As the availability of digital information continues to increase, there is a
need for flexible tools that help faculty and students integrate electronic
content into their teaching and learning. The Visual Understanding
Environment (VUE) is an information management application that provides an
interactive, concept mapping interface to digital resources accessed via the
Web, from FEDORA-based digital repositories, FTP servers or local file
systems. Using a simple set of tools and a basic visual grammar consisting
of nodes and links, faculty and students may map relationships between
digital content to capture and communicate concepts and ideas. The resulting
content maps can then be shared with others. VUE leverages the cognitive
benefits of concept mapping as an interface and information visualization
techniques to support the creation of rich resource-based, instructional or
research-oriented presentations.VUE can be used by anyone interested in
visually structuring digital content, whether in support of teaching
difficult to understand concepts or more generally, a tool for organizing
personal digital resources. While VUE can be seen as a general information
management utility with broad applications, the latest version of VUE was
designed with education in mind. VUE provides a concept mapping interface to
digital libraries which allows faculty and student to link and map
relationships between educational materials. VUE also supports
author-defined pathways through maps of digital content, the ability to
filter map content based on user-defined metadata, and the comparison of two
maps side-by-side.
