Reflection on Mind Maps
Hello,
Thank you for the fabulous and detailed presentation group 9! As I went through your presentation and reflected on what I have learned this week, here are my thoughts. As we learn, we have a good sense of the ideas and concepts that we encounter. I think mind mapping allows us to reflect this learning process of ours. Mind mapping would require us to apply our new ideas/understandings to our prior knowledge which will connect it to our web of related schematic knowledge. Through the activity by diagramming our understanding of the concept with the online mind mapping tool, it not only allowed us to collaborate in an online environment but also shows a reasonable understanding of the material from each of us. Having that using an online mind mapping tool to illustrate our ideas/concepts forces us to organize the material, therefore we psychologically organize and process the information and relate it to our prior knowledge. The mind mapping tool would also create nice colourful, neat and tidy mind maps that would make it as a good piece to be utilized towards studying.
However, I think that mind maps are only effective when they are small so that all the information fits within one page. As the mind map grows bigger, more scrolling would be required and visualizing the connections would be more difficult which can lead to frustration and learners can lose the trace of what is related to what.
Karon
Posted in: Week 09: Visual-Intensive Learning
Sherman Lee 11:36 pm on July 5, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Karon,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I do agree that simple mind maps that fit on one page tend to be easier to read. Do you think there’s a difference between who is reading the map? That is, if the author is reading the map versus an outsider. Would that affect the level of complexity that one can include? Along the same path, do you think this effectiveness issue that you have identify could lead to some new venture opportunity in the world of mind mapping?
Cheers,
Sherman
karonw 3:32 pm on July 7, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Sherman,
I think that it would always be easier for the author to read the mind map that they created over an outsider especially if it was a complex map that was not organized well. However, if the map was well-organized then the visual representations would benefit to the human’s visual processor as it makes visualizing and understanding large amounts of information easier for the reader and the reader can read the information as a whole rather than trying to link pieces of information from the mind map to make sense of what is being presented to them. Perhaps, mind mapping tools can incorporate a way to better present visual information, many of them right now actually allows you to hide the information bubbles and hover over it to review the detail so that the map wouldn’t be over cluttered and would be more organized, I think something a long that line would benefit the world of mind mapping.
Karon