Maps as Knowledge Organizations
Cross-posted from the Intentional Teaching Patreon, as part of the 2024 slow read of Intentional Tech.
The following infographic titled “How Dangerous Is a Zombie?” is a little dated now, but it remains one of my all-time favorites:
We see here a set of coordinate axes, with the vertical axis moving from “dumb” at the bottom and “smart” at the top and the horizontal axis ranging from “slow” on the left and “fast” on the right. Plotted on these axes are a number of zombie movies, with the location of the movie indicating nature of the zombie threat depicted in the movie. The zombies in the 2004 horror/comedy Shaun of the Dead are both slow and dumb, so that movie lands in the bottom-left quadrant. (How is that movie already 20 years old?!) The walking dead in the 2009 film Zombieland are fast, but not particularly smart, so that movie in in the lower-right quadrant. It’s that top-right quadrant you want to stay away from, since the zombies in those movies are both fast and smart. As the chart says, “You’re screwed.”
As a mathematician, I find this use of coordinate axes a little dicey. Typically, we mathematicians use coordinate axes to plot points and lines and curves in two-dimensional space, where the locations indicated by the axes have some concrete meaning. “How Dangerous Is a Zombie?” plays fast and loose with this structure. There’s no standard metric for how fast or smart a fictional zombie is that you can use to place movies precisely on these axes. The placements of these movies on these axes are subjective and imprecise, but yet the infographic conveys a number of concepts effectively. You can easily compare (some movie reviewer’s subjective opinion of) the speed and smarts of zombies from two different movies, and you can imagine what it would be like to inhabit (or perhaps produce) a movie in a particular quadrant.
This infographic is a type of map. Not a geographic map depicting a physical place in the universe, but more of a conceptual map. Wikipedia tells me that a map is “a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.” If we interpret “space” pretty broadly to include the space of zombie movies, then a map can depict all kinds of things, like the speed and intelligence of zombies in said zombie movies. And as a symbolic depiction of the relationships among elements of some space, a map can be an incredibly useful teaching tools.
That’s an argument I make in the fourth chapter of Intentional Tech, which focuses on the idea of knowledge organizations. To support that argument, I cite the modern classic How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan Ambrose and colleagues, which now has a second edition (and an eighth principle!), and I’ll do so again here. Summarizing the research on knowledge organizations, Ambrose and her co-authors write, “When students are provided with an organizational structure in which to fit new knowledge, they learn more effectively and efficiently than when they are left to deduce this conceptual structure for themselves.”
There are lots of ways to go about providing students with organizational structures for their new knowledge. In my book, I share a number of examples, including concept maps, synthesis maps, debate maps, geographic maps, timelines, and more. I was about to note that I focused on examples that used digital or analog technology, given the theme of my book, but I’m pretty sure all visualization tools use some kind of technology, even if it’s just drawing timelines on a sidewalk with chalk. I wonder if certain academic disciplines tend to shy away from visualization tools in teaching because they also shy away from using technology in their teaching. (I’m looking at you, humanities.)
Here are a few more examples of visualization tools useful for student learning, each of them a different kind of map.
Justin Shaffer teaches chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. I shared an interview with him last week focused on the ways he uses technology to make student learning visible, but we initially connected around the use of coordinate axes, like the one above. He once set up axes in a Google spreadsheet, with the vertical axes running from unethical at the bottom to ethical at the top and the horizontal axes ranging from negative impact on the left to positive impact on the right. He invited his students to name innovations of various kinds and add them to the coordinate axes whether the student felt the innovation belonged. (See screenshot below.) A cure for HIV and toilets made the first quadrant (both ethical and with a positive impact), while cloning and biological warfare were contributed to the third quadrant (not ethical, negative impact). My favorite student idea is perhaps “eradicate geese,” which was seen by one student as unethical but having a very positive impact. I love this activity as a way to surface student prior knowledge and help them start to understand the ways that we might define “ethical” or “impact.” Listen to my interview with Justin for more on how he uses this kind of map with his students.
Back when Ayla Pamukcu was a graduate student in earth and environmental science at Vanderbilt University, Ayla participated in the Teaching-as-Research Fellows program sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching and the CIRTL Network. She saw how much the students in her Earth materials lab struggled to identify unknown minerals. To help her students better understand the concepts involved in this task and apply that understanding more effectively, she had them create flow charts describing the steps frequently taken in the process of identifying an unknown mineral. The flowcharts started out very simple and not very helpful, but as the students refined their flowcharts over the course of several weeks, many of the student flowcharts became quite sophisticated, reflecting a big picture understanding of the ideas involved in this task that was made evident by the students’ performance on mineral identification tasks near the end of the semester.
I didn’t include Ayla’s story in Intentional Tech because the example of synthesis maps covered similar ground and because Ayla didn’t have any high-quality digital copies of her students’ flow charts I could share, but I’m glad to re-share it here! (I originally posted about it on my blog back in 2010.) Also, I just Googled Ayla Pamukcu, and I’m thrilled to find out she’s an assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Stanford University.
Last year I had the chance to deliver a keynote at Temple University’s Faculty Conference on Teaching Excellence. One of the things I love about attending such conferences is that I invariably sit in on a session where I hear about a teaching practice I find fascinating. At the Temple Conference, it was a lightning round presentation by art instructor Francesca Fiore about using “process maps” in her drawing courses. (Sidebar: One of those courses is called “Drawing as Research,” and I find that angle on an art course particularly interesting!) During the time of pandemic teaching, Francesca learned about a digital whiteboard tool called Milanote. In her on-site studio courses, she would circulate among her students as they worked providing them encouragement and feedback. Milanote allowed her to do that virtually as her students documented their project work through words and images on the whiteboard and Francesca left comments on their progress maps.
Returning to in-person teaching, Francesca continued having her students create progress maps in Milanote, and she cited the How Learning Works chapter on knowledge organizations during her lightning talk at Temple! She also cited Jesse Stommel’s work on ungrading, specifically that students should have a greater role in mapping their own learning trajectories. Francesca asked, “What if students could help determine the ‘shape of their learning’ in the course by providing me, and themselves, with a map of their thikning as they engage in course content?” She found her progress map assignment to be a great success, and you can read more about her approach in her Milanote map. That map includes links to several student progress maps, and here are a couple of favorites of mine: Sabrina’s map and Autumn-Brook’s map.
In each of the three examples above, the spatial relationships depicted in the various “maps” (coordinate axes, flow charts, process maps) all convey meaning. Making meaning is hard work, and I appreciate hearing about instructors who give their students useful tools for doing that hard work.