Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/Cohere

Motivation

Web2.0 technologies are increasingly providing learners with environments where they can learn together in new informal ways. These technologies build on the basic concept that learners need to learn socially, online, by talking and discussing with each other, and that this dialogue can help them to express their thinking, compare it with other learners and better understand their and other people point of views.

But the issue is: How do we make learners’ thinking visible? And, since learners will often disagree, how do we make their thinking contestable and addressable by other learners in order to stimulate their critical thinking?

Cohere Add-on

Cohere Mozilla Firefox Add-on aims at addressing this issue by providing learners with an environment for them to reflect critically and engage with documents, ideas and people online and directly through their browser. The Cohere Firefox Add-on provides an environment where learners can mark up pieces of information and engage in discussing different points of view on the same online resource. Moreover they can create semantic connections to explain their position toward other learner points of view, or toward ideas they may have proposed, theory they may have cited, or data they annotated online. In this way the Cohere Firefox Add-on introduces a layer of meaning that learners can use to engage critically in scholarly discussions.

What the Cohere Add-on does more then standard collaborative web annotation tools?

Cohere Mozilla Firefox add-on improves on already existing social bookmarking and collaborative annotation technologies by:

• Enabling classification of annotations: learners can annotate web pages with their reflections and each annotation can be further defined associating an icon to it that explains the role that that annotation would play in a scholarly discussion (i.e.: Am I raising a question? Am I providing an answer to other people questions? Am I providing a piece of evidence for a certain claim?..etc)

• Enabling semantic connections between annotations: Annotations can be connected in a network of meaningful relationships that explains how annotations relate semantically to one another (I.e. my annotation responds to the issues raised in your annotation, your annotation suggest a resource that can be useful to answer the problem I am tackling, …etc).

Following up

In the future we plan to develop the Cohere Add-on to create an environment for users to learn/teach critical thinking skills by:

• Making argument maps to describe and visualize higher order thinking

• Using or building templates to learn how to make good arguments, and perform sound scholarly discussions.

• Adding tagging features to make easier conversation clustering and annotation organization.

In Summary

Cohere Mozilla Firefox Add-on, developed in KMi at the Open University (Milton Keynes, UK) is a tool for learners to make collaborative annotation and mapping of ideas and web resources. With the Cohere Mozilla Add-on learners can: i. collaboratively annotate the web; ii.create semantic connections between annotations; iii.and engage in online scholarly discussions.

To know more about the Cohere Add-on you can watch the demo video. You can also download a higher resolution version of the demo video here. For further info on Cohere please visit the Cohere site. To contact the applicants please email: M.S.Bachler@open.ac.uk; S.Buckingham.Shum@open.ac.uk; a.deliddo@open.ac.uk.

News

Our First jetpack is available for viewing/testing and can be installed from here.

Future updates soon!