I came across this yet another tool for our Personal Learning Environment (PLE): Cohere, a free tool from the Open University (via this Martin Weller’s food-for-thought post on FLOSS and eLearning).

It’s basically a tool for sense-making (one of the first things we do when we learn, formally or informally, any sort of subject: we negotiate the meaning of our own inputs).

What’s Cohere?

Or quote from their site:

About Cohere

We experience the information ocean as streams of media fragments, flowing past us in every modality.

To make sense of these, learners, researchers and analysts must organise them into coherent patterns.

Cohere is an idea management tool for you to annotate URLs with ideas, and weave meaningful connections between ideas for personal, team or social use.

Key Features

• Annotate a URL with any number of Ideas, or vice-versa.
• Visualize your network as it grows
• Make connections between your Ideas, or Ideas that anyone else has made public or shared with you via a common Group
• Use Groups to organise your Ideas and Connections by project, and to manage access-rights
• Import your data as RSS feeds (eg. bookmarks or blog posts), to convert them to Ideas, ready for connecting
• Use the RESTful API services to query, edit and mashup data from other tools.

Cohere is a visual tool that helps you create, connect and share ideas. It’s a KM mapping tool that runs on the web (=webOS), designed to help answer critical questions such as : “Who supports this idea?”, “Show me examples of that phenomenon”, “What are the limitations of this methodology?”.

There’s a Firefox add-on to make connections with Cohere -which I’ve already installed-. Firstly, sign up at Cohere and then download the FF add-on. Finally, I recommend you to read their Quickstart guide.

Compártelo! Share it!