http://cohere.open.ac.uk

The basics

Cohere comes from the Open University in the UK. It is an ambitious, complex and compelling piece of software delivered via a web browser. It states clearly its motivation and goals: “The Web is about IDEAS+PEOPLE. Cohere is a visual tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Back them up with websites. Support or challenge them. Embed them to spread virally. Discover who – literally – connects with your thinking.”

Cohere does what many Web 2.0 applications do – you put into it ideas, web references and resources, so as to organise them to understand better the inputs (sources) and outputs (ideas) of your research, thinking and so on. However, Cohere does a couple more things brilliantly. It allows you to add logical connectors between entries: so, for example, website A can be linked to idea B via the connector “evidence of”. In this respect, Cohere is unique. Cohere also emphasises the networking of people, as well as ideas. There are various ways to view the data you put into the system.

Here’s an example of what Cohere looks like:

View of Cohere showing connections between ideas and sites

What is intriguing

The most intriguing aspect of Cohere is how beautifully it explicates the nature of the ‘link’ or relationship between one item and another. In most cases, the web assumes that a link is a link – that it’s simply a narrative step in a journey from one place to another. So, for example, when I provide a link to more reading on Cohere, read more on the theories behind Cohere and its possible uses, I am doing two things – I am providing an easy navigation from here to there (hypertextually, removing the need for me to summarise what is there to bring information from that source and include it here) and I am implicitly arguing that what you read if you visit the link somehow supports, or extends, my discussions here. But there’s no explicit indication of the precise nature of the ‘link’. Cohere provides metadata about links. They can be evidence, counterarguments, related ideas — almost anything you wish to use to describe the relationship between nodes.

What is also intriguing is that Cohere perfectly anticipates the move to knowledge networking and provides the richest environment, with a sophisticated interface, for such networking. It is, perhaps, the closest current expression to Bush’s fabled Memex, an idea which is often claimed to be a theoretical fore-runner of the way people now use computers connected to digital information networks. Cohere makes real certain theoretical possibilities within knowledge networking: yet does this realisation produce a culturally useable result? Perhaps the real lesson is that ‘networking’ is more implicit, intangible and accidental than we might ideally like?

Pedagogic Challenge

One way to use Cohere is as follows. Rather than designing a traditional narrative sequence of materials, tasks and so on arrayed over the weeks of a semester, a lecturer builds a cohere network of information and activities, using in particular the logical relationships between the knowledge objects in the network to cue students as to what to do with the material. Because the entire unit of study is going to involve Cohere, the fact that students might need a couple of weeks to learn how to use the system effectively is time well spent. The lecturer can use the didactic presentations (such as lectures, whether recorded for online students or presented in traditional presence) to explain how and why the unit works as it does, and what Cohere can do. In this way, the direct address between teacher and student (which is a key motivator for student uptake of new software) is focused on the most challenging initial part of the unit — learning to use the software. During the semester, students are moved from a state of greater dependency (reading and responding to what is presented) to one of greater independence (taking responsibility, for example, of adding to and amending the initial cohere network).

The real challenge, however, is: what happens the next time the unit runs? Does the teacher ‘revert’ to the original and then get students to go on the same pathway of learning? Or does the teacher let the second group of students work with the enriched content which includes both her original and the last group of students’ entries?

Why this tool is not ‘top 10′

Cohere is, to be direct, too complex for it to be included in the ‘top 10′. Learning how to use the software effectively, and then using it consistently, is a significant investment of time and, moreover, time that needs to be devoted to it regularly. Fundamentally, Cohere works by ‘re-engineering’ the way that scholars do knowledge work: that is its power and charm, but also its weakness when we think about the pragmatics of teaching university students.

In many ways, Cohere is a perfect example of the knowledge networking paradigm in that it explicitly builds relationships between ideas and people, in an explicit, shareable manner, with a strong emphasis on the use of digital creativity to create seamless integration between the idea-generation and idea-publication processes. Inputs and outputs blur together into a knowledgeable ecology in which each element works synergistically with others. For this reason alone, Cohere could be considered the ‘top 1′ application for knowledge network learning. However, ultimately, teaching is an exercise in pragmatics and, therefore, the non-inclusion of Cohere in my 10 great tools lists is designed also to emphasise the way that academics must make realistic choices about the tools to be used, based on getting maximum attention for students on the learning outcomes.

But you should be the judge: start by viewing Cohere’s excellent screencast to see for yourself; then create an account and begin to play.

Alternatives

As indicated, Cohere is by and large unique. However, some parallels might be drawn between Cohere and more traditional mind-mapping software, such as Mind42 which I discuss on this site; you can also see a similar attempt to use the idea of ‘networks’ (both conceptually and visually) to support argument at Debategraph.