Abstract:

The didactic presentations have a dual purpose: to support the speaker during the presentation in the classroom and support the student during the study at home. The traditional presentations consist of slides’ sequences illustrating the flow of speech and the overall logic of the presentation without directly created significant links between the concepts.

The introduction of concept maps as a teaching tool in the '70s - thanks to Novak & Gowin - has allowed us to introduce the idea of meaningful learning such significant cognitive interconnection or which creates links between prior knowledge and new concepts to be learned.
Concept maps are based, however, on a rather regular pattern of presentation and organization of information, especially from a visual standpoint.
The concepts are organized into balloons connected together by arrows that indicate verbally the conceptual correlations.

The recent development of disciplines such as Data Visualization and Info-graphics allows the introduction of new tools for knowledge-representation richer and complex than the pair node / link of the original concept maps.

Thanks to research by authors from different disciplinary contexts the world of presentations has been enriched by new conceptual tools for the management and presentation of knowledge: information architecture (Wurman), models and structures of representation of qualitative and quantitative data (Tufte) patterns of content presentation in slide-shows (Reynolds).

These conjectures becomes the basis for the representation of disciplines to build new representative models based both on the potential of concept maps and the visual vocabulary of the graphic design supported by the availability of digital tools on and off line for construction of figurative and visual output of quantitative data (histograms, pie charts etc.) and qualitative data (graphs, maps etc.).

The development of systems of meaningful representation – with a strong parallel to the Ausubel’s concept of meaningful learning – makes the teaching tools more visually and conceptually structured helping learning and memorability of complex concepts and not only of singular notions.

The paper explores the potential theoretical, methodological and digital software that introduce these new conceptual models as learning tools within the learning activities through case studies.

Keywords:

Concept maps, meaningful learning, digital learning tools, visual representation.