Concept Map: Brainstorming with bubbl.us

For this concept map, I decided to take advantage of the format to create a brainstorming map for the hypothetical essay referenced in my last post. While I used to hate creating brainstorming maps, I find them continually more useful to my writing process as well as for teaching. I use them in class often to help students learn how to generate content before they begin to write. I've often been surprised when students who are initially discouraged by an assignment's topic, will quickly build self-confidence when they realize they've been able to brainstorm more than enough to write about.

After using bubbl.us, I could easily see myself allowing my students to use it to create their own brainstorming maps and creative outlines for their projects. I think it would be interesting to see how people could take advantage of it's ability to incorporate images but it's also nice as a simple way to create clean and legible brainstorming maps for typical essay writing.

Mapping Memories

As a writer and a teacher who teaches writing, I wanted to imagine a way to take advantage of Google's My Maps by using it to tell an interactive story. I decided to imagine it as a facet of a common project of mine, the memoir. The map I created would work as a modeling example for my students.

Imagine I were writing a memoir about five of my favorite places, associated with five of my favorite memories. While the memoir would rely, typically, on a standard essay format, "illustrating" the story with this map can add depth to that memoir. It becomes a map-story, a secondary storytelling device. My assignment for my students would then be to write their essay and then use the map to illustrate the key points of that essay, however they would decide.

My hypothetical memoir essay is about how most of my favorite memories are outdoors at a park, even though these days I'm a homebody. In my map below (you may have to zoom out so that you can see the whole of the U.S.), you can start at the green push pin to see why Disneyland is important to me, then click on the park table in Del Mar, the comedy and tragedy masks in El Paso, the pine tree in Huntsville, and finally the fork and knife in Chattanooga. However, for my story, I would not include a line to give a "path," allowing my reader to have some freedom. Ideally, the map and the essay will compliment each other. Each should be able to tell a story, even if that is a collection of descriptions instead of a linear plot.

In fact, I specifically like how each student as cultural cartographer could choose to indicate a path or direction for their map-story or not. This could lead to interesting conversations about plot, storytelling, and memory.



View My favorite places in a larger map

Podcasts and Social Bookmarking

My delicious page: delicious.com/shana.wolstein

My podcast: http://75842.podomatic.com/entry/2013-07-28T15_43_20-07_00

Sharing Photos

I forgot to do this for homework but here's the link to my photobucket: http://smg.photobucket.com/user/stevesbluegirl/slideshow/

For posterity...

Photobucket
While I haven't used it in years, I activated an old Photobucket account for this assignment. I don't know what I was expecting but I was genuinely surprised by how much has changed. When I first used Photobucket, it was a necessity to have the account in order to share pictures with my friends, probably through my Livejournal account that I had at the same time. This was probably around 2002-2005. And I stopped using it when it was no longer a necessity, largely because of Facebook. However, going back to it now I'm happy to say it has evolved from when I first uploaded the picture below.

What else is there for an 18/19/20-something to upload?

If someone knows the source of this picture, please let me know!

I'm happy to see that Photobucket has added so many new user options during my years of neglect, especially in terms of syncing with Facebook, that make it useable again for me. (I'm currently uploading my Facebook photos to have them backed up to another place!)

YouTube
If you go looking for it, you can find my own personal YouTube channel (that notes I was most recently active three years ago). On my channel you can watch a mediocre taping (thanks to a mediocre camera not a mediocre cameraman, thanks hubby!) of a profanity laden play I wrote a few years back called, "Hunger." Instead, I'll leave this video for you here.

John Green, a fabulous YA author, and his brother Hank (along with a crew of others that includes some of their high schools teachers), have created a few different veins of this series. All of them are combined under the umbrella of "Crash Course" videos. I recommend watching all of them! I especially love their chemistry videos, as they help me understand what my husband is doing for a living.

Google Maps
What I love about being able to add media to blog posts is our ability to use them as conversation points, whether they are markers of memory, creating a shared experience, or revisiting something we may have forgotten some details about. So, for this I decided just to add a map of something that I looked up recently, one of my favorite parks in El Paso, TX. An old high school haunt, Madeline Park.


View Larger Map
  

Wikis and Blogs and Feedly, Oh My!

A link to my new wiki: shanawolstein.pbworks.com.

     I’ve used blogs before and though blogger isn’t my favorite site (I love Wordpress!), I still love the format of blogging in general. As a creative writer though, I was nervous about creating a new blog. I find it hard to explain exactly what happened but I noticed that in writing my post for this first week, I approached it differently than the average discussion board post. Even though I don’t think people will be seeking out this blog, the lurking eyes of the internet have made me more aware of my audience. I was also excited we were assigned to create an RSS because I was an active user of Google Reader and had not found a new RSS since Reader’s demise. I found Feedly very easy to use although I miss the visual layout of the Google Reader (a static list of blogs on the side in addition to the previews in the center) whereas Feedly only seems to have a side pop-up menu. However, I’m sure this is something I can get used to as the rest of the feed is very similar.

     I really like the idea of wikis but I’ve found in my usage of them for this class so far, I’ve only used it as a kind of interlinking blog post. However, for my job I’m working on up-dating a wiki of office knowledge. I think using a wiki like this in the classroom, where students are pooling information about subject matter and in glossaries, a wiki could be extremely useful. It can also be useful in terms of solidifying a sense of community outside the classroom that encourages more meaningful interactions in the classroom.

     While I think that Dale’s Cone can be used to evaluate the use of Feedly, in terms of it’s ability to create an easily accessible pathway to resources of limitless potential, it’s easier to speak in more direct terms about it’s application in terms of blogging. Blogging allows for a variety of levels of the Cone based on the content of the post. Text posts, that use abstract verbal symbols and higher learning levels, can be combines with video demonstrations or videos of dramatized experiences. As I wrote about on my wiki, sharing blogs can lead to direct purposeful experiences by allowing for conversations and interaction with other bloggers.

     As far as “computer imagination” is concerned, I think that Feedly is still more limited in it’s use. Feedly offers a service that allows you to stay up-dated to other data-delivering services (whether they be blog or website) but doesn’t allow for user-created content outside of creating tiers of organization. However, I could see how an instructor could use this as a tool to understand those sources. Keeping track of websites that up-date on basis of quantity as opposed to on the basis of quality of the content, may allow for an English teacher to question the proposed audience of those articles in order to understand their reliability as a source. They then would answer the question of how knowledge changes over time and what kind of information may be over-produced. However, blogging is a tool this is hard to limit in terms of imaginative uses. One of my favorite blogs that have transformed how I view the genre, are those that act as experience. Many artists are able to use their blog space to create a controlled delivery system for art that takes advantage of multiple media, whether they be video, audio, or text-based, as long as they can be posted into a straightforward digital space. Blogs, as classroom tools, thus allow for a wide variety of uses with the emphasis on the ability to continue conversations outside of the classroom and to allow for a wide variety of supporting media. For me, this would be the essence of the problem that blogging answers.