At the end of last week I attended the two-day ‘MIDAS VII' conference: our six-monthly standing business meeting and the annual research student conference, hosted this time around by The Royal College of Music in London. Darla Crispin (RCM Head of Graduate School) was our chair for these couple of days, which she ran with her usual light touch and perceptivity. She was running (in the other sense) the London marathon the day after the conference, which I hope turned out well for her—it was a very hot day for the runners, I think.
I few delegates asked about the software application I used during the ‘reportage’ session at the end of Saturday. I said I’d write a few notes here about this and the other two programmes I’m using on trial for doing that sort of electronic whiteboard job.
The app I used on Saturday afternoon is Cmap. You can read about it and download it here. Their website practices what they preach: it takes the form of a hyperlink-rich concept map itself. It’s freeware, the result of a research project funded by a consortium of American universities; there are versions to run on most platforms. I was using it in a very simple way, just to record key notions and cluster these according to their themes. I tend to use it in my teaching and supervising this way and have been doing for a few weeks. It seems very stable. You can link ideas by lines (as per a ‘mind map’), but the software is actually designed to build what it calls ‘concept maps’. As far as I can tell, without delving very deep in to theory, the difference between these ways of representing relationships is that ‘concept maps’ always include a word on the linking line to describe the nature of the link. At the moment, I find this more annoying than helpful. I’d much rather be free to choose whether to record this definition or not, which is very easy to add to a mind map (via an intermediate node) if I want to.
I use the programme frequently and as a ‘digital whiteboard’, it works well. You can colour nodes very easily and group them (then expand or minimise the group) in a couple of key-strokes. It produces an attractive map and has the most gentle of learning curves. You can save your maps in the programme’s own format (which you can share in an online ‘soup’ as they call it … you are given storage space on the university’s server when you sign up to download the programme) or as PDF, JPG, XML and a few other media that I don’t know about!
It’s Cmap’s pleasing visual output that pulls me away from Tinderbox when I’m preparing a map to share with a group. Tinderbox (currently OS X only; Windows in development) is a more sophisticated environment in which to think, not least with its integral multi-perspective ways to read the same data, but it’s a bit ‘bare bones’ in appearance: rather muddy default colours; square boxes (that don’t expand to fit text contents without a bit of work); no ‘snap to frame’ possibility. It’s a very good piece of software for organising ideas, for sure, but although I trust it’s an attractive piece of code (I’m sure the developer would have it no other way), it is not itself very attractive. Can we have brains and beauty in one parcel, or is that going against the natural order of things?
Finally, Mindjet's MindManager (OS X and Windows). This is new to me, but I’ve got off to a good start with it. My gripe is that the programme tends to presuppose that the items you record in it are linked (as opposed to “might be going to be linked”). As soon as you place one item near other, it connects them. Now, my way of thinking is to ‘brainstorm’ my ideas first (i.e., scatter them to the four winds) and then work out their relative proximities and relationships. The programme prefers you to build your map in a more systematic manner than I like to, but I’m sure some will find this less of a bug-bear than I seem to.
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3 comments:
Have you seen Topicscape? That can produce a form of concept maps also, but in 3D. The new Beta lets you add the all-important verb phrases between nodes, like cmap.
If you want to look at it, you'll find it at http://www.topicscape.com
MindManager has a "Brainstorm Mode" where you can get all your thoughts done first, separate them by hitting the return key and then piece your map together after the fact. You should check it out.
Gaelen
Thanks for that suggestion, Gaelen, but having explored this possibility further, it still doesn't quite fit my working method. What I would like to see is each new idea starting out as a 'floating topic' (in MM terms) and for me to be able to link those topics “how I see fit, when I see fit” by some simple click-and-drag process (as in CMap or Tinderbox). It's not immediately obvious how to weave links between floating topics and the world outside them once they have been created initially in that category. Coming at the problem from the other side, the 'brainstorming mode' always links new ideas to the central topic, whether I sense that the link is there or not (we could split hairs and say that there must be some sort of link, if only at the level of free association, but that would be to miss my point). Neither of the assumptions made by the application suits my way of thinking-out-loud-visually. I want my ideal whiteboard to work just like a set of Post-It™ notes: I put them up one-by-one and then I set about arranging them. Their hierarchical relationships (if any) are revealed to me through the act of playing with them in space; for me to feel entirely free to do this, no formal links should exist between them a priori.
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