I appreciate (and almost always use) visual representations when mapping out an essay, a topic, or an argument. As I understand it, creating this bedraggled daisy should help folks organize and explore their research. However, for these purposes, I feel as though it's an ineffective activity. My personal preference for visual representation of ideas is a mind map, where I can organize ideas in relation to each other. A mind map allows you to connect ideas to one another so that you can see common and overlapping connections. In contrast, the daisy forces you to try and fit all of your ideas into a daisy - it would be really difficult to add petals after the fact! For this reason, I found this daisy activity more limiting than anything.
In any case, here's my bedraggled daisy:
I agree with your post, Ling! I too felt that the activity was limiting. I had to brainstorm my words before making my daisy. I then had to draw the daisy twice because I decided I needed more petals and wanted to move around my words. In my INF1005 Workshop with Stephen Abram, we talked a lot about Multiple Intelligence Theory. This theory would likely argue that while this activity was frustrating to us, there is likely many people who organize their ideas differently than us and would love this activity as a way to visually and artistically piece together ideas. Still, like I said in my own blog, at least this activity gave us an opportunity to brainstorm potential searchable subject word we can use while researching secondary literature.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you! I just wanted to create a mind map, I felt I was so restricted trying to limit my topics to petals. Especially when we have the chance to draw it out, I feel that leaves more room for brainstorming and expanding your topics, even making connections. I don't like the way the daisy limits this. I can see how it is good to come up with main topics, but I still think a mind map would work better for me!
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