Comments on: Software Review #3: VUE (Visual Understanding Environment)

By: Sweta

Sweta — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:27:11 +0000

Hi, I’m a student at Tufts and am finding Vue enormously helpful to create program models for international development projects. Quick question to those who may know–how does one wrap the text in a node, without having to hit return manually to break up a long line into several lines?

Swetha

By: Skip

Skip — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 01:32:53 +0000

That’s an excellent feature that I discovered after my initial comment. For what it’s worth, I’d love to have the option to export as text as well, for inclusion in text documents.

I’m enjoying VUE very much.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:17:42 +0000

Skip,

You can do File->export Node notes outline, and get the output in a PDF. If this is doing something other then what you’d expect let us know.

By: Skip

Skip — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:39:36 +0000

Thanks, Scott. That will make VUE presentations much more manageable.

Any chance that VUE might export topics to an outline format at some point? This is a very useful feature of Inspiration.

By: Scott Fraize

Scott Fraize — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:16:44 +0000

FYI, the ability to collapse and re-expand nodes is a feature under development and will be in the next major release of VUE.

By: Skip

Skip — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:47:36 +0000

I prefer Inspiration to PowerPoint because of the potential of working in a non-linear way through a presentation, revisiting some parts of a presentation or skipping other parts depending on your audience. One annoyance is Inspiration’s inability to group topics (“nodes” in VUE) into a single node. For complex topics, you’d end up with lots of nodes crammed into a small space. I like VUE’s ability to compress nodes, although I wish that there were a way in VUE to click a single toggle to expand and collapse stacked nodes.

Another major annoyance–in Inspiration, you can link between several Inspiration documents so that you can avoid having too many nodes on a screen, but linking this way is still very linear. To return to the original screen, you need to make a specific link back to the original document–you can visit other documents, but you have to return the same way you got there. With VUE, it appears that you can create additional VUE documents and then link them through Pathways, giving you access to any of the documents at any time. I’m really looking forward to this, although it’s going to make me have to rethink how I construct presentations. (That’s always a good thing.)

Pathways brings a whole new ability to concept mapping that never existed in Inspiration, so I guess I couldn’t claim that it was an annoyance, but I love the ability to jump into presentation mode at any point in your concept map, to move non-linearly through a pathway (or even into and out of other pathways), and to toggle the concept map and the presentation slides at any time.

By: japhyr

japhyr — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:19:56 +0000

Do the pathways address the limitations you referred to in your first post? If so, do they address all the limitations you were thinking of, or just some? As a more experienced user of concept mapping software, I’d be curious to hear what weaknesses you do see in the program.

I’m happy to hear you are learning from this as well.

By: Skip

Skip — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:12:20 +0000

I’ve just spent a delightful hour learning VUE. Wow. It’s what PowerPoint should have always been, and the brainstorming tools are excellent. I’m very excited about starting to use this tool in my classes. Pathways…who knew?

By: Skip

Skip — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:38:04 +0000

This is fascinating. I’m downloading the program as I write this.

In the UAF School of Education, I have long promoted a program called Inspiration, a proprietary cross-platform application that was one of the early concept mapping tools available on any platform. It has evolved into the de facto K-12 application for concept mapping, outlining, brainstorming, flow charting, etc. for K-12 and even though it’s clearly oriented toward K-12 it’s a very capable tool for professionals as well. (You may recall a few years ago that Arthur Golden published some of his character maps and plot outlines for Memoirs of a Geisha in their native Inspiration form.) Inspiration is now required software for all SOE students.

I use Inspiration extensively (and in preference to PowerPoint and its ilk) for presentations or exactly the reasons you allude to (non-linearity and linking ability in particular), but there are some annoying limitations. It sounds from your review like VUE may have solved some of those problems. I’m anxious to test it out. It sounds as if it may be too difficult for elementary students (we’ll see) but it may be a viable replacement for Inspiration for older students and it certainly has potential use as a professional tool.

Sometimes I wonder who is learning more from this project–you or me.