We’ve all had those experiences where we were seeing a map of something familiar, but it was being shown in a way that made it unfamiliar. I remember seeing my first aerial map of some acreage my father owned and struggling to make sense of it. All of a sudden, my visual understanding of creeks, hills, and canyons was challenged by a different way of seeing those things.
Most of us have had similar experiences with topographical maps, X-rays, CAT Scans, and information bar charts. We carry around a notion of how something really is in our heads and then have that notion challenged when it’s shown to us from a different perspective.
It’s all about how we see things. Graham Wegner picked up on this in his recent post on visualizing learning networks. Actually “seeing” the information network and paths of knowledge that make up our learning can radically change the way we go about doing our work.
I was thinking about this when I saw a post on BoingBoing about a site called Cab Spotting. As the site says, “Cabspotting traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible.”
I think that’s when the significance of perspective– seeing things differently — really hit me. It was with the line “It hints at trends that are otherwise invisible.” Before I saw the Cab Spotting map I might have assumed that I was seeing things pretty clearly. But then I was shown a new perspective on the same information and I did start to see invisible patterns. I started to see things differently.
This, of course is the nature of and reason for creating new maps or views of our worlds. These new views confirm or dismiss our previous assumptions about things, and they stimulate us to conjure up new hypotheses about the reality we are living.
In the physical sciences this happened dramatically with the development of the telescope and microscope. The same has happened over the last 150 years with other discoveries in biology, physics, medicine, anthropology, psychology, literature, and, yes, education. From the lecture halls of humanities to space-age laboratories and super computers, our current era of rapid-fire information and discovery has given us new maps and new perspectives.
Lately, in the edublogging sphere, we’ve seen and heard a growing discussion about “Telling a New Story.” The idea is that we need to move towards a different understanding of learning and a different form of instruction. In other words, we need a new map for education. I happen to embrace this call for change, but I’m also aware that I have a personal stake in the outcome of the argument. My writing, my business, and my teaching are all affected positively by the New Story and adversely by the Old Story. Unfortunately, that tends to make me less interested in seeing things from too many different perspectives.
But knowing that the real secret to understanding is gaining new perspective — is seeing things differently — I start wondering about what else I should be mapping. I look at Cab Spotting and visualized learning networks and I ask myself what other invisible things am I missing?
Perhaps, instead of spending so much time on the obvious, I should be spending more on what I am not seeing, what I cannot see, and what I have trouble imagining. I’m not sure exactly what that means in terms of education, but I do know that I plan to spend more time looking for new maps in the future, and opening my thinking to whatever new information those maps can reveal.
I think I’ll call it my personal treasure hunt.
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