Graphic Organizers, Semantic Maps and Word Webs are tools that help learners visualize and organize complex content. Mind maps can help learners find and understand the connections between ideas. Concept mapping can promote organizational skill and problem solving. It can also challenge learners to synthesize what they know (Barkley & Major, p. 218).
Application: Over the last 7 years, I’ve worked and learned with a group of people interested in networks as a tool for solving complex issues, in personal knowledge management as tool or organizational transformation and in working out loud as a path to a network mindset. These three concepts are interconnected through many other concepts and research topics.
I’d like to invite my group to join in a co-learning exercise to create a concept map around each of the three concepts and then merge all three into a single concept map.
It is unlikely that our group will be able to meet face-to-face, so I will need to research collaborative online tools for creating the concept map. Many of us connect with each other through Zoom web conferencing, so we may be able to combine synchronous and asynchronous collaboration to work on the concept map.
It will be difficult to map the three concepts myself as Barkley and Major suggest (219), but I could map another concept to demonstrate to my colleagues what we are setting out to do. It might be most effective to create teams to work on major concepts within the map. Our full group could periodically come together to re-align and share our work.
Assessment: Concept Maps (Barkley & Major, 2016, pp. 218-224)
The activity above should create an artifact to serve as an assessment for the activity and of the collective knowledge of the group. Although there is no need to “score” our work, the map and a narrative describing it could be assembled into a scholarly article and peer reviewed.
References
Barkley, E. F., & Major, C. H. (2016). Learning assessment techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Tate, M. L. (2012). “Sit and Get” won’t grow dendrites: 20 professional learning strategies that engage the adult brain. (2nd Ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.