Outside of my personal battle with the CMap software, I thought it was a very interesting activity, but I'm not sure if I would want to include it in class. Although concept maps can be a good way to reach students with spatial or visual learning styles, what happens when they do look very scattered? I can see how the different parts of the course fit together, but I don't know what the implications are, nor has it proved to be a particularly heuristic activity for my course design. It just helps me realize that yes, in fact, all of these ideas are related...so should I bring them all up in every class meeting and run the risk of boring my students to tears?
Rather than using the concept map as an alternative to an organizational tool (because I can really see horror stories evolving from that), I would use this as Bean suggests — something more of a preliminary brainstorming tool to find out what ideas the students are engaging with most frequently, and what ideas the students see as definitively linked to one another. This could be very helpful for narrowing the scope of a thesis to something that can be completely argued in 3-7 pages, thus to avoid the "all about" or "and then" writing that Bean so fears.
2 comments:
Wow! Your concept map is amazing! Mine is not so great...
I'd agree that this would be a good brainstorming tool for some students. I'd hesitate to require it of everyone, though, since I really don't think it would be helpful for some students (who think like me!).
When concept maps look scattered, you can both hold all connections in place, yet show them according to different points of view. Look at these screenshots, they are all sharing the same knowledgebase:
http://www.pmm.nl/Screenshots.htm
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