Monday 23 November 2009

Learning Agreement Build-Up


The bottom map from the picture above is the closest I could come to defining what I am looking at as a subject at this point of developing an academic argument. I realize that I went through a process of communicating my area of interest, from describing a singular entity of a vastly chaotic idea, to illustrating it in a collection of more comprehensible 'signs' that can relate to a decipherable 'code'. The key word I found in this fourth stage of ZOOMing in is 'Antithesis'.
This was the 'node' that allowed Stuart Hodges, my supervisor in the MA, to relate to and comprehend what I was talking about, as set in the context of this 'map', and therefore help me finally FOCUS. I am still a mind-map away from actually achieving it.
It has been a tough race with time and information-handling, through a 'jungle' of different theoretical approaches, but now I can see the path that leads to the finish-line. This is an enormous relief, as the fear of being 'lost' was immense despite the fact that I never allowed myself to lose the confidence that it can be done and I am the only one who can do it, because it is my 'original' concept. The more original a concept is, the hardest it is to communicate before it is somehow materialized - visualized.
I have more or less read more than ten books that inform my subject, within in the last month alone, and countless on-line articles and wikipedia definitions... and still my language is primal and insufficient. The practice part of my project (and therefore the finish-line to the race) is yet invisible but I'm positive that (I know) it exists as it is already illustrated in a not-yet deciphered part of the 'map'. The extreme difficulty is partly due to the multi-disciplinary nature of my subject or to put it in Photoshop language, it is like a multi-layered document of which only one layer is seen at the time when I try to communicate it in the tutorial time. It involves as I realized with the second map in the above image, Design, Sociology, Politics, Marketing and Business, Philosophy, Film-studies, Web Architecture and even Physics, Maths and Biology. And that isn't the full list.

Missing a few that I have read and having not yet read in full some of the ones in it, the photo below is like a mind-map on early stages. Not a good example of how to work faster, but a good one of how contextual information is built and appropriate language acquired.

Bottom left is my first mind-map, bottom right my 'reflecting journal' 'sketch'-book.

This post is in celebration of me finding a way out of a maze of non-communication.
I'm still in the maze.

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