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Connect the dots
by Jukka Purma
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last modified 2008-06-19 11:41
Or 'Travel the subject area with tickets'If the subject of course has clear borders -- timeframe, area, anatomical area, some ecosystem etc, it often divides itself into subsections and research topics. However, having a student or group to do project from one of these topics or subsections easily transforms into learning something about one special topic and repeating it to other students. It gets difficult to grasp the whole picture. One way to really explore The way how course material is organized usually provides one route that goes through all of the topics in some order. Topics that are too close to each others in course material are not so good, as the most interesting routes are between two far-away subjects. So we'll find unintuitive combinations by picking topics randomly. Course material is usually organized so that subjects that are closely related are also close to each other in time spent studying and the flow of text tries to create links between sections and chapters. This creates the basis for some subjects being 'close' to each others and their relationship being easy to explain by just repeating what was said in course material. One quick and easy method for creating topics is to take all of the subheadings from the text (you don't have to use only headings, add keywords and interesting bits as you like) and write each of them to small piece of paper. Now each student picks randomly two of these 'tickets' and then student and teacher together try to figure out if there could be any meaningful connection between them, connection or story worth telling. If the connection is obvious, then one of the tickets is dismissed and another ticket taken. If the connection is difficult to find, but can be found, then the task is good. Student doesn't have to understand the route yet, but teacher should provide some hints about where to go. When several students share one same ticket in their route, it should be possible to connect their routes too, but at this point there can rise differences between interpretation of topic. This happens in science all the time and should be noted. At some point it will be natural to draw a map of all of these topics and draw the links that students have created into it. The original 'text-book-route' should also be there. With older students essay topics can be created this way, but again, choosing the two topics should be supervised so that obvious ones are not used. |
