The blog Rose Colored Glasses: Thoughts on Instructional Design by JoAnn Gonzalez-Major recently had an article about a presentation she attended on the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient system at Educause 2009. She writes:

Today I attended a presentation on the development of virtual patients learning units with open source tools. The session was lead by Rachel Ellaway, Assistant Dean, Informatics and David Topps, Associate Professor, Clinical Informatics, Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The presenters stepped us through the use of Vue (Visual Understanding Environment) and OpenLabyrinth for the development of highly interactive, low bandwidth problem based learning units. I was amazed at how quickly the units could be developed; the number of decision point could be designed into the scenarios, and the ability to repurpose portions of the units in other activities.

From the article:

It’s less of a mindmapping tool and more of an information visualization tool. Its strength lies in the multiple ways information can be arranged, sorted and manipulated.

From a recent post on the VirtualPatients.eu website:

OpenLabyrinth cases are authored by subject-matter experts using VUE (Visual Understanding Environment), an open-source tool developed by Tufts University. This tool provides an intuitive way to develop and visualise a decision tree representing a VP case, which can then be imported straight into OpenLabyrinth.

People are often ask how they can contribute to VUE in ways other then contributing code. Here is something simple anyone in the VUE community can do, nominate us for Sourceforge's Community Choice awards. Doing this will help us continue to extend the VUE community to bring both new users and hopefully contributors to the project. This helps ensure a sustainable future for VUE. Help us by clicking the link below and nominating VUE today!

VOTE for VUE in the Sourceforge Community awards, Nominate us as

* Best Project for Academia
* Best Visual Design

Vote here:

I recently came across another open source project, msc2svg, who used a VUE map to describe the design of their software. The application they've developed is a neat utility for crunching a text document into a message sequence chart like this:
Here is the VUE map describing the design of the software:

The map file is available in their open code repository located here.

Stuart Lee from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is using VUE to draw out relationships between poets covered in the archive. From his post at the World War One Literature google group:

What I have done, therefore, is take a preliminary stab at showing -
in a mind-map - the relationships between the poets we have
concentrated on in the project (or will be) and show how they might
have known each other, etc. By no means is this complete, but it
begins to show poets who were clearly at the centre of things
(Sassoon, Thomas, Graves, and eventually Owen) and those who were on
the periphery (Leighton, Jones, Brittain).

Mike Thomas at the Urbanworkbench blog recently had great post about using VUE for his presentation at "Sustainability or Survival - the future of life in the Kootenays." Check out his slides and map which are linked from his post. Mike says:

The presentation was given in a software called VUE, Visual Understanding Environment, which is fun way to structure talks and presentations with a huge amount of flexibility in how you display things on the screen. The slides above don’t do justice to the rich, fullscreen graphics we displayed as we clicked on images during the presentation.