Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

zaterdag, december 09, 2006

Mindmaps

I remember the first time I was confronted with a mindmap. It was in one of my MBA classes two years ago. The guest speaker Jef Staes only had one handout: a mindmap of his entire lesson. When I look back at it now, I can still recall his story. If I remember well, a MASIE studie revealed that only 70 to 80% of employees look back at their notes after following a classroom training. So why take all these text notes when one picture can literally say a thousand words? The more I am confronted with mindmaps, the more I like them. They are increasinly used in education to lay out the story or to summarize. Compenies find in mindmaps a useful brainstorming tool. A professor and his students made a 10+ meter one on American history. Sometimes during conferences live mindmap is drawn and projected during the speech.

First some definitions. Mindmaps are basically visualisations of ideas and items around a central topic, usually drawn in the middle. Concept maps differ from mindmaps in the links: the nature of the link is defined in a concept map, so it is rather a visualisation of relationships. Otherwise, I find the two very similar. The first image in this post is a mindmap I have drawn on requirement gaterhing for e-learning projects. The second image in this post is an example of a concept map.

There are several tools out there to make these maps. I'd like to share 3 with you:

Freemind : Freemind is a JAVA program that you can download for free here. The best thing about this open source project is that it is free. But that's about it. I find it quite ugly (looks do matter, especially for visualisation software). And when you export Freemind maps to web pages it generates text-based trees. Maybe Freemind will improve with time but for now, I'm not a fan and I'm not gonna use it any further.
Mindmanager : the most sold commercial mindmapping software, by a company called MindJet. The first image on this post (the requirements gaterhing one) is made with a trial version of MindManager. It's a very rich and easy to use program, with nice visualisations. Also exports to various formats such as web, powerpoint etc work quite well. The big negative point is its price tag: the PRO version will cost you 299 euro. That is quite a lot of money.
IHMC CMap Tools : made by IHMC, this free tool allows you to create concept maps. I did not find the time to use the tool myself yet, but I've seen a colleague using it and it looks quite straightforward and easy to use. CMapTools are for free. CMapServer is a server-based repository for CMaps and is not free for commercial use.

But by far the best mindmaps to my humble opinion are still the ones drawn by hand. The image hereunder is one I got from www.eoi.be, the site of Jef Staes who rose my curiosity on mindmaps.