I’m marginally participating, here and there, in #clmooc: Making Learning Connected MOOC. I would participate more, but for the past few weeks I’ve been: (1) finishing up ds106 (and yes, I know it’s never really finished! Most of my ds106 projects are posted on a tumblr, here), (2) moving out of my apartment in Melbourne, Australia where I’ve lived for a year on sabbatical, (3) travelling, (4) making the journey home to Vancouver (I’m still on #4 right now, waiting in an airport with a delayed flight).
At any rate, one of the projects in #clmooc for this week is to make a map–a map of anything you want. I chose to make a mind map of what I’ve been doing over the past few months, as a result of my participation in #etmooc, the Educational Technology and Media MOOC that took place Jan-March 2013. #etmooc had a profound impact on me and my work, which I wanted to capture in a mind map.
After doing a search for free mind mapping software, and finding ,this Wikipedia page I decided to give Mindmup a try. I liked that it is open source and free, and that it seems pretty easy to start using. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s quick to learn how to use and to make a map. You can include links just by typing in the URL, and it automatically turns it into a link. Apparently you can add attachments too, though I didn’t try that.
The one thing I wanted to do but couldn’t was to add a “parent” to the main parent in the middle, which is #etmooc itself. I wanted to just say that I heard about #etmooc through Twitter, through my PLN. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Oh well; I’m happy with it otherwise.
You don’t have to create an account to create a map, though I don’t know how you can save it on their site w/o an account. I saved it to Google Drive, but you can also save it to GitHub if you want.
You can get an embed code for your site if you save it on Mindmup (which you can ALSO do after saving it on Google Drive or GitHub). That’s what I used below. I like how it works on the blog–you can resize it and move around it…nice!
#ETMOOC: Educational Technology and Media MOOC, Jan-March 2013 http://etmooc.org on MindMup