AMERICAN LANGUAGE HUB_Level2_Student'sBook_Answerkey.pdf
Flexible Concept Mapping
1. Flexible Concept Mapping 3rd CMC Tallinn - Helsinki 22-25 Sept. 2008 Alfredo Tifi Antonietta Lombardi Txomin Villarroel presenter: Alfredo Tifi "If a C-map is the result of a mediation process, it is always a good one"
9. Complex content domains: objective: point out key relations How did opium became a forbidden drug in China? Why some poor healer women were charged with the guilt for the disease ergotism in Middle Age?
10. Complex content domains: objective: point out key relations The reading paths in red are not meaningful
14. The Basque is an agglutinative language There is one and only one solution: they can make C-maps in any language they want, but not in the Basque one .
15. Propositions in a S O V (Subject Object Verb) agglutinative language:the Basque
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Notes de l'éditeur
In this presentation I want to talk with you about some reflections, that synthetize the contents of the corresponding paper, "flexible concept mapping", that everybody can access from the proceedings. The issue of flexible concept mapping was born in the context of mediating learning in my chemistry high school classes, where my wish of introducing concept mapping as a practice to reach a deep understanding of new contents, clashed with the difficulties of students over the problem to face a new set of rules and conventions, that sometimes were perceived as being more difficult to apply than was the understanding of the content to be mapped. In other words, once you have proposed concept maps, if a student keep himself being rote-memorizing, this couldn't be only a matter of previous habits, but even a consequence of the bewildering caused by an excess of puzzling situations arising from coding well understood ideas into concept maps, as a constraining effect of the demanded C-M rules and conventions. I had many meaningful learner-students that rejected concept mapping too! The usefulness of C maps is even harder to understand for them! So I and Antonietta initiated an analysis of the origins and a research of the reasons of the so called "rules for good concept mapping" and asked ourselves why in primary school there aren't the same difficulties. We discovered that we are often using several not-written and maybe not-necessary criteria, consciously or not (as the preference for single word linking phrases, the mandatory use of verbs in linking phrases, and the prohibition for nouns, adverbs, prepositions and adversative conjunctions in liking phrases, and overall the strict use of ternary propositions to form units of meaning). The basics and unchangeable criteria are the structure based on explicit and inclusive propositions, the search for cross links, the answering to a well posed focus question and, above all the deconstruction and reorganization of the knowledge domain to form a new arrangement that makes the key relations stand out. These are the criteria strictly related to the Ausubel theory of meaningful learning and necessary to the communication and metacognition involved in the mediating pedagogical relation. Once satisfied such general criteria, we can quietly accept the subtitle of this presentation. Finally, thanks to Txomin from Bilbao, we have searched for an application of our more tolerant rules to the Basque agglutinative language, in which the verb goes to the end of a phrase and all the flexions are merged to the noun's keyword, making it very difficult to use the same concept term as a cross node between two different propositions.