- Lot of flexibility in placing and formating nodes - shapes, fills, outlines
- Does not appear to have the ability to have a parent > child heirarchy but nodes and subnodes can be clustered to create something similar to a heirarchy. Does not allow collapsing and expanding subnodes attached to a node.
- Links can be labelled, colored, and can even have curves or "S" shapes.
- Extensive Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to zoom in, out, pan, focus, etc.
- The beauty of the software is the ability to create presentations from the map
- Each node can have text or images attached to it.
- Pathways can be created linking nodes/subnodes in various orders and then a presentation can be created that displays the text/slides
- When displaying the slides, moving the cursor to the extreme right will show all the nodes linked to the node being displayed allowing you to navigate your presentation in a non-linear manner
- Multiple pathways can be created in the same concept map.
- You can show nodes connected to a particular pathway by hiding the rest of the map.
- The map can be exported in multiple formats
- There is also a semantic search function that one can run on the concept map.
- VUE also allow import from datasets including Zotero. I have not tried that yet but sounds fascinating that it will automatically create concept maps based on the imported references!
- The part that I want to explore is how the map can be exported to OpenLabyrinth to quickly create virtual patient cases.
I am just scratching the surface as I have used this software for barely a week. I was running a course on "Technology in Teaching" at our institution and created the following VUE map.
During the course I took the participants on a journey from the fundamentals of learning theory (Yellow nodes) to understanding the learning environment (blue nodes) to the various technology solutions (green nodes). I created a couple of pathways that allowed them to see how each portion of the course related to the whole concept map.