CoHere

Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. http://cohere.open.ac.uk/

• newer: LiteMap? https://litemap.net/

from Simon Buckingham Shum's group

Open Source http://cohere.open.ac.uk/subversion/public/ - PHP plus a Java applet?

Sept27'2010 interview with Patrick Mc Andrew: For OLnet these tools have come to the fore in helping us carry out and reflect on research in OER. In Cloud Works we have an open social platform that provides a base for discussion, asking questions and supporting events. It has been very effective in giving more impact to what are otherwise local and often transient events. It was developed at The Open University but can be used by anyone, with OLnet’s own use being just one strand. CoHere is a Web tool to enhance collaborative learning, Sense Making and Critical Thinking. Cohere helps reasoning and is designed to help us cope with the challenge I mentioned above of drawing some conclusions while also knowing that there are arguments for and against. Cohere allows these situations to be visualised and explored in a collaborative way. In its current state of development, I think it is a tool for researchers, but its usability and the models for its use are developing rapidly. Similar to a previous knowledge mapping tool, Compendium, Cohere could well find a role for learners, especially in presenting arguments. Compendium was released as part of Open Learn and is now used informally by learners to build connections and also in a simplified version by learners on some of The Open University’s own courses.

http://reganmian.net/blog/2011/05/28/cohere-a-prototype-for-contested-collective-intelligence/

• http://reganmian.net/wiki/ref:liddo2010cohere - Viewed through the lens of contemporary web tools, Cohere sits at the intersection of web Annotation (e.g. Diigo; SideWiki), Social Bookmarking (e.g. Delicious), and Mind Mapping (e.g. MindMeister; Bubbl), using data feeds and an API to expose content to other services.

To thrive, organizational entities (learning communities; teams of analysts; formal companies) must make sense of a complex, changing environment. Our interest is in how sociotechnical “Collective Intelligence” infrastructures may augment this capacity. We are seeking conceptual lenses that illuminate this challenge, and draw ideas from Resilience thinking, Sense Making, and Complexity science. We propose that these motivate the concept of Contested Collective Intelligence (CCI), and give examples of how the CoHere platform is being designed in response to these requirements.