. Examples of this kind of work are included in this book.
Globalization and other factors that have created what Thomas Friedman (2005) describes as, The World is Flat, and this makes it imperative for schools, governmental agencies, and corporations to advance to new methods of learning, creating, and using knowledge. This book will contribute to these efforts, and I recommend it to any person interested in the future.
Joseph Novak, 2008