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Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies |
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LILT, Dept. of ICS • University of Hawai`i at Manoa • 1680 East-West Road, POST 309 • Honolulu, HI 96822 • 1-808-956-3890
Belvedere is now Open Source!
Belvedere 4, our software for constructing and reflecting on visualizations of one's ideas, is now available as an open source project on SourceForge (the world's largest Open Source software development website).
Belvedere is designed to help support problem-based collaborative learning with evidence and concept maps. With our software, middle-school and high-school students learn critical inquiry skills that they can apply in everyday life as well as in science. Pictured above is an "evidence model" viewed as both a graph and a matrix. Below are examples of a "simple model" and a "concept map."
Belvedere has a long history of development under various sources of
federal funding (NSF and DARPA). Originally developed by Alan Lesgold,
Dan Suthers and colleagues while at the Learning and Resource Development
Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the third and fourth generations
of Belvedere were engineered by Dan Suthers at the Laboratory for Interactive
Learning Technology (LILT) at the University of Hawaii to support multiple
representational views (tables and hierarchies as well as graphs) on evidence
models. Belvedere 4, programmed by David Burger, also adds support for
concept maps and causal models. Several other experimental versions of
Belvedere also exist at LILT.
We frequently receive requests for Belvedere, including requests to modify
it for specific research or application purposes. By releasing Belvedere
as open source we wiill enable the research and educational communities
to build upon this resource, magnifying its impact well beyond what would
be possible if we controlled the code.
Visit our Sourceforge site at http://belvedere.sourceforge.net/ to access Belvedere. Feel free to email us if you wish to become a co-developer.