Mind Mapping Meets Wikipedia

As a strong advocate for any tool that aids the learning process, I have to give a PG rating (Pretty Great) to http://www.wikimindmap.org. So, let's say for instance that we want to continue our learning on RSS news feeds.

1. Visit the site http://www.wikimindmap.org
2. Set the appropriate language, which if you're reading this you'll probably want to set it to en.wikipedia.org.
3. Enter a topic like RSS

or go directly to the results by clicking below: http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=RSS

Tags: Classroom, Higher Education, Learning, Teaching, Mind Mapping, RSS, Web 2.0

New HP Tablet PC—2710P

Diigo (social bookmarking with annotation capabilities), Mindjet Mindmanager (idea mapping software), and Biblegateway (with Diigo) all make more sense when you are a tablet PC user. I have had my HP branded TC4200 for almost three years now and I still give it high marks for durability and usability. But, here's the interesting news—HP Compaq is going to ship their newest version of the tablet PC in Q3 2007. The following video does a great job of showing some of the features in the HP 2710P.

http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=823361919

Concept Mapping to Mind Mapping

I had an excellent Biology Professor at Huntington University (www.huntington.edu) that taught me about "concept mapping". As much as I enjoyed the class for its subject matter, I really appreciated his "concept mapping" style notes, that he used during the lecture. On a casual glance it might look pretty intimidating, hard to read (looked like chicken scratches--especially from the back of the classroom), but oddly enough, it made sense to me.

It looked a bit like the following:

In addition to defining many different words that pertain to the world of biology, I found it very helpful to understand the relationships between these defined words. Maybe you could talk about this as the "ontology" of these words. If you define "ontology" as the interaction between entities within a specific domain (in this case biology), I think it works.

While this was helpful to me, it had its limitations. This wasn't your classic outline that moved from right to left and down the page. This "map" from a theoretical standpoint had "flexibility" built-in, but in the real world this free flowing idea map became a problem when you hit the edge of the paper (or the chalkboard, as was sometimes the case).

Another shortcoming, when you looked at the "map" for a while you would begin to understand new connections, but making edits could be a challenge. Your best option was to draw a connecting line between the entities that where you had discovered another relationship.

The good news is--some things have changed in the last 15 years. It turns out that the world is a bit more digital now than it was before. Paper and chalkboards/whiteboards are still important, but the digital world brings with it some new options.

What used to be called "Concept Mapping" is more well known today as "Mind Mapping". And there a plethora of mind mapping software based tools available. You can find a comprehensive list of these at: http://www.mind-mapping.org/. I really can't speak to these other tools, but I can tell you that I appreciate the features I have found in a mind mapping tool called "Mind Manager" (www.mindjet.com).

One big problem solved! My virtual paper has no edges and ideas can be moved around easily.