If it is true that students learn more by doing than by passively absorbing information, then Google Maps offers students a blank canvas of the world on which they can create a narrative in response to the questions that are raised in a rhetoric classroom.

During the CWRL's fall orientation, Jim Brown described how Google Maps might be used in for pedagogical purposes. You can read his original blog post describing a pedagogical use of Google's My Maps feature here. Since then, other CWRL instructors have explored further uses for Google Maps which resulted in engaging active learning experiences for their students.

Sean McCarthy has developed a research-oriented use of Google Maps in his section of RHE 306. He says:

I’m lucky to have a class with a lot of energy and little fear. The response to an assignment that did little more than barely connect ‘immigration’ and ‘map’ has resulted in clever and imaginative invention. A typical pattern in the class was to start out in familiar territory (mapping the journey of the Yuma 14 in The Devil’s Highway, for example) and to gradually move out into more adventurous territory once they became familiar with the concept. One student began mapping markers of immigration between her apartment and school, which has turned into an examination of how ethnicities of various Caribbean islands become part of the deal in packaged sea cruises. A rugby fan started out by charting the history of his favorite sport across the globe and has since become fascinated by the relationship between colonialism and sport. These are only a few examples plucked from a great bunch of ideas and some clever presentations.

In hindsight, I didn’t really need to give the students a prompt—they came up with it themselves. What they have made of my vague and cliched ramblings at midterm is how movement—be it of a person, group, an idea, or a cultural practice—across physical and cultural boundaries is a transformative process. They’ve learned enough about argument this semester to realize that the world turns on how information is used and presented and argued, and they have put their shiny new rhetorical tools to good use in their maps. Notably, how my mapmakers manipulate research differs considerably between page and browser. They realize that a well-placed hyperlink or YouTube clip can tell a thousand words, that an annotated Flickr photo can move their writing away from the what to the why in a few deft clicks. Yet, to understand how to present an argument on the web, they have to understand how it works on paper. I’m finding that the interactive narrative techniques are reinforcing what they learn about more traditional rhetorical techniques.

You can see an inspired map project—a comprehensive map documenting the Tibetan Freedom Struggle's international scope in the wake of ground-breaking protests inside Tibet—by one of Sean's students here.

Krzys Piekarski, an AI who teaches the Rhetoric of Vietnam, uses Google Maps to supplement the introduction to the complex history and political underpinnings of the Vietnam conflict. By asking the students to create their own maps using a short historical text as a guide, students begin their learning journey as active creators and contributors to an amalgamated class map of Vietnam's history. Everyone's map can be seen by other class members, and the most important events are nicely captured and summarized for all to see. Rather than keeping the learning private to each individual, the entire class benefits from seeing each other's maps.

For further information, you can watch a video on YouTube describing how to use Google Maps here, or read a blog post showcasing different kinds of Google Maps mash-ups here.