Credit: “The World Showing British Empire in Red (1922)” flickr photo by Eric Fischer shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Maps are a way to make sense of the world, whether the map is a GPS helper on our mobile device, a hand-drawn route on the back of a napkin for a friend to find their way to some place, or a planning document that gives framework to an idea or a way to remember something important.

Maps can shape our experiences. The making of maps gives us experiences to shape, turning what seems unknown into something visible.

For this CLMOOC Pop-Up Make Cycle, we invite you consider the power of mapping, in its many forms and formats, and we invite you to make maps throughout the month of November.

Consider this map, for example …

Credit: Wendy Taleo, 2017, shared under CC BY SA.

Each coin represents an activity. Pick your activities in any order and make a map with the coins to get X to join Y. You can use this map, or you can make your own.

Here are some possible ideas for mapping activities:

Couch Potato

• Watch a TED talk about maps. Will this influence your next activity?

Shaker Maker

• One of the inspirations for this Pop-Up Make Cycle is the #mapvember project. Check the website and choose a theme for the day. Create a fantastical map.
• Make a map without writing or words….maybe knit, paint, mold, 3d print, sculpt, use found objects. Push the boundaries of what we expect when we think of maps.
• Compose a Music Map. Perhaps you can use music symbols or related concepts in your map.
• Join in with our postcard project (see below for details of how to sign up), and make a postcard map.

Remix Town

• Remix one of Miska Fredman’s maps.
• The CLMOOC Make Bank has a whole section of maps. Feel free to remix any of the ideas.
• Use these maps from the New York Public Library Digital collection as the basis for a remix.

Go Retro

• How about going back to 2013 and remaking one of the old makes there?
• Or reengaging with the second ever Make With Me?
• Here are all the posts in G+ tagged ‘map’ – you could remake one of those and share it out with us.

Dig Deeper

What’s the view from your perspective? Add a pin and perspective to the collaborative mapping project The View from Here.

• Create a learning journey map (slide 22-37) for your students or for yourself. (We’re learners, too, right?)
• Un-Map the World – What would that look like? Show us what you envision.
• Imagine a Digital Literature/Digital Writing map. Lead your students into the future as they consider how literacies might change. What do they need to pick up on the way? Where will they find what they need?
• Create a map for social justice and civic action. CLMOOC friend Daniel Bassill has long used mapping as a way to advocate for action, particularly in his home city of Chicago. Explore Daniel’s blog and consider how you might use data to map out solutions to problems. Daniel would also love it if you turned some of his ideas into a cartoon.
• Tech thinker Kevin Kelly launched a project a number of years ago called The Internet Mapping Project, in which he invited all sorts of people to draw their perceptions of interactions with the Internet. You can download his template (or better yet, make your own). For inspiration, check out the maps that were submitted.
• Are you working on a novel for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) or is it GloNoWriMo? Why not map out your progress as a visual reflection? Where is your story idea going? Where has it been? What unexpected detours might have happened? How can you surface the story in a visual context?

At the end of pop-up time, create a map that is an archive of your activities from this Pop-Up Make Cycle and share it in all the usual spaces.

Possible tools:

• Thinglink
• Twine
• Coggle (intro video)
• Text2Mind

We’re using maps as our postcard theme this month. If you’d like to join us and send some postcards, go here to sign up (and add more topics if you wish!). (If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up for our CLMOOC postcard list first so you have addresses.) The way this all works is somewhat at your discretion — you can mail just one postcard to one person on the list, or make a few for a few people. We don’t expect you to send a postcard to everyone on the list — you can, but that might be a lot of work.

We will be engaging in this throughout the month of November, with hopes of getting something in the mail by November 15th (more or less — again, no hard and fast boundaries). Feel free to post what you make or what you receive in all the usual spaces. We look forward to hearing from you!

And if you missed them, here is a storified collection of some of our previous postcard work.

Have fun. Make maps!

— CLMOOC