Reflections on an Interest Mapping Exercise
Maha Bali
This post is co-authored with Sherif Osman (@the_sosman), CLT Senior Officer, Pedagogy and Assessment, Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo and Co-founder and Chief Learning Designer of ERGO Ed Design According to Rockefeller Foundation's useful guidebook "Gather: The Art and Science of Effective Convening", you can design a more effective convening of people if you conduct some kind of "asset mapping" exercise at the beginning of the event. Asset mapping is described as an approach where "Participants from an existing community build mutual understanding of one another's capabilities and needs to find ways to support one another" (p. 51). We (Sherif and Maha) recently facilitated such a mapping exercise shortly after we had experienced something similar at another event. In this post, we share with you our context and thinking, and reflections on how it went. We conducted this mapping exercise as part of an event organized by our department, the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Our event included faculty, faculty developers and librarians from our own institution and a group from AMICAL institutions (AMICAL is a consortium of liberal arts institutions outside the US). Each day of the event was designed differently, with a symposium on the first day showcasing teaching innovation at AUC, a 15th anniversary celebration the second day including a student-faculty co-design session (which we'll write about later) and booths showcasing the services CLT offers. The third day was dedicated to encouraging exchange of innovations across AMICAL institutions and promoting possible collaborations. To make the most of this third day, we thought that we would start facilitating some kind of mapping of interests from day 1. We had also previously done some interest mapping based on participant applications, and we knew they were broadly interested in one of the following areas: -
Learning communities and Centers for Learning and Teaching -
Assessment -
Student Engagement -
Digital Pedagogy, Digital Literacies and Blended/Online Learning -
Digital Humanities In our brainstorming, we thought that participants at our event would fall under one of three major roles in terms of what they would want to share about themselves: -
They were learners – they were novices, seeking to learn from others -
They were enablers – they had expertise, they were willing to share with others -
They were collaborators – they were seeking to work with someone else e.g. on co-teaching or on projects or such 
We therefore created several boards where participants could pin "cards" sharing details of what they were interested in learning about under the appropriate category – and we would later cluster these by topic under sub-categories. Participants would revisit this board at various times throughout the event and on the third day, after spending time with people of similar interests, developing ideas for projects and such, start posting "commitment cards" of what they planned to do beyond the event, which they also pitched to the group orally at the end of the last day. After the event, we planned to digitize the cards and post them on a Padlet so people can return to them again. We felt the exercise was overall quite successful, but that people needed some encouragement to get started. For example, the first card was posted by one of us, and we felt people were less willing to post "enabler" cards until we started posting some. We also felt that more time allocated for intentional mapping might have served well – what we ended up doing was visit people on their breakfast tables inviting them to participate, and reminding them once in the morning session and once before lunch break on the first day. Once the board started filling up, it took on a life of its own. We felt that some people added commitment cards a little earlier than needed before having enough time to discuss things – and we think it might have been better to suggest people add commitment cards after they've had time to first focus on collaboration cards and teaming up with others. 
One other possible improvement would have been to digitize immediately as things were posted, so that people not in the room could engage, or even those present could engage outside the session times. Two other suggestions we could have done would have been to allow some form of "like" or "follow" stickers to be place on ideas, even if someone was not going to engage with the particular project directly. The other would have been to fold the card over at the bottom to make room for people to put their business cards in (especially for collaboration cards; although Maha says she never walks around with her business cards anymore). Have you conducted a mapping exercise before? What was it like? Tell us in the comments! | 
