Tabletop concept mapping

Abstract

Concept mapping is designed to externalize and represent knowledge. Together with their visual presentation concept maps should support focused and sustainable interaction between students and coaches or members of organizations. Hence, corresponding tool support has not only to empower persons externalizing their mental models but also to enable transparent multi-party interaction based on context-sensitive (re)presentations. We introduce the Tabletop Concept Mapping (TCM) technique and tool which is supposed to meet these requirements. Providing an open space to express individual thoughts and ideas, it maximizes openness with respect to pragmatics, semantics and syntax of modeling, and minimizes intervention through feature-inherent properties of the artifact.