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