I decided to create a mind map because I wanted to work with some tools which might be useful in helping students invent a piece of writing. My son had some kind of learning problem when he was young and just couldn’t get going on a writing project. While we were in Europe for a couple of years, I was home schooling him, and I used mind mapping techniques to help him learn to invent writing. It worked wonderfully. However, it seemed very far from my own very linear and rigid processes.

Many of my students, in fact most of them, are more like my son than they are like me, and they need alternative methods of invention strategies. I think in this assignment I have discovered an easy way to use digital tools to do mind mapping. I did this in WORD after watching an 8 minute video—thus, this would be easy to move into an online learning class. And in two sessions over a period of two days, I had it done. I know I could take my map and turn it into an essay now if I needed to.

I crafted this map to reflect the teaching options at my school. We only offer f2f class, hybridized, and purely online (normally with a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous materials). Given those parameters, how does shifting content and teaching decisions change from mode to mode? But more importantly for me was thinking like a rhetorician. My field is rhetoric, so I’ll be teaching my students rhetoric in these online environments. How can I think rhetorically about teaching rhetoric in an online class? This mind map was the result of that thinking.

I had a draft of the three modes and the various rhetorical considerations that I, as a teacher, needed to make as I rethink or redesign a course. But I knew something was missing. Some good questioning from a reviewer led to my adding the materials in dark orange on the right of the map. These items helped me move from abstract concerns in each category to thinking about how in particular a teacher might implement design and teaching strategies into the classroom to solve the questions and problems raised by each rhetorical lens. I know this is not complete, but it is certainly a beginning in pre-planning an online course.

It would have been much more familiar to me and easy to write an essay analyzing these modes of teaching, referencing scholarly work—that is a way of thinking in which I am highly competent. I am pleased that I spent more time in working with these digital tools in a less argumentative style (though my own rigid and linear proclivities show in its design!). It’s a kind of window into the issues that the students face when getting one of my assignments. I’ve always thought that teachers ought to write with their students, do the assignments—it grounds the teacher in the students’ world better.