Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Mapping the terrain

I have always been fascinated by maps. As a child, I remember sitting on the couch in our living room with a world atlas in my lap. I would open it to a specific country or region and my mother would ask me to find a location ("Find Santa Fe, New Mexico.") I could never get enough of this type of play.

Mind mapping and semantic networks

Recently I posted on the idea of self knowledge as it pertains to learning design. Thanks to a couple of replies, I have become enlightened to the notion of mind mapping and semantic networks.

Joanna Howard notes:

I've always found it useful to provide frameworks for thinking which may help them determine. For real-life stuff like management, I've used Critical Incident Analysis, Life-Story approaches, "Mapping the Field" as exercises that help a person sort what they want or need to learn.

With this information at hand, I googled around to learn more about “mapping the field.” Terry Wassell cited a reference to Buzan which I did not recognize. Wikipedia has an interesting entry on the so-called inventor of Mind Maps.

Gossip aside, I find the idea of mapping one's idea of one's self fascinating. By graphically depicting my desires and interests, likes and dislikes, I imagine I would come up with a veritable Middle Earth-like depiction of myself.

My colleague Greg Ulmer uses narrative maps with his students under the heading of a mystoriography. A mystory is to "map one's location in a discourse network." A good example is Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse, which serves as both an affirmation and a mode of inquiry. The mystory works from a "middle voice--based on the reflexive, self-conscious nature of modernist writing that claimed to be a knowledge only of language, not life itself." In this voice, the effect of writing is self-discovery -- the revealing of one's identity as a social construction (after all, you are what you see, feel, touch, taste, smell, think & feel).

Now, how does all of this pertain to learning design, you might ask.

By asking learners/students to construct a map of themselves (choose your form), there exists an opportunity for self-reflection. The map can be used to show relationships and connections between objects and events. Since maps embody a collection of values with each marker or point representing an array of implicit and explicit meanings, they can allow us to orient ourselves in time and space; they can aid us in interpreting ourselves and the environment that surrounds us.

I believe this exercise would be useful in learning design as it relates to whatever topic you are responsible for sharing with learners.

My own interests are in the areas of teacher education and learning design wherein a number of teacher candidates or designers come to learn too late that they are in the "wrong field." This can be an expensive lesson to say the least. Perhaps if an exercise in self-mapping were conducted early within their program of study, they might be able to see if they are indeed cut out for the teaching/learning design profession.