Personal Geographies

An Amazon cardboard bundle has just landed on my doormat. In it is a wonderful book called Personal Geographies. It’s full of weird and wonderful maps of real and imaginary places.

As the flap says “Mapmaking fulfills  one of our deepest desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not show just continents and oceans; there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. There are maps to popular culture, from Gulliver’s Island to Gilligan’s Island; speculative maps of the world before it was known; and maps to secret places known only to the mapmaker.”

Who wouldn’t want a peek at that?

Reference: Katharine Harmon (2004), Personal Geographies and Maps of the Imagination, Princeton Architectural Press, New York



Emotional States

I’ve not much to say about this lovely circular visual schema of our emotions. Other than it’s gorgeous and enlightening at the same time.

Just look closely at how emotions intensify towards the centre (eg. Apprehension to fear to terror). And how overlapping bands of emotions combine to create another emotional or behavioural response (eg. Annoyance and interest creating aggressiveness).

I’m afraid I can’t acknowledge the source as I’ve lost the  reference.

 

Mapping Guidelines

There are many rules that Tony Buzan insists are essential for good mapping. And they aren’t. Many are simply a personal aesthetic preference, as in the case of the wavy, organic lines supposedly an accurate representation of our brain waves. I ask you!

Instead, try out these guides, tested by schools up and down the land. Amend and break them if you like. But keep checking to see that the information captured in the map is hierarchical.

What’s hierarchical information you may ask? It’s information broken down in categories, with the more abstract, higher order notion, nearer the centre of the map. And the more concrete, lower concepts or facts, at the far reaches of the branches.



How MapWise are you?

Mind mapping is used in very many schools. Government literature frequently encourages schools to use this visual thinking tool.

But from what we’ve seen in schools over the past decade, the practice has limited impact. Why’s that? The teaching of how to construct a map is not systematic and the application is restricted both in imagination and reach.

In our opinion here at Model Learning, schools are still under the spell of Tony Buzan’s New Age approach. Oh, you know what I mean: “everybody’s a genius but they haven’t yet discovered the fact but once they’ve liberated their brains from the shackles of traditional education…” and so on.
If you want to check out the rigour of your school’s approach to mapping, we invite you to take our questionnaire, shown below. Download a high resolution pdf and ask colleagues to respond.



Visualising de Bono

I first read Edward de Bono’s Mechanism of the Mind as a youngster, having spotted it on my mothers’ bookshelf. Some twenty years later, I completed his CoRT course at the then Cambridge Institute of Education under the tutelage of his formidable partner Francis Link.

I’ve seen de Bono in action, in his later years, sitting next to his beloved overhead projector in front of a huge audience of teachers. Seemingly oblivious of his audience, he proceeded to mumble and draw sketches on a roll of acetate constantly illustrating each of his ideas.

And while his books do provide some useful diagrams, his work for school students remains frustratingly short of visuals that help thinking. So at Model Learning, we’ve done something about it.

Because of the tight rein his company has over his ideas, we’ve changed all the names of his strategies. The one below we’ve called Consequence and Impact. It contains the same, and not very original, idea of imagining the future implications of current actions. Very appropriate for younger minds.

As you can see, it’s just a very simple flowchart. When pared down to their essentials, you’ll see that most of de Bono’s thinking strategies for students are rather simpler, and more obvious, than he makes out.

You can download a free Powerpoint document with several of these visualised, and alternatively titled, strategies from www.modellearning.com. Click on iDEAS for more free Powerpoint documents and posters.