Mind The Extensions #2: Soft Brains and Virtually Free Minds

So, continuing the theme of the extended mind model - there are more than a few software tools that attempt to provide support to putting ideas down in a non linear way. I've tried a few of these 'mind mapping' or 'concept mapping' tools over the years but always seem to come back to pen and paper when I want to make something truly useful, truly quickly.

The extended mind idea prompted me to have a quick look around at these types of tools again, to see if there was anything new that looked interesting. I skipped past 'Inspiration' (which we have at the school where I teach http://www.inspiration.com/); it's OK but lacks finesse on the graphics and still feels a bit cumbersome (though we may have an old version). Also, I'm looking for something that I can load onto my netbook, home PC and ideally my memory stick.  The school licenses don't extend to this and Inspiration doesn't, well, inspire me enough to want to part with my cash to buy a copy. There's a beta trial of a related web based product at http://mywebspiration.com/blog/beta at the moment, but I'm reluctant to invest time and effort on putting things there only to find that I have to start subscribing once interest reaches a critical mass.

I like the look of Tony Buzan's iMindMap®  (http://www.imindmap.com/) and I owe a debt of gratitude to Tony Buzan who tickled my interest in this stuff back in the 1970' s with 'Use your Head' as part of (I think) the Open University broadcasts on the BBC back then. iMindMap more accurately reflects Buzan's 'rules' for this style of diagram than some of the other tools (labelling on lines rather than at nodes/junctions) . It also encourages bold use of colour which I like. Looking at prices though, I'd want at least the 'Professional' version to get the key features of being able to expand and contract branches and easily link parent/child diagrams- so I'd be looking at about £100 at the current pricing.

Freemind looks interesting to me http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ Free, but with a bit of a learning curve to become proficient with all of the shortcut keys. I didn't find it immediately intuitive but I think I'll probably spend a bit more time looking at it - there's a nice video showing some of the capabilities of Freemind at  http://www.artemissoftware.biz/videos/freemind-demo1.mov  it also touches on how one of these tools can be integrated with a 'Getting Things Done' (GTD) regime (a system credited to David Allen which I'll write a bit more about in a later post).

That is, I'll take more of a look at Freemind if I can tear myself away from the hypnotic wonder that is PersonalBrain http://www.thebrain.com/ I'm currently running the free download and have thrown some thoughts in, mainly to do with the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge course I'm developing.

I may be breaking the guidelines of PersonalBrain's best practice (I'm only a beginner and usually play around before referring to the instructions) but already the highly visual and dynamic nature of the tool really appeals to me. Thoughts are associated with parent or child thoughts simply by pulling out a thought link and filling in the thought title box. Multiple thoughts can be added at the same time, and thoughts can then be linked, cross linked and linked to documents or websites. As you click on a thought it is automatically brought centre screen with closely associated thoughts close by and more remote thoughts visually pushed into the background or hidden entirely. If you prefer a hierarchical/outline view it's just one click away.

I guess that the diagrams could become very large and unwieldy but I also suspect that refining diagrams could be a useful learning exercise. I'm pretty excited about this tool and I haven't even started playing with things like mapping bookmarks or folders and documents on my PC. I think the free version is probably useful by itself but I'm pretty sure I'll be purchasing the 'Core' edition for about £100. I suspect we could look at trialling the free version at school, need to check with the company about that first to test their attitude towards pricing for state funded schools.

So PersonalBrain is one of my 'extended mind' tools-of-the-moment. There are lists of other similar tools over at Wikipedia of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software and you may also want to take a look at Concept Mapping software too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept_mapping_software

Mind The Extensions #1: Books, Boxes and LibraryThing

Spring really started to uncoil over the weekend and my brain/spirits show signs of waking up too so I guess it may be time to pop a thought or two down here.

Like many others at this time of year I find myself involved with some spring cleaning. For me the challenge is less to do with cleaning and more to do with clearing and organising.

One prompt was my realising that I had reached some kind of critical mass with books. I was becoming less sure that I could accurately recall exacetly which books I had in my collection and, even when I was sure that I had a book, I was sometimes hard pressed to locate it. On top of all that I was simply running out of bookshelf space.

With gritted teeth I consigned some books (mainly old computing references) to my local Oxfam store. Others I packed away in some enormous 'Really Useful Boxes' and hid them away in the loft. I am partial to the 'Really Useful Box' product line ( http://www.reallyusefulproducts.co.uk ) - sturdy, stackable and semi-transparent; much more reliable and reusable than cardboard archive boxes which (I find) have a tendency to self-destruct when lifted above head level .

I've long considered making a catalogue of my books, toyed with the idea of doing such a thing in Excel or Access but then shyed away from the project as being overly laborious. This year, though, I looked at some online solutions for library cataloguing. I fiddled with Google Books for a while but eventually settled on Librarything ( http://www.librarything.com ) I'm up to 555 books right now. Librarything accepts ISBN numbers, looks them up and pops back records with, typically title, author, publication date, and a thumbnail of the cover. You can assign tags to books so you can look up more easily later using keywords that mean something to you. I have tags to say which room or set of shelves (or Really Useful Box) the book is in as well as subject tags and tags to indicate if I've loaned the book to someone else - the tags are a bit like Flickr tagging. For smaller collections (or just to try it out) you can catalogue up to 200 books for free, over and above that you're best subscribing for either $10 per year or (like me) $25 for lifetime subscription. 

Once all the books are in I'll make a kind of backup in case Librarything goes bust (you can export your library to spreadsheet friendly formats) . I'll probably then also open up the collection to share the list with others. Right now, though, I feel that it doesn't really reflect my collection ... lots of fiction and not many reference books entered so far.

One of the reasons I use LibraryThing is that I LIKE using it. It gives me interesting little views on statistics associated with my collection, recommendations and, quirkily, 'unsuggestions' which suggest the books 'least likely to fit with my own collection'.

Even so, the next few shelves are going to be a bit harder work, mainly old or antique books which take a little more effort to lookup and may have to be added manually.

So why am I bothering sharing all this about cataloguing my library? Well apart from it being something that I'm involved with, it's also an example of something that can tickle our ideas about identity and the mind ... no, really ... it can.

One model about the mind and cognition (knowing) suggests that not all of our knowing is in our heads. Instead (the theory goes) our mind can consciously lean on parts of our environment, blurring the boundary of where the 'edge of our mind' (my term) is.  This active externalism view is described in the paper by Clark and Chalmers available at http://consc.net/papers/extended.html . If I've understood their ideas correctly, they are proposing that it's arbitrary to constrain the idea of 'mind' to 'within skin and skull' and that a better view would be to consider the when the mind uses some facet of the external world [in particular ways] that a coupled system is produced, such that the external object effectively becomes part of the mind itself. Examples could include a pencil and paper while working out a complicated calculation or simple reminders, shopping lists etc. LibraryThing, then, might be regarded as part of my mind while I am using it.

I'm intrigued by this model, I suspect it leads towards some interesting links with other subjects I'm interested in.  Most directly, the model provides some food for thought about the nature of knowledge so feeds my Theory of Knowldege (ToK) work.

Consider as a thought experiment - 

1. I learn something, such as how to calculate the area of a triangle and write it down on a piece of paper, understanding it as I do so.

2. I file the paper away in my 'mathematics' folder.

3. Months later I am given a problem to calculate the area of a triangle. I can't recall exactly how to do the  calculation.

4. I go to my trusty filing system and get the mathematics folder out to consult my notes.

5. 'Ah yes,' I think 'Now I remember how to do it.' And proceed with the calculation.

Could I be said to have known how to solve the triangle problem at all points after the initial learning? What if someone sneakily removed the page from my file?

I'm reminded of the words of Dr Johnson "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1564 ) .

Expect more on this topic soon ...

Acknowledgements:

Image from Wellcome Images

Live-wired brain - artwork
Credit: Heidi Cartwright, Wellcome Images
Image Ref: B0003256
Thanks to Wellcome Images for permission to use this image
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