Hi all,
First of all, thank you! I did not expect that kind of feedback :)
@Kevin - I do think spheres would be much more realistic and interesting, especially as there is much more space to navigate that. In terms of method to achieve such a "diagram", the first thing that comes to mind for me is Google Sketch Up, the free 3D drawing software. However, I've never used it and a) I didn't feel write trying to learn a whole new program to "impress" and b) I was lazy.
I do wholeheartedly agree that it's interesting to see how people are presenting themselves, though there is a bit of pressure to make it interesting, which I think is great but perhaps a bit intimidating.
I'm going to take the colourful comment as a compliment :)
@Paul - Communication is an integral process to interrelationships, which is how I perceive the world. Our definition of identity is dependent on others, either directly (e.g. I am a girlfriend and teacher) or indirectly (e.g. I like to cook, therefore somebody had to be there to harvest/ship/sell the food to me and provide recipes). For me, I started the diagram with Communication and went from there. Coming from a background in psychology, I find communication very central because language = thought = humanity, and I learnt to think from somewhere, right?
For curation, that is more of a recent addition, much like your introduction, about the "harvesting" of all the knowledge that is out there. An avid reader, I gobble up information and now need to develop new ways of processing the digital age for it to be useful. (I've only recently come to ponder on curation, which is partly why this course is so interesting.) I see that as a learning process, both in the strategies I use and in their output => education.
So, I weed all the information which is thrown at me. Both for my personal interests and specifically in the work that I do. For the former, it can be explicitly, in my RSS reader, or implicitly, taking the bits and pieces of an article or what somebody says that I find useful and memorable. For the latter, I collect resources for my students and I write articles about international development.
Now, the extent to which that is curation is debatable, and naturally there's more to it that just these few lines, but that's for another task!
Otherwise, I thought of the concept of overlapping circles because htere is always a tiny portion which stands more alone than the rest, but the concept is pretty infinite, I think.
Then again, these are just my two cents.
As to the creation of the diagram, I really didn't plan that much :P I used Photoshop with various coloured vector masks to make circles and then put some type in the middle. I had a few vague ideas about what I wanted to include and have it in different colours, but I kind of made it up as I went along and then made a few minor adjustments so that it would all fit. I also originally thought of spheres, as did Kevin, but then I figured that was too hard so let's go with a funky Venn!
Best,
Shaz
I am a Teacher of English in a suburban Boston high school, where I teach in face-to-face, blended, and online environments.