Why Use Sticky Notes for Mapping?

We have traditionally used sticky notes on large pieces of paper to map out courses. Why bother with sticky notes? Why not just use a spreadsheet or work from a syllabus? One answer is that over time we've noticed that faculty who create maps using sticky notes usually come up with much better courses than those that don't.

A second answer is that our observations have been bolstered by the work of Tom Wujec, a designer who studies how we share and absorb information. In his TED Talk (below) Wujec shares the insights he has gleaned from watching people try to draw the process of making toast. It's a terrific talk if you have time to watch it. But for our purposes, Wujec points out that when people are trying to pull together the logical flow in a sequence or design that they do better when they use something like cards or sticky notes. With sticky notes,

"most people tend to draw clear, more detailed, and more logical nodes. You can see the step by step analysis that takes place, and as they build up their model, they move their nodes around, rearranging them like Lego blocks. Now, though this might seem trivial, it's actually really important. This rapid iteration of expressing and then reflecting and analyzing is really the only way in which we get clarity. It's the essence of the design process. And systems theorists do tell us that the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model. So sticky note systems are not only more fluid, they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings. The drawings are much richer.