Top 10 Mind Mapping Uses for Students

November 7th, 2010
 

SpicyNodes graphically organizes and represents relations between ideas and concepts, harnessing the full range of our brain skills.

The earlier post on 6th graders using SpicyNodes, raises a larger question of what kinds of ways can a tool like SpicyNodes be used by students. Toni Krasnic recently posted Top 10 Mind Mapping Uses for Students, Toni is a visual mapper, educational consultant, and author of  Concise Learning: Learn More & Score Higher in Less Time with Less Effort. He says:

Although still relatively little used is school, students who have discovered mind mapping find it a fun and engaging approach to enhance thinking and learning, and a great tool to manage information and increase productivity.

See the post >>

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Spicing up 6th grade (Winchester House School)

November 7th, 2010
 

James, a 6th grade student in the UK, said, “I thought spicynodes was quite fun and it was very clever.” Last month, he and his fellow 6th graders (year 6) at the Winchester House School, in Northants, about 50 miles north of Oxford, England, used SpicyNodes over the course of several lessons based around Internet research, in the ‘Information and communication technologies’ class taught by educator Chris Leach. Chris works with all classes at the school, and worked with James’ 6th grade class for an hour per week. Chris said, “I’ve done mind-mapping before with children but only ever pencil and paper. SpicyNodes was the first tool I came across that had the flexibility I wanted—the ability to link any node to any other.” MORE »

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Online communities. Where are they? And why do people leave FB?

October 6th, 2010
 

Hot off the presses, and the comic book stand. The webcomic xkcd has a Map of Online Communities, based on careful reseach and a bit of fabrication. Discover online communities that you did not know existed. It’s a big map, you’ll have to zoom in.

Soon, we hope that that more online communities will use SpicyNodes to help people find related posts and related people.

Meanwhile, why do people leave communities like Facebook? Check out the latest findings on top reasons for Facebook unfriending (press release) from a University of Colorado Denver Business School student.

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Sneak peek: SpicyNodes Touch

September 28th, 2010
 

Here’s a sneak peek of SpicyNodes Touch running on the Apple iPad. We’re working hard so that you can publish your nodemaps in your web site, blog, or also on mobile devices… so your nodemaps will come to life on at your user’s fingertips.

Many more features and improvements are planned.

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Journalism in the Age of Data (video)

September 28th, 2010
 

Our eyes have the highest bandwidth connections to our mind of any of our senses. In our increasingly complex world, information visualization — charts, graphs, geographical maps and node maps — is efficient and neccesary to convey information and keep us informed.

A documentary from Geoff McGhee, titled “Documenting emerging uses of data visualization” (54 minutes, in convenient chapters) includes interviews with several talented and well-known data visualization practitioners. The covered topics include contemporary issues like Visualization in Journalism, Telling “Data Stories”, Exploring Data or Technology and Tools.

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The Evolution of the Visual Mapper

September 21st, 2010
 

The world of mapping information uses a mismash of terms, like “concept mapping,” “mind mapping,” “visual mapping,” and “radial mapping.” These all mean essentially the same thing — representing information visually, in nuggets of information. There’s a history behind each term, for example, Tony Buzan developed a hand-drawn genre which he calls “mind maps”; and professor Novak has worked on a version of these maps with labels between nodes, and he advocates the term “concept map.”

Read more about these terms, and how are evolving in a post by Wallace Tait, “The Evolution of the Visual Mapper” over at Hypershifters.  Go to post >>

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Tony Buzan: Mind Mapping Evangelist

September 16th, 2010
 

Tony Buzan posing in front of a mindmapWhen it comes to drawing out creative and associative thought, Tony Buzan is head and shoulders above the rest. He’s the putative inventor of the modern mind map, having created this alternative to linear note taking in the 1960s. Since that time, Buzan has been a leading advocate of mental literacy and the use of mind mapping to tap into the brain’s power, calling mind mapping “the Swiss Army knife of the brain.” Buzan has been involved in a number of mind-expanding endeavors, including founding the World Memory Championships and the World Speed Reading Championships, and co-founding the Mind Sports Olympiad. He’s also authored dozens of books on mind maps, memory, and brainpower.
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Thomas Vander Wal: When Folksonomies Supplant Taxonomies

September 13th, 2010
 

When you’re sharing photos online, posting to your blog, arranging books on your bookshelves, or organizing your recipes, you come up with your own categorization systems. While there’s a science of classification called taxonomy, Internet developer and information architect Thomas Vander Wal has dubbed the on-the-fly categorization methods used by everyday people “folksonomy.”

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Melvil Dewey: The King of Classification

September 9th, 2010
 

Peruse the offerings in any of 200,000 libraries around the world, and you’ll see the footprint of one man: Melvil Dewey. Creator of the Dewey Decimal Classification, Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) was an education reformer, and took it upon himself to codify Francis Bacon’s knowledge structure with a set of numbers, and apply those numbers to Amherst College’s library collection. Dewey was in his twenties when he copyrighted his classification, yet it remains enormously influential today.

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Edward Tolman: Pioneering Cognitive Mapping

September 6th, 2010
 

When you use SpicyNodes for concept mapping, it feels right. That’s by design. It feels natural because the linked nodes largely mimic the way the brain works.

But while linking prior knowledge to form new connections seems intuitive, this process wasn’t acknowledged until the mid-20th century, when cognitive behavioral psychologist Edward Tolman coined the term “cognitive mapping” in a 1948 paper published in The Psychological Review.

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