Mind The Extensions #3: Tiddly Things

There are all sorts of ways, then, that we can 'extend' our minds through the use of tools that support out thinking processes. Of course, simply writing things on paper is a wonderfully freeform way of recording ideas. The 'mind mapping' approaches mentioned in my last post here are one way of breaking away from simply writing lists, which may imply an order or hierarchy of concepts which isn't really there. Sometimes order, priority and hierarchy IS important, but sometime we just want to put ideas down, link them in the way that we recall them and then perhaps recognise the possibility of new links between clusters of concepts. Today, this crosslinking of ideas is something we are used to on the internet so, clearly, there's a possibility that we could use a kind of, 'personal internet' as a way of storing ideas in a way that may feel more natural as a 'mind extension' than just a list of information in a document or spreadsheet.

One tool which addresses this is TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is an opensource 'non-linear personal web notebook'. At its simplest, TiddlyWiki lets you write chunks of information (typically a paragraph or two, these chunks are called 'tiddlers'), give your paragraph a title and tags (tags are similar to the 'labels' on this blog) and then automatically links everything together. Keywords, then, are automatically highlighted and hyperlinked to the corresponding tiddler. You can either define keywords by putting them in double square brackets [[Like This]] or you can use a convention called 'Camel Code' or 'Camel Case' which simply involves using no spaces and starting each word with a capital letter so, instead of [[Like This]] I could use LikeThis. This makes for really easy writing.

As I write this, I realise that it all sounds a little dry, try taking a look at a YouTube video to get a quick idea of what TiddlyWiki is like. Better still, hop over to http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ and get the feel of the software. There's more information at Tiddlywiki.org and there's an Aladdin's cave of importable add-ons over at TiddlyTools.

All of the functionality and data is held in your TiddlyWiki file, which is just an html file, so you can copy the whole thing to your memory stick and carry it with you. No need to install special software - it all just runs inside your browser when you open the file, so it's really portable. I'm particularly interested in it as a note-taking tool for students on the Theory of Knowledge (ToK) course I'm designing.

Now, what I'd really like is to be able to import my TiddlyWiki into Personal Brain (see my previous post) so that I can navigate over (selected) tiddlers using the Personal Brain visual tool and then jump back into the TiddlyWiki.

I've posted the idea over at the Personal Brain forums ... let's see if anyone comes up with a slick import mechanism ...

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