Beth Cougler Blom

Colleen thanks for your thoughts and ideas! I think the 'guess whose tree this is' might be a fun variation on this activity. And I think returning to it later in a course might be interesting as well, particularly if the 'future-focused' piece could be expanded upon/revealed more based on new concepts/ideas that had come up in the course that might affect someone's thinking and planning etc.

I'm glad you tried to make a tree. It's neat to actually go and DO the other person's ideas here, isn't it? Because in the doing, we get a bit more insight into what is easy and hard about the process. And it's not always what we thought it would be in the beginning.

PS Just as a fun aside, I'm sending a photo of a 'listening' tree that I saw at the Amazon Spheres office in Seattle a week or so ago. It was an interactive art installation. I wonder if we could riff off of that idea? The prompt could be something like, "What is important to you in your world right now? What questions and statements would you place on your listening tree that you want others to hear?"

Gina that's a great riff on this - I hope one of us gets a chance to try it!

Thanks for your thoughts Hillarie. Yes I think in some courses this might really be appropriate to the content of the course as well as to the building of community.

I haven't done this activity before but here is something I created based on the Prune the Future activity that is available from Gamestorming.

In the original version of the activity, which is written up as a paper-based activity, a person would ask participants/students to create a large tree that represents "current states" and "multiple categories of the future". It's meant to help people think of current reality/future desired state stuff.

An image of the hand-drawn version from Gamestorming is here.

So, translating this to a community-building activity and changing somewhat the prompts to reflect that, here are some proposed instructions:

• "The roots": Where did you come from? What contributed to making you who you are today?
• "The trunk and lower leaves": What grounds you? What shows up a lot in your life? What things are part of your life right now that are important to you?
• "The upper and further reaching leaves": What does the future look like for you? What are your dreams and things you'd like to still accomplish? Where is your life leading you? (Hint: Using question marks or another way to indicate the future elements will help us "read" your tree.)
  

These are great comments Hillarie. Potentially we could ask the students/participants to actively find strings of connection to each other. For example, an instructor I know at RRU has a "Six Degrees of Separation" assignment (not activity, it's actually graded), in which she asks people to actively search for - and detail back to the class - ways that they are connected to each other. I can ask her if she would be willing to share this assignment to post here if you would like to see how this works? There are four parts to that assignment.