This article, which appeared in Prodigal Son magazine, is a nice, brief overview of the process of mind mapping.
Life: Career:: Mind Mapping
Mind mapping is a technique that organizes your thoughts and ideas into a visual map or diagram that is easier to process. It can be quite useful in brainstorming or problem solving, and some pastors, like Ed Young, use it to organize their sermons. If you would like to learn how to mind map, Innovation Network offers the following 8 easy steps to mind mapping.
It is a reprint of an older article in the Church Relevance weblog. I found another article on Church Relevance pointing to bubble.us as a tool that may be used fororganizing sermons and ideas, with an example of a mind map created in bubble.us. Theres a similar, more recent article about using bubble.us in the context of a church service at the Church 2.0 weblog with a really nice example of how a bubble.us map may be embedded into a web page.
The Church Relevance article mentions Pastor Ed Young, who makes his incredible sermon mind maps available for sale to other pastors and interested parties. He links to some examples in this article from a while back.
It would be nice to see more of this sort of thing. Spirituality, with its vast and endless ontology of ideas, texts, and values is an ideal area to apply visual thinking to.
I wrote a guest post for the MindMapping 2.0 blog about linking to external documents in desktop mind mapping software as opposed to the kind of linking that you can do in web-based mind mapping software.
Mindmapping 2.0: Linking to External Documents: Desktop Software vs. Web-Based Software
One of the primary concerns when deciding whether to implement a particular mind map in desktop mind mapping software or web-based mind mapping software is the issue of linking the map to related documents.
Wall Street fat cat Merlin Mann sees the future …
One reason your boss is so twitchy | 43 Folders
I think one of the emerging leadership skills of the next five years will be learning how to do brilliant filtering — either programatically or by delegating information-sorting to others. To ultimately become someone whose system accounts for incoming data in smart ways and who never has to make excuses about too much stuff.
Tinderbox 4 has been updated. Even the point-point releases of this software make me drool.
Mark Bernstein: Tinderbox 4.0.1
Despite the small version bump, it’s got some important infrastructure. Get it. As usual, you can upgrade from any previous version for $90, and it’s free if you upgraded in the past year.
- Notes and Agents check syntax of rules and actions
- Comparison and equality operators in actions are more flexible
- New numerical operator for modulo arithmetic
- More control over inheritance of prototype children
- Better handling of email sent to Tinderbox
Lots of other improvements and fixes, too. See the release notes, in the Help menu.
Here is a nice comparison of computer and hand-drawn mind mapping. The author presents two mind maps that were produced in these two different styles with similar purposes in mind.
Peace of Mind: Style Comparison
This posting includes two maps used to collate recipes.
See also: Peace of Mind: Manage Information Using Drag and Drop
To help fill the demand for Chinese language education for foreign learners with a real competitive advantage, HaFaLa Chinese incorporates mind maps as well as animation and story into an innovative learning package.
Catching the Book Worm — china.org.cn
In collaboration with Mindmap Research Institute (Shanghai) and the Chinese Character Research Institute, the Shanghai-based Taotu Animation Technology Co Ltd has published a series of multi-media toolkits for overseas Chinese-language learners.
Based on the Mind Mapping methodology, the so-called Hafala Chinese learning tool enables non-Chinese learners to acquire 2,500 Chinese characters in a systematic way within months, according to Elizabeth Yu, from Taotu.
William Gibson’s blog had a post about the music he was listening to. This led me to checking out the Drive-By Truckers on iTunes and collecting some semi-related alt-country albums I want to buy later. I know too well how easy it is to buy everything I see on iTunes, so I often do this kind of mind map so that I can return to the albums and artists I thought I liked late one night and try them out again later. MindManager is perfect for this, because I can preserve all sorts of weird associations that would be difficult to maintain otherwise.
Click on the image for the full mind map.
I have been a huge fan of PigPog’s post about his nowMap templates and method for months. It’s sort of a loose-form concept mapping to help you get it together as you go about your day. I have used them when away from computers and running around, and also while sitting at computers. However, I also like to keep something similar in MindManager. It’s a little different, because MindManager doesn’t do concept mapping. I haven’t found this to be any trouble at all, since I will print these out, with the background, and write all over them while I’m running around or away from computers. Since the information is split between the computer and my written notes, it saves me some data entry time.
Here is what they tend to look like (click for a larger version). The data is falsified, but it should be obvious to anyone reading this that I need a vacation.
I have a template that I use to pop these maps out as quickly as I need them, and a style that I can use to convert any map to this look. I use styles a lot to organize my maps so that I can see at a glance when I switch to MindManager and tab through my documents what sort of thing I’m working on.
I’ve made the template, the style, and a converted image of PigPog’s template that you can try out as a background (though this isn’t a very flexible option … it’s easy to run out of space) available as a download:
NowMap.zip
You can also try printing the original template first, and then printing your map on top of it, turning off the printing of the background image. I got this idea from a similar topic at the Mindjet forum.
This has been one of my favorite websites for years and years …
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Cognitive Daily: The difference between familiar and unfamiliar worlds; or, evidence that Steve Higgins is a real graduate student
“When you look at a scene: a building, a park, a mountain, your visual system processes the information differently from when you look at a single object: a face, a pen, or a coffee mug.”
The paper is available here.
