Visualizing e-learning processes using Didactic Process Map Language

Beat Döbeli Honegger
Institut für Medien und Schule
University for Teacher Education Central

Michele Notari
PHBern, School of Teacher Education
University of Applied Sciences

In this article a visualization language is presented as tool for the discussion of didactic processes. Such a tool has to be easy to learn, easy to use and has to be able to visualize the essential aspects of didactic processes. Completeness and formal validity are not necessary; DPM is supposed to be used by humans discussing with each other and does not need to be processable by computer.

Therefore an approach following the 80:20-principle (pareto-principle) is needed: Essential properties of didactical processes must be visualisable while unessential and rare used properties have to be left out. They can be communicated and negotiated. With this principle in mind, the DPM-approach distinguishes itself from existing efforts for an exhaustive didactic process description language.

Following the pareto-principle with 20% of the vocabulary needed for a complete description of didactical processes 80% of the essential properties of such processes have to be represented.
Further studies are needed to distill these essential 20%. The existing draft of DPM (Notari&Doebeli 2007) has been used to describe collaborative patterns like Jigsaw (Aaronson 1978) and has been successfully implemented in several workshops (e.g. Notari 2006).

Literature:
Aronson, E., Blaney,N., Sikes, J., Stephan, G.,&Snapp, M. (1978). The jigsaw classroom. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Notari M., Döbeli Honegger B. (2007). Didactic Process Map Language; Visualisierung von Unterrichtsszenarien als Planungs- Reflexions- und Evaluationshilfe; in Studieren neu erfinden- Hochschule neu Denken (page 416); Merkt M., Mayberger K.; Schulmeister R. editors
Notari, M. (2006). How to use a Wiki in education: 'Wiki based effective constructive learning'. In Proceedings of the 2006 international Symposium on Wikis (Odense, Denmark, August 21 - 23,
2006). WikiSym '06. ACM, New York, NY, 131-132. DOI=
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1149453.1149479

Back to program schedule