Don't Worry, Hand-Drawn Mind Maps, I'll Defend You

Something happened this week that made me think of the hand-drawn mind maps that I use in an educational presentation propelled by some snazzy technology. My presentation has been well-received, and I have a few engagements coming up in the near future. The content was there first: mind maps, other visual organization tools, and how they can help a person get to higher thinking and deeper learning. The snazzy technology (especially Prezi, a visual organizer itself) was carefully selected afterwards in order to highlight the content. My concern is that this is not always the case, and too often the content serves the technology rather than the other way around. The zeitgeist of education is changing and there's less pedagogy, less intellectual curiosity, and an emphasis on technology.

I use technology in all of my presentations, or I would run the risk of appearing extremely dry. I've endured the paper-presenting-conference scene and hope to never have to do that again. (For the uninitiated, this is where you write a scholarly paper, submit it to a conference, and if selected, show up at the appointed time and literally read the paper to a captive audience.) Today's more engaging technology-laced presentations are a better use of time, as long as the technology serves the content. Prezi, the popular presentation software with which I have replaced PowerPoint, looks cool with its zooming and spinning, but it also serves as an organizing device. Animated Xtranormal videos and Glogster posters get the "listener's" attention to be sure, but the content has to be ready to take over.

My content is mind maps, content maps, knowledge maps and other examples of visual organizations and explanations of information. Most of these are my own, and most of these are hand-drawn. One of the points I make in my presentation is that these tools are extremely helpful for visual and kinesthetic learners. I believe I am a combination of these and that the very act of drawing these maps and assigning colors helps me remember, organize, and make connections.

My goal is to help my listeners and readers find ways to organize, remember, and schedule and attain higher-level thinking and deeper learning with these tools The hand-drawn techniques will work better for some. The problem is that I perceive, especially through the "perfect storm" of events this week, that there is an aversion to non-electronic learning objects and ideas. The pendulum of teaching has swung to the extreme, a focus on technology rather than learning. I'm hoping that pendulum will come to rest in the center where the focus will be on using these snazzy technologies to create more effective teaching and learning.

Here's a piece of visual technology with a pendulum in it because this post has no other pictures.

New Article with No Mention of Mind Maps Specifically in the Title

Notification just arrived that my short how-to article on using visual organization tools has been published on this British website. I've expanded the techniques described, and because of this I thought the mention of mind maps in the title would be misleading. Sometimes concept maps, knowledge maps, and other tools fit the content better. Mind maps are still my favorite, and I use them more often than the others. What do you think? What's your favorite technique?

The New Presentation

I tried out my new, improved Mind Map presentation on Thursday to an audience of seven: five K-12 teachers, one college professor, and one professor emeritus. I'm pleased with the response and glad I decided to use the Prezi presentation embedded in my previous post here as the vehicle to propel the show. I was also able to make the point that mind maps, Prezi and Twitter are all tools that get right to the good stuff (the heart of the matter). Always the jokester, I pointed out that in high school and college I was never able to pad my essay answers with "BS" as most of the other students did. My answers tended to be concise and rather short. (My friends will tell you that my storytelling is not, however.) This is why I love mind maps, Prezi and Twitter: they eliminate the extra padding and get to the core concepts.

Since my attendees were all teachers, I threw in another point. I showed them how mind maps (and other visual organizations of information) help a visual learner make connections and attain deeper learning, climbing up the ladder of Bloom's Taxonomy (usually also represented with a visual). I showed them the mind map I used to organize my essay about the Delaware Bay into a rondo form. I never would have thought to do that while staring at a bunch of linear notes. And then there was the mind map I created when my book club read the book Snow in August by Pete Hamill. I portrayed the various characters in my mind map as heroes or villains as the young narrator did and then realized that there was also a recurring theme of fairy tales running through the text. Many details from the boy's life had to do with the Brooklyn Dodgers, so those got their own mind map branch. Without the experience of making a mind map, I don't think I would have made the connections between the fairy tale and Dodger details.

I told the group about the time I helped my goddaughter with a science fair project on the fruit fly. I hoped this story would convince them that mind maps are a help to any age learner. (We grasp the concept of pictures way before we learn language.) Hope had done some fruit fly research at school and I had gathered a few things for her. I debated whether I should introduce her to mind maps to organize all of her information. I decided to watch how she approached the task and was delighted to see that she started with a mind map! She called it something else (the nomenclature is somewhat elastic), but it was without a doubt a mind map. That story was a hit.

The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html) provoked an audible reaction as did my Delicious.com link loaded with resources (http://delicious.com/margaretmontet/mindmaps). Among the many positive comments at the end, one teacher told me she was going to try mind maps to organize her students. If nothing else, I gave these teachers some practical, usable ideas to take back to their classrooms in September.

Click here for a link to a Prezi slideshow of selected mind maps and other types of visualizations.

It took me awhile to figure Prezi out. After seeing many sharp-looking scholarly presentations that used Prezi instead of PowerPoint, I thought I should get serious about shedding the "Death-by-PowerPoint" look. It took me a few hours of solid experimentation to create something usable, but I like what I have. I'll be debuting it later this month at a mind mapping presentation for K-12 educators, and I am expecting as many questions about Prezi as about mind maps. Take a look (but remember on this small screen the mind maps are teeny):

Mind Mapping on Prezi

VoiceThread

I have just discovered VoiceThread, a free online cool tool to use for discussions about images and video. This is my new favorite, and I've started discussions on my concept map and my knowledge map used in my mind map sabbatical project: http://voicethread.com/share/1199512/.

The maps are not new, but I still hope you check them out if you haven't been to my mind mapping LibGuide (http://bucks.libguides.com/mindmaps). I'm curious how effective you think VoiceThread is for discussing images like mind maps and such. I think it is very effective. The first time I saw this tool, it was being used to discuss fine art. That worked very well, too.

Please leave comments on the VoiceThread site or here if you prefer.

The Back of the Napkin

The human brain thinks and imagines naturally in pictures. As children, we communicate with pictures and have no inhibitions about drawing. As we grow older, we become more comfortable with language and most people become less confident about their drawing skills. Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin, believes that we never lose the ability to understand concepts and ideas conveyed with pictures, and that we can use very simple drawings to explain ideas and influence decision makers. In this book, he breaks down his process, or toolkit, for solving problems and selling ideas with pictures by using the same process he is teaching.

First he explains the process of Look-See-Imagine-Show where we analyze the idea and decide how to show it. Then we proceed to the SQVID analysis where we decide where our picture will fit on one or more continuums: simple/elaborate, qualitative/quantitative, vision/execution, individual/comparison or change/status quo. Next is The Six Ways We See, where we decide how to present the idea: who/what (picture), how much (graph), where (map), when (timeline), how (flowchart) and why (plot). Here is my Napkin-inspired flowchart of the book:

More than one choice from the SQVID and The Six Ways We See can be incorporated into our graphic in order to represent or sell our idea. (Notice that the first continuum in the SQVID analysis is simple/elaborate.)

I like this book and started using its process to graphically represent my own concepts before I had gotten halfway through. Here's a timeline explaining information literacy that I am hoping will inspire and illuminate college students:

Mind maps are useful for almost anything, but over the course of this project I began to feel a need for a way to show time and process. This is it.

Musicophilia

I just finished a book about the brain and music called Musicophilia. It is by the psychiatrist on whom the movie "Awakenings" focused, Oliver Sacks, and is more a recounting of tales about patients he's seen than a step-by-step description of how the brain processes music. (That was the case with the other book I read for this part of the project, This is Your Brain on Music.) He recounts fascinating tales of people experiencing musical hallucinations, musicogenic epilepsy, and musical savantism. He describes what is really happening when we find ourselves with an "earworm." Now I have to transcribe notes from my underlined passages in the book and make some mind maps as that is what I'm writing about--not so much the brain and music.

Sacks writes at length about dementia patients and how music alone has the ability to bring their "self" out. I can relate to that part, of course, because of my experiences with Dad (stroke and aphasia) and more recently Mom (advanced dementia). I wish I would have tried music on Mom. She wasn't musical, but perhaps the music from her young adulthood would have brought her some pleasure. I don't know. Dr. Sacks also wrote at length about music therapists. There were music therapy majors at the universities I attended as an undergraduate music major, Duquesne and at Temple, but I never really understood what they did. I assumed they worked mostly with children. Music therapists also work with adults suffering from brain disorders and it brings much success. Dr. Sacks supposes that the reactions to music are based on subcortical (rather than cortical responses), which I have learned is commonly referred to as the reptilian brain. I'm amused to remember that under my name in my Temple University yearbook, I am labeled a "Music Therapy" major. It is, of course, a typo for Music Theory, and I always thought my classmates would wonder that I never seemed a caring or outgoing enough person to choose to study Music Therapy.
All of that is the content for my learning-with-mind-mapping project, but what I'm really looking at is the process of organizing and learning the content. Early on in the reading of the book, I realized that linear, outlined notes would be easy, but a graphic representation would be much more difficult. This is because the book is made up of a series of tales of Dr. Sacks's patients with some explanation of why they act as they do and what might be going on in their brains. I created mind maps, but they are simply chronological, chapter by chapter. Perhaps these mind maps are an intermediary step and a more creative way to organize the information will occur to me later.


That said, the discussions on dementia and Williams Syndrome are extensive and could warrant their own mind maps (or other type of visualizations). These are the two brain conditions that are the most intertwined with the brain's processing of music, and so there is a lot of information to organize from Dr. Sacks's studies and observations in addition to many citations of other studies.

In any case as I have said before, the mere act of creating a mind map helps me see connections and hierarchies, and I will have the mind maps to refer to as I read the other books on my list.