I have never felt comfortable with mapping. It seems to involve a way of thinking that just doesn’t come naturally and interpreting other people’s maps seems to be beyond me. Three years ago I attended Howard Rheingold’s online course Towards a Literacy of Cooperation, where mapping was a weekly activity. I blogged about this and without realising it found I had the title Minding Mapping in the Social Media Classroom. I thought I had written Mind Mapping in the Social Media Classroom. It was only later when I came back to the blog post that I realised what the heading was.
But this year I am giving it another go, using the Think Tool Matthias Melcher has developed. I have been looking back through all my published papers and I wanted to see if I could trace my development of thinking through these papers, what the common threads are, what links there are between the papers and what the maps might reveal about my research interests and development as a researcher.
Matthias has made the tool freely available. Here is a direct link – http://x28hd.de/tool/
The tool can also be accessed from his blog where he discusses it further and provides a wonderful explanation of how it works in this video which you probably need to watch if you are going to make sense of what follows. (Allow 5.44 mins to watch the video).
As he explains in the video this mapping tool is particularly useful for:
- Maintaining an overview of multiple connections and not having to organise ideas into discrete categories.
- Maintaining the richness of the associated text alongside the map. The text does not have to be visible, but can be accessed with a simple click of an icon.
These two affordances seemed perfect for looking for connections between my own research papers.
I have created my own video to show how useful this tool is and how I have used it to date. (This is a 12-minute video. It is a bit blurred, but hopefully not impossible to follow).
From using this tool I now know that my 22 papers can be organised into six groups, which can each be summarised as follows:
Group 1: Implications of community tensions for communities of practice
Group 2: The affordances, tensions and constraints of open environments, notably MOOCs, for learning experiences and connectivity with reference to the theory of connectivism.
Group 3: The design and visualisation of emergent learning experiences within open learning environments, such as MOOCs, where learning is uncertain and relies on self-organisation
Group 4: Focus on a specific MOOC – FSLT12 – to investigate experiences of the learning community, course design and the implications for teaching and learning in a MOOC
Group 5: Whether and how learning design can be influenced by an embodied view of the world and a view of perception and action as enactive perception using all the senses
Group 6: Focus on a specific MOOC – Rhizo14 – with particular reference to learners’ experience of community and curriculum formation and the teacher/facilitator’s role in this
I have also been able to identify major and minor keywords that crop up across the papers and how methods and theory are referenced, again across all 22 papers.
Finally, as I worked on these maps, entering text from the Abstracts and looking for connections, some continuing cross-paper themes began to emerge. At this stage of the mapping process, I see these as:
- Factors of open learning environments; factors that influence teaching/learning
- The impact and consequences of ‘open’ – including an open mind and a more right hemisphere view
- Emergent learning; research itself as emergent learning
- Liminality – the space in between spaces for learning
- Learner experiences – particularly ‘hidden’ experiences; what cannot be seen; the alternative view or people on the boundaries
- Individual dimensions
As I say in the video, Matthias’ Think Tool has been extremely helpful in enabling me to see the connections between my papers and the common threads. For anyone looking for connections across a multitude of concepts/ideas, I can recommend giving it a go.
Jenny Connected 
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