The information on concept mapping and the concept mapping tools were helpful in focusing the project. Since I am a visual person the ability to represent the project graphically proved to be easier than the conventional outlining methods. The one powerful aspect of the concept maps is that they allow you to spatially place concepts. I found the ability to place and move concepts helped to focus the issues for me. Not only were the maps helpful to focus my own thoughts, but they were also helpful items to bring to the discussions with my experts. I found that this graphical format was easy for most of the experts to grasp. The amount and quality of the information transferred seemed high. This is especially true for the initial meetings with Anthony, where we used the maps to derive the ,a href="prjproc.gif">operational concept map which eventually focused the project.
KSSn was a good platform to implement the development of the project's concept maps. The flexibility in shapes of the nodes and editing of the node names made it possible to implement any applicable mapping style. The interface was good once the basic operations were mastered. There were some functions that I was unfamiliar with at first but this could be due to my unfamiliarity with the Macintosh platform. It would have been useful to have a PC version available since I did not have access to a Macintosh.
The ability to isolate the experts being elicited from their peers was a benefit in the case one of my experts. The influence of Anthony was understandably higher than the other two. This was due to his instructor status and their student status. When we attempted to discuss the selection of the common element set, it was evident that neither Rob nor Don were going to oppose anything that was said by Anthony. This made that discussion very one sided. On the other hand, when the other two were in front of the computer, it seemed they were freer to talk. There was still a bit of second guessing going on; often I would hear Rob or Don say something like, "Anthony won't agree with this but ...".
It was sometimes difficult to come up with bipolar construct terms. It was often the case that the experts, including myself, ended up stating a characteristics of the two groups of elements (the one different one and the two that were similar). This meant that we came up with two terms that were usually not related in an opposing manner. I wondered throughout what this meant for the development of the psychological space. This type of thing could be thought of as drawing a line through more than one dimension (i.e., instead of limiting the comparison to one axis, because there were two unrelated terms we were actually using two or more axes. In this case, is the comparison techniques being used still valid?
This process was very time intensive. Mainly because of having to work around the experts' schedules. It is understandable that this is the case but some further tools might have alleviated some of the strain. For instance a PC version of KSS0 would have allowed the distribution of the software so that the experts could have completed the elicitations when it was most convenient for them. The WebGrid seems like a good idea, but I think the situation I was in is not unusual, where the people I dealt with did not have internet access or access to a Macintosh. This should change in the future, but there is a present requirement for something to fill this current gap.
I liked the open structure of the course. This allowed me to fit the work, that I did in the course, into a format that dealt in the areas I am interested in. This meant that I had a high motivation to study the materials and go beyond their scope to relate them to my interests in robotics and adaptive control systems. I think this promoted a very high level of learning and exploration.
