Module 1

I had a lot of fun creating and sharing our Module 1 projects in class. It was very interesting to see how different everybody's map of themselves was. There was a very wide variety of types of visual maps, and it was interesting the choices people made to represent certain symbols. Some people only used text, and people, like me, only used images.

When I was making my map, I realized that a prevailing theme for everything I was including on it was the idea of education or using one's mind to its fullest potential. The top half of my map was things that I was born into and had no say in (being burn in a suburban town, and being born female)--and though these were things I couldn't change, I also had symbols to represent that I challenged those parts of me in order to become the person I am. Critical thinking is the key of my life--careful analyzation is paramount.

Because I had so many symbols on my map to represent critical thought, I made my button to say, "Think Outside the Sphere" with an image of a globe in the center. Obviously, this is a play on the saying, "Think Outside the Box," but to me, the 'box' represents man-made constraints that we create to give meaning to life, but there is so much more to this life than that. It is also a play on the symbols of my map representing environmentalism and animal rights--the environment and animal life are huge components of Planet Earth whose interests can easily be forgotten or ignored--thus, thinking outside the "sphere" means thinking about the planet and its interests as a whole.

I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I realized in class that my map follows the model of a decentralized network. Many people had their maps completely connected like a series of events, and others had themselves in the center and a centralized network expanding outward. Mine, though, had three larger images (these would be the "hubs") and smaller symbols pointing outward from those parts of the network. In the end, everything is inter-related, but I could have expressed this better had I used more arrows. If I could change anything about my project, it would be creating more of a defined network. It is difficult to decode my map without explanation because of the lack of text present. I have several symbols that can be decoded in a number of ways, depending on who is doing the decoding.