| | | Welcome! Cohere is an experimental knowledge mapping tool that runs on the web, connecting you, and your Ideas, to other learners with common interests. Cohere is designed to help answer critical questions such as : "Who supports this idea?", "Show me examples of that phenomenon", "What are the limitations of this methodology?" Use Cohere to define and forge meaningful connections between ideas, which you can associated with relevant websites if you wish.
As these ideas, connections and websites grow in number, Cohere generates views of these, and helps you to view and filter them in various ways, as the following two screens illustrate.
"All incoming and outgoing connections to the Idea called "Key Skills":
"Generate a complete map of connections (right) and search this for specific kinds of connection" (left):
You can choose to make your work public to share ideas with others, and Cohere provides ways to discover other people and their ideas which may be of interest.
Don't want to read any more? Why not view the introductory screencast showing the above use of Cohere with some OpenLearn resources, or go direct to the site and login as a guest to start playing!Cohere is open to the world to sign up at cohereweb.net. But if you're already logged into OpenLearn, clicking a link from the Knowledge Mapping block will take you direct into your account on the site via cohere.open.ac.uk without troubling you to sign-up and login again. Cohere is the second OpenLearn Knowledge Mapping tool, following the release of Compendium. While Compendium installs as a personal, offline tool on your desktop, and you craft every map by hand, Cohere runs in your web browser, and automatically generates map layouts. You can also upload Compendium maps to Cohere, so you can work without the internet if you need, and you can view your previous maps in Cohere.Cohere is optimised for the cross-platform Firefox browser so we recommend you use this if you have any trouble with other browsers. | | | | | 1-2-3
- There are 3 basic things you can do in Cohere: (1) add Ideas... (2) connect them... (3) browse and filter your own and others' knowledge maps.
Once your ideas are in Cohere, you can share them as normal hyperlink addresses, or embed ideas and maps in other websites as interactive elements, a bit like YouTube movies [example].
| | | | | Jumping from OpenLearn into Cohere
- On the homepage of any OpenLearn unit, you will see the Knowledge Mapping 'block' in the left margin. Without logging in the Browse Maps link takes you to the public Cohere homepage where you can browse the latest Users, Ideas and Connections, and login as a guest to browse (but not edit):
After logging in, the link changes to Create+Share Maps, which will then log you into Cohere automatically. The differences (highlighted with the green boxes below) are that the homepage confirms that you're logged in as you, you can now enter your Workspace which is where you create, edit and visualize your knowledge maps, and the buttons for filtering Ideas and Connections are no longer greyed out, but active:
| | | | | Using Cohere as an OpenLearner
- Keep track of important ideas and their connections with each other. This is the essence of Cohere. The introductory screencast illustrated this around the topic of Study Skills. This example is there for you to play with when you login as a guest.
Organise your thoughts by summarising them. A first step to making sense of the ocean of information and ideas you encounter on the web, and in OpenLearn, is to summarise them succinctly with relevant extracts or in your own words. So when you read something of interest, consider summarising it as a new Idea, and add the URL of the resource(s) you were reading. Here we are registering the new Idea of a "knol" as announced by Google:
Put your Ideas in context: link them to key questions. Cohere enables you to link Ideas with any kind of connection, but a particularly powerful strategy is to relate them to the questions that interest you. So create some Question Ideas as prompts to the kinds of Ideas you need to find. Here are two Ideas (assigned the role of Critical Questions) linked to "knol":
Blogging and Cohere. You may already be a keen blogger used to sharing your thoughts with the world using OpenLearn's Learning Journal or another tool. Cohere will soon be able to import your blog postings, converting them to Ideas, but meantime you can of course just copy+paste your posts by hand. But why would you want to do that? Well, there is no blogging tool or aggregator that you can ask questions such as "Who supports this idea?", "Show me examples of that phenomenon", "What are the limitations of this methodology?" These are the kinds ways you can filter the Idea network in Cohere. Then you can embed Cohere ideas in your blog postings, and have the best of both worlds: blogging's richness, and Cohere's structure management. Here is the "knol" Idea now embedded in a posting about Google's announcement in the Cohere blog:
| | | | | Conclusion
- Once inside Cohere, we hope you'll find it self-explanatory as you play around with it, so at this point we'll wrap up this introduction.
Cohere is an experimental tool, and it's still early days. We look forward to hearing your feedback via the OpenLearn Forums, or via the Contact buttons on the Cohere website.
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