Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 4: Improving Research

This is the final part of a guest series on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

Article 4: Using mind mapping for research
If you have had a chance to read the other articles in this series, you will have noticed that there are a few things that are unique to mind mapping. These include:

• The ability to easily combine many information types in one document
• The natural proclivity toward information chunking
• The ability to get a birds’ eye view of information—and to drill down to details.

Each of these qualities can be a big help when conducting research.

Combining information types
As I said before, mind maps make it easy to combine URLs, images, video, audio, and ideas in one document. The resulting “information object” truly reflects the state of information in the 21st century. For all the advances that have been made in technology, the average research still resembles something created in the middle of the 20th century: pages of type, maybe with an occasional image or graph, the obligatory footnotes, citations, etc. It’s kind of dry—especially for today’s students who live in a very rich media world.

But this isn’t simply a matter of form. The goal is to help students learn. I can remember as a kid having to do a “report” on Mexico. All it really involved was collecting what I recall as almost a foot-tall stack of pamphlets, articles, and tourist brochures. It wasn’t about interacting with the information. It was about seeing how much you could collect.

With mind maps, you can collect a staggering amount of information because you can quickly hide all but the small portion you want to deal with at any given moment. But what is different about mind mapping is that you can hide 99% of this information and concentrate on the 1% you need to focus on at any given moment. Furthermore, the visual nature of the mind map interface enables you to navigate effortlessly from one information point to another, inserting your comments adjacent to each “chunk” of information in the map.

Download the full example lesson via Google Docs.

Final note
I hope that this series of articles has got you thinking about providing your students—and yourself—with a tool that matches the way the human mind prefers to work. Unlike more linear tools, mind mapping allows users to cast their nets widely—to brainstorm and capture all of their thinking on a topic. By supporting the natural movement from divergent to convergent thinking, mind mapping keeps students from getting trapped at the start is overly narrow lines of investigation.

Mind mapping then provides users with a way to rapidly combine into one document many kinds of information—and to add to that pre-existing data their interpretations of and insights about that information. You and your students can build these fantastically complex and complete information objects. Then they can choose to restrict the information view and concentrate on one point at a time.

Finally (and this may seem trivial), mind mapping give students the ability to add creativity to the often tedious process of conducting research. By changing fonts, adding icons (like the lit bomb on the branch about ethnic cleansing), and inserting photos or clip art, students can in a way personalize their information gathering. This simple step of adding visual interest to a body of information adds a personal dimension to what is often a very impersonal process. And it can help student create visual cues that will draw their interest and attention immediately back to key information.

I said this before in this series, but I think it bears repeating: Today’s students swim in a multimedia world the likes of which few teaches experienced at such an early age. By providing students with a tool they can use to recapture some of the “polymorphous perversity” of the modern information landscape, teachers can enliven the education process, making learning more creative, thoughtful and, dare I say it… fun.

Hobart Swan is a professional writer who has worked with mind mapping tools and companies for the past 20 years. To see an example of a book Swan organized using mind mapping, visit www.cancercode.com. Swan has worked for two leading mind mapping companies, CS Odessa, maker of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, and Mindjet, maker of MindManager.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 3: Improving Student Writing

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 3: Improving Student Writing

This is the third part of a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom. This part focuses on improving student writing.

Students swim in media-rich waters
One of the keys to good writing is good preparation. But rare is the student who loves to dig into that most important of preparatory documents: the outline. I tend to think of it more as a “pre-writing document.” When most people think of outlines, they imagine line upon line of text. A pre-writing document is something more befitting the resources students have at their disposal these days.

Kids live in a media- and information-soaked culture. To require them to work in a landscape dominated by text may seem to some akin to carving their thoughts on the tusk of a whale. More appropriate--at least for the pre-writing phase--may be to give them the tools to create rich, multimedia aggregations of insights, images, and information. As I will explain, this may require no more than giving them access to a single mind-mapping application.

Start with divergent thinking
Creation of the standard outline may well be a prime cause of the dreaded blank page syndrome. Even the most seasoned writer can falter when faced with the gaping maw of a blank screen. What, the emptiness taunts, is that one very first thing you want to address. It’s too much pressure. Who know what they want to think of first, then second, then third.

A new mind map, while still nearly blank, offers one small, lifeboat-shaped haven. In the center is a small shape into which you can enter a word or two to describe the purpose of the map.

Let’s call this map: Memoir. For this writing assignment, you have asked your students to write something about a memorable event in their lives.

This might still seem intimidating until the student realizes that they don’t have to start a numbered list of their thoughts, with the first one on tope, followed by the second, third, etc.—proceeding in a relentlessly linear way until they reach The End.

Instead, your first suggestion to your students can be for them to think of some memorable event and just start brainstorming: jotting down ideas as they pop up in their brains:

Many students I’ve talked to say that the ability to add images helps make the assignment for fun, more engaging. Being able to just quickly jot down ideas makes the process more open and creative. And that can lead to new insights. See how in the next map the student has begun to interact with his or her idea.

Move on to convergent thinking
Mind mapping is a great way to get students’ minds thinking. By first being able to just think random thoughts, they can feel less constrained. They can let their minds wander as they please in and around the topic at hand.

Usually, this allows a main thesis to emerge—and for less important or unrelated ideas to depart. In this example, seeing all of the ideas on one screen has given the student insight into what exactly he or she is thinking about. In this case, the student seems most interested in the teacher, and how he or she made the year so memorable:

 

The student has dragged and dropped the branches from his first use of the map, added some new ideas and, in the process, and converged their thoughts on one main idea.

Mind mapping methodology allows room for this kind of divergent-to-convergent thinking that is often missing in student writing.

Now to form an organized whole
Once some ideas have been captured and perhaps an inkling of insight gained, it is time to leave the free thought behind and start creating a logical structure for the ideas and information that will make up the final writing. Some mind mapping products (and again, ConceptDraw is one such product) allow users to see or to export the map contents in more traditional outline form:

If the student so chooses, he or she can simply push a button to export the map as a traditional outline, and continue the writing process:

It is fair to say, though, that once your students (or you yourself) get used to working in this more concise, visual way, they may be more inclined to continue to flesh out their ideas right in the map:

… knowing that at any point they can export what they’ve written as a working outline:

One example among many
I’ve used a creative writing assignment as the topic. Regardless of the topic and hand, mind mapping’s ability to integrate multimedia and interactivity allow students to work much more quickly, intuitively and, I would argue, more creatively.

As I noted in the first article in this series, ConceptDraw MINDMAP enables users to embed hyperlinks, images, multimedia, and graphics into a pre-writing document. Students can browse the Internet, link to research resources, and then combine online information with information from other sources—including their own ideas—to enable them to do the kind of preparation that can lead to more reasoned arguments and less head-scratching on the part of teachers.

And again, mind mapping enables students to work in a very information-rich way, with access to all the many forms that information comes in these days. That includes everything from websites, to images and icons, to YouTube videos and information clipped from Facebook or Twitter. Most important of all, mind mapping is designed to help people collect all of this rich information—and then add to it their own insights, reactions, and observations of that information.

It is in delivering a true 21st century mixture of pre-existing information and new ideas that mind mapping shines.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 4: Improving Research

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 2: Chunking of Language

This is the second part of a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

As I writer, I can easily bristle at the idea of our trading in the well-crafted sentence for a few well-considered words. If it wasn’t so handy, I’d be a lot more resistant to this practice. But because of the visual nature of a mind map, people tend to use words much more sparingly that they do when writing a document (such as the one you’re reading right now that may seem to be droning on and on). What might otherwise take a paragraph to communicate can be done using just a sentence or phrase--maybe even in one single word--when you mind map.

This makes the information in the map:

1. More easily understood: Children for whom English is not their native language, with dyslexia, or low literally levels often find it far easier to understand what is being communicated—and more able to interact with the information.
2. Contexually powerful: Because of the spatial nature of a map, the viewer finds context by seeing where a concept is relative to its neighbors. Communicating without these visual cues means that all meaning must be expressed using words—and we are back to the multi-page document.
3. Concise: Because the map is built with individual branches made up of a few words and maybe an image or icon, it’s possible to capture up to 10 or so pages of writing in one map. The ability to see all of the information in one view improves the ability to interact with that information. Note: Map branches can be “collapsed” so that the document isn’t cluttered with information you don’t need at any given moment.
4. Quickly digested: You plow through a written report. You scan a map.
5. Flexible: I’ll discuss this further in the article about writing. The main point is that by capturing information onto individual branches, the information can be quickly and easily dragged and dropped into similar groups, chronological order, or any other arrangement that best suites the current objective.

The one thing I don’t dare put on a list like this, for fear of trivializing mind mapping, is that the way of capturing, organizing and sharing information is much more fun and engaging than simple “writing a report.”

Today’s students live in a world filled with motion and images. For many of them, nothing could be more boring that having to reduce all of that excitement and action to “a page and a half” of writing. But turn them loose with a mind map, in which they can quickly capture and organize elements of the information sea in which they swim, and you may be surprised at what they come up with.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 3: Improving Student Writing
Part 4: Improving Research

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 1

This is the first in a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID.  Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

Screen capture of an example "starter" mind map (ConceptDraw MINDMAP software)

In this multi-part series I will describe a few ways to use mind mapping in teaching. I will talk about how teachers can use mind mapping to make their work easier and clearer, and how students can use mind mapping to help them organize thoughts and information.

The three uses I will describe are:

1. To create multimedia lesson plans.
2. To help students organize their writing.
3. To help students conduct research.

Throughout this series, I will be using ConceptDraw MINDMAP from CS Odessa Inc. to create the mind maps used in these articles (The functionality I describe is standard in MINDMAP and in some other products).

A note on the history and development of mind mapping

The “Tree of Love” by Porphyry of Tyros
(3rd Century AD, Greece)

Some say that the practice of mind mapping is as old as the hills. It is, indeed, possible to find quite old examples of what is often referred to as “visual thinking”—the theory behind mind mapping. There has been much evidence to support the main tenet of visual thinking that the mixture of text and images promotes thinking and learning. Much of the rationale for this theory comes from Robert Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning experiments with people whose two brain hemispheres had become separated.  Sperry’s experiments revealed some of the specialization of the brain, and how by stimulating more than one functional part of the brain, we increase the creative and memory capabilities of the brain.

From these origins grew the highly sophisticated practice known today as mind mapping. This manner of capturing, organizing, and sharing mixtures of information, ideas and images is today used by everyone from English and German school children to 85 of the Global Fortune 100 companies.

Images and observations of early life by
Leonardo da Vinci (15th Century AD, Italy)

Its use in academics has yet to be fully taken advantage of. One barrier continues to be the ability of students and teachers to have unfettered access to computers, computer software, and the Internet. For the purposes of this series, I will assume that you and your students access to all three.

Creating Multi-Media Lesson Plans
A common thread you will see in all of the uses I discuss is a teacher’s ability to combine multiple information type in a single, easily constructed and navigated document. A mind-mapped lesson plan often includes:

• A thesis statement and accompanying questions
• Active internet links
• Images and icons
• Answers and notes

Download a full example with step-by-step instructions and screen captures via Google Docs.

A Symphony of Meaning
“But what,” you might ask, “are the advantages or creating a lesson plan this way? It seems like it would be easier to do this as a word document?”

One of the results of Sperry’s research was that each hemisphere of the human brain is better suited to particular forms of information. Traditionally, the left hemisphere has been thought of as the home of reason, logic, numbers, and language. While the right side excels in rhythm, color, images, and intuition. Provide information is a way that appealed to as many of these cross strengths as possible, it was believed, and the brain would be more able to learn, remember, synthesize, and create.

As this idea has gained popularity over the years, so has the idea that some people’s brains are better able to take in information captured in one of these way (i.e. some of us are “visual learners.” More recently, research suggests that we all think better when information is communicated using these different modalities. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a picture with a caption written in bold red type with an exclamation point is worth a lot more.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 3: Improving Student Writing
Part 4: Improving Research