Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

I'm a fan of visually structuring your thoughts, notes or even e-learning menus via mindmaps, and I've blogged on them before.

Lately, new complete web-based mind mapping tools have changed the landscape a bit. You can read on tools like mindmeister, meadmap or spinscape on the WebWare blog.

My new favorite mindmapping tool however is mindomo.com. It has a nice flash-based interface and an Office-like menu, and you can share your maps with anyone you wish to. The resulting maps are visually appealing and allow for notes and links. In the free version the number of private maps you have is limited, so they offer a paying service too. But you probably want to try it for yourself. And right you are in doing so.

PS Update: another site for making simple mindmaps is Text2MindMap.com . It does pretty much what the title suggests.

Labels: mindmaps, mindomo.com

• 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.























DECISION : one of the items on about2findout.com will be maps. These maps will be used to link the squares.

Labels: cmap, freemind, mind manager, mindmaps

At work we have an innovation team, and they gave a presentation on web 2.0 some months ago. Their handout was this mindmap which I find excellent. With one look it covers key aspects. I'm publishing it here with kind permission of Michel, Simon and Ralph. Thanks guys!

(It's made with an evaluation version of MindManager - click on the picture to enlarge).

Labels: mindmaps, web2.0