Abstract
Designing good relations is a challenge, as is using them consistently in the context of constructing knowledge representations. Further, the ability to generate and use relations effectively is a feature that clearly distinguishes between good and poor biology students. Fortunately, the SemNet software makes it possible for teachers to diagnose individual student problems in creating and using relations and to provide pencil and paper exercises to build missing skills. Assignments for students engaged in generating or using computer-based knowledge representations are significantly more powerful, in our opinion, when they are designed to prompt student thinking about using and applying knowledge to solve problems rather than to organize textbook knowledge in a relatively inert format. Finally, there are many problems in knowledge representation strategies for science students that remain to be solved.
With apologies to Socrates, whose “The unexamined life is not worth living” is more elegant in ‘relating’ its point.
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Faletti, J., Fisher, K.M. (1996). The Information in Relations in Biology, or The Unexamined Relation Is Not Worth Having. In: Fisher, K.M., Kibby, M.R. (eds) Knowledge Acquisition, Organization, and Use in Biology. NATO ASI Series, vol 148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61047-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61047-9_13
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