You probably think I’m going to enthuse about the maps and their uses. Well, I’m not. Not in this post. You can find several acres of my enthusiasm for all types of mind maps at WikIT. (If acres are a suitable measure for wiki pages.)
No, not the maps themselves, those two words “mind maps”.
This is not a term that goes back centuries even though some forms of tree diagram do. So, many languages other than English have just adopted “mind maps” as well.
As a result, when we search on Twitter, we get to see what the mind mapping action is in Spanish, French and German-speaking countries. The Spanish do have mapas mentales, the French cartes heuristiques (and quite a few others), but “mind maps” is used often enough that Internet searches reveal activity in countries the world over.
And thanks to Google Translate, we can even keep up with what mappers are doing in Thailand, Indonesia and Japan.
It’s been a few months since WikIT published an extensive series of information maps prepared by medical practitioners and students studying medicine.
Recently, some excellent charts started appearing in WikIT’s uploaded files. Then a small entry was added to Medical profession’s use of mind mapping. I had to do a little detective work to get in touch with the uploader, and check that he held the copyright, but once he assured me he did, I was able to add this excellent and detailed new resource as a separate article Medical mind map sources – Zoom out – Pharmacotherapy. These go well beyond mind maps, into the field of information landscapes.
They are the work of Maha Atef, a Clinical Pharmacist and a Healthcare Quality Specialist based in Cairo, Egypt, who has his own site devoted to the topic.
Adam Sikinski’s extraordinary magnum opus the MasterMind Matrix moved into version 2.0 yesterday, just over a year after its first release. It’s impossible to display properly the breadth and scope of this – the best I can do is an overview and partial enlargement of a small area:
It is available as a pin-sharp PDF that can be enlarged to your heart’s content, and Adam has a long and fascinating explanation (a life-user manual!) on his website.
I blogged about the back-story of this at the time and its worth following that up today if you didn’t see it before. Adam has extended, updated and restructured the map, condensing a further year’s thought about how success is achieved, and how we live our lives.
University of Dundee medical mind maps links in 3D information landscape on-line. The first time you visit, please give the program time to download.
These Dundee Uni mind maps cannot be linked to directly, or downloaded, but a read-only viewer for the software needed can be accessed from a link at the same site and this allows the mind maps to be explored dynamically. This Topicscape WebView shows what is available but you will have to go to the web site to view the maps themselves. The structure in the 3D WebView reflects the way the maps are organized at that site.
The medical mind maps source Allergy Cases has maps about allergies and immunology. Links to all the allergycases.org mind maps can now be found organized in an on-line 3D Topicscape.
This is a response to a Twitter question from @danieljohnsonjr, but it is an often-discussed subject, so here’s my take (140 characters was not enough!)
I most often use a computer for the first rough-out of a mind map, because it allows for continuing change, growth and maximum flexibility. But this is probably because most of my mind maps are for my consulting business or clients. Often I mind map to organize a lot of information. Or to track information as I research a topic on the web. Here too, a computer-based map (or 3D landscape in my case) is best.
But – but – but …
Hand-drawn, paper maps really do have strengths in some areas and for some people. The physical pleasure of working with bright colors and drawing your own images (however rough – like mine) can encourage creativity and be motivational.
Choosing a hand-drawn map, which means you won’t have to worry about computer navigation or shortcut keys, can help with total focus when trying to carry out a detailed analysis of a subject.
The use of color, having items appear in the same place on the map (computer software often moves nodes to make space) and your own thinking about how to illustrate nodes (instead of ’pick a clipart image’) are said to help with learning.
Mind maps are such general purpose visual thinking aids, that there’s no simple answer to whether software or paper is best, though I’ve often seen claims to the contrary on the web.
I hope that helps.
Roy
PS – sorry there’s no mind map in this! It was quickly done to answer the question. I’ll add some later and put it in WikIT the mind mapping wiki.
A while a go, I reviewed a book called “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. Chuck Frey of the MindMapingSoftwareBlog recommended it to me, and it was one of those recommendations that change your thinking. I was very enthusiastic about it (still am) and I did a mind map of it to include in the review.
Then last night, Paul Foreman of MindMapInspiration discovered and tweeted about it (his Twitter handle is @mindmapdrawer) and it went mildly viral as @IQMatrix, @Dr_SG, @gcimmarrusti and others commented. I’m very happy about this – that book should be known to everyone.
But one witty comment from @Dr_SG caught my eye and made me think : “This an excellent map, Roy. It really lays out the important points of the book. So well, in fact, that I’m not going to read the book at all ;o)”
So here’s the dichotomy: Mind maps are supposed to help you remember things – they certainly help me, and that’s why I did the map in the first place. I found the book very convincing and wanted a quick overview to go back to. Then decided to review it briefly and publish the mind map on line.
But using the mind map as a prime source of the ideas in the book would mean you wouldn’t see all the delightful and persuasive stories, and the ideas wouldn’t be Made to Stick.
I know it was a tongue-in-cheek witticism Dr_SG, but I hope you will really read the book if you haven’t already!
Roy
BTW do not, on any account, follow @Dr_SG on Twitter, he has way too many interesting tweets for a normal person to handle )
Adam Sikinsci, someone who can challenge the world’s best mind mappers (and win), has done a ‘compare and contrast’ of several mind mapping packages and wrapped it up in the form of a guide to the mind mapping process for beginners.
He kicks it off a mind map in his own inimitable style, and follows through with a similar map rendered in four software packages, and another by his friendly rival Paul Foreman.
It’s a fascinating comparison and the textual explanation that follows allows us to share Adam’s great insight into mind mapping.
Adam Sicinski, well known to readers of this blog since the Great Hand-drawn Mind Mappers’ Face-off, has come out with a jaw-dropping mind map that some people could probably run their lives with. Cleverly called the “MasterMind Matrix” it comes either as a PDF or a laminated A0 poster (that’s A0, as in 33 inches x 47).
I corresponded with him about this to dig out the back story, and the more I learned, the more I realised that it was a tale worth telling.
Adam Sicinski is a coach – a Life Coach – and he told me of a several year search for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (not his words, I’m just a Douglas Adams fan) involving 150 books from Amazon, CDs, DVDs and seminars. He kept diaries about interactions with others, and obsessively watched recordings of reality-TV shows so he could pause and resume while making notes about what people said, how they said it and what happened as a result.
Although he knew of mind mapping back then, to him, it wasn’t the indispensable tool he finds it now. He started organizing this material into OneNote in what he would probably admit is a pretty non-visual way:
This took several weeks of full-time organization of years’ worth of materials. Suddenly, he had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments: He had become a mere Information Collector (his caps) and it was getting him nowhere - action was what he needed.
So he started formal study at the Life Coaching Institute of Australia to get practical experience and this pushed him over the ‘action’ hump. He told me that this was when the idea for a MasterMind Matrix began to take its first form one night in 2006, because he saw he had many disparate pockets of deep information with not much tying them together – there were gaps that he wanted to fill in and links to be made. He sent me a snap of an early version, and if I’m guessing rightly, I think he was using Inspiration at that stage – not at all in today’s Sicinski style.
He tells me that piecing this together filled his evenings, nights and the early hours for twelve months, but as it grew he went into another round of research and reading. By now his target was to present all this information in an easy to understand format that linked everything.
Then it got interesting – by early 2007 the chart had grown out of control. He even had it all over one bedroom wall and contemplated it before sleeping and when waking up.It was rough around the edges, which is hard to imagine if you look at it now.
Getting it to its present state took another 2 years – moving right into 2009 and its release a week ago.
I tried to squeeze something out of Adam about his process for making this type of mind map, but he’s staying tight-lipped. With a unique style like this that’s probably wise, though I’ve heard that he plans some courses around the technique.
So what does it look like? (and just bear in mind that it’s normally nearly four feet wide)
To get the value from this, it’s clear you’ll be studying it for a long time (click for a larger image).
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