ReMemex: a software tool for knowledge construction and organization

Abstract

Citizens of the Knowledge Age have to be skilled in the construction of meaningful knowledge; in the collecting, anal.yzing, synthesizing, and organizing of information. These demands are driving educational technologj'^ research to find new theory and practices. Constructivism, an emerging theory of learning, offers new perspectives and is expected to have a major influence on education in the near future. Yet today, despite increasing efforts, considerable research is still needed to determine how best to apply constructivist ideas to educational software and to prove or disprove its effectiveness. This thesis presents the ReMemex system, a software tool, which both aids knowledge workers to collect and organize information, and provides a basis for research into the application of constructivist learning theoiy in educational software. ReMemex is a framework for a knowledge construction and organization environment, where learners create information landscapes to visualize the inter-relationships between the concepts and/or objects the domain is composed of. Features such as importing files and data from other applications as nodes, abstraction of the details by grouping, multiple view support for maps and nodes, and stjde support make ReMemex more powerful than traditional tools. The base implementation of ReMemex ha.s been developed in Java as a flexible and extensible Object Oriented API.