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Box 6.6
An example: GetSmart — An E-learning solution for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL)

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL; Marshall et al. 2003 ) has provided students
and educators with science education resources since 2002. Seamans and McMillan (1998)
defi ne a digital library as more than the digitization of a collection, but also consisting of
information management tools and responsibilities to bring together collections, services,
and people to create, use, disseminate, and preserve content. NSDL collections cover a
wide range of topics including astronomy, biology, economics, mathematics, and technol-
ogy. The NSDL GetSmart system is a good example of how KM and e-learning can be
integrated. GetSmart was designed by blending together learning and information seeking
theories, and it has been implemented as an integrated suite of tools for curriculum
support for teachers, search support for those seeking information, and for concept
mapping support to support student learning.
Curriculum tools are typically Learning Management Systems (LMS) that provide a
standardized environment to support classroom learning (e.g., WebCT and Blackboard,
www.blackboard.com). Digital library tools provide information seeking and retrieval to
help users navigating through the digital collection to locate the resources they are looking
for. Knowledge representation tools provide a visualization of the content (e.g., concept
maps) to allow users to visually review, capture, or develop knowledge. Concept maps
represent concepts and relationships as node-link diagrams or semantic maps. Such maps
and the very act of mapping have proven to be very effective ways of presenting informa-
tion and also serve to promote effective learning ( Chmielewski and Dansereau 1998 ). For
example, a text syllabus may be found in the curriculum e-learning tool, a search aid to
fi nd all relevant resources in the digital collection related to that course may be found in
the digital library tool, and a course map of learning objectives and prerequisite knowledge
may be found in the knowledge representation tool.
From a KM perspective, GetSmart is a system for the generation, codifi cation, and
representation of knowledge. GetSmart is organized to help individuals, groups, and com-
munities develop knowledge. Curriculum tools provide a context for individual and group
learning. As users construct concept maps, they explore available information and then
synthesize selected ideas into personal knowledge representations, which allows them to
learn by exploration (discovery learning). When group maps are created, several users
collaborate, clarifying concepts and relationships and fi tting them together. The search
and curriculum functions access repositories of community knowledge that tend to be
more formal and to use established vocabulary. The search tools help knowledge travel as
information to the user/learners. As information is transferred to the individual, it becomes
enriched, expanded, and synthesized into new or unique contexts. These processes are
viewed as information fl owing from experts and repositories to individuals and groups.
When a body of maps has been created, the information fl ow can be reversed.
Technologically, the GetSmart system is an XML browser based so that learners can
access it from a typical university computer lab. Microsoft SQL Server is used for the data-
bases and the map-drawing tool is a Java applet developed using Java 1.4.
At the GetSmart launch in 2002, over one hundred student users at the University of
Arizona and Virginia Tech created a database of more than one thousand student-prepared
concept maps with more than forty thousand relationships expressed in semantic, graphi-
cal, node-link representations.