One of the things we’re doing in The Internet Course is mapping out ideas and concepts from the students’ research, visualizing connections between them and how they relate to the major topics of the course. I sort of stole the mapping idea from George Siemens et al.’s LAK11 MOOC. I’ve been pushing concept mapping in some of my information literacy workshops as a way of organizing ideas and inspiring creativity, and a lot of students seem to get it. We’re working with Cmap Tools, and, I think, barely scratching the surface of what can be done with the software. There have been some technical hurdles, but overall the class has come up with some great work so far.
One of my goals for this course is to tie all of the readings together, connect them all to the main topics of the course, and create a hierarchical map of the course. So here I’ve made a map of the main topics, and each topic links out to the collected class blog posts on each one.
The next step is to bring all the readings on each topic together into a unified map for each. So we’ll have a map of the history of the internet, a map of how it works, a map of the social/economic/cultural impacts, et cetera. The nodes on this map will link to those, and those maps will link the students’ individual maps, thus linking everything in the class together: a web of the web.
I have only one thing to say: Awesome. I await that map. I wish I could be a participant in your course – your students are lucky dogs.