Mind Mapping
July 17th 2007 10:46
Wow, no more sitting around researching for me! I can get Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge to do it for me.
In one of Jurgen Wolff’s recent short articles, he mentions Wikipedia’s new mindmapping tool. I’ve always been a fan of mindmapping, though I haven’t always taken the time to use it properly. Nevertheless, it remains a creative thinking approach that I know works – as opposed to some other creative thinking approaches that don’t work for me at all, including many of de Bono’s methods (Six Thinking Hats and such.) Maybe I’ve never given de Bono’s methods enough time, or maybe they’re better used with a group of people, in a brainstorming arena.
Anyway, back to the Wikipedia tool. Whatever you think of it, or of mindmapping, there’s no doubt that firstly this is a lot of fun, secondly it really does take you off in interesting directions research-wise, and thirdly, it shows that Wikipedia isn’t just a huge number of web pages that contain useless information. Everything I turned up was well laid out and informative.
It’s called the WikiMindMap and tends to default to the German version, something I didn’t realise until I’d tried a couple of entries. However, the English version is second in line, and there are several other languages available as well.
While I was trying to remind myself of de Bono’s name (I find names don’t zip to the front of my brain as readily as they used to do), I put in red hat, and Six Thinking Hats was one of 14 possibilities that came up, including biretta, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kagyu (a Buddhist idea which I haven’t had time to check out as to how it relates to a red hat yet), the US Air Force (do they wear red hats?) and the Red Hat Society.
And it doesn’t stop there. Each item that turns up is itself a mindmap to other subjects. When you click a little green button it will take you to a new mindmap with new possibilities. And running your mouse over the main subject gives you more information, so that you can decide whether it’s worth pursuing further.
A great toy!
In one of Jurgen Wolff’s recent short articles, he mentions Wikipedia’s new mindmapping tool. I’ve always been a fan of mindmapping, though I haven’t always taken the time to use it properly. Nevertheless, it remains a creative thinking approach that I know works – as opposed to some other creative thinking approaches that don’t work for me at all, including many of de Bono’s methods (Six Thinking Hats and such.) Maybe I’ve never given de Bono’s methods enough time, or maybe they’re better used with a group of people, in a brainstorming arena.
Anyway, back to the Wikipedia tool. Whatever you think of it, or of mindmapping, there’s no doubt that firstly this is a lot of fun, secondly it really does take you off in interesting directions research-wise, and thirdly, it shows that Wikipedia isn’t just a huge number of web pages that contain useless information. Everything I turned up was well laid out and informative.
It’s called the WikiMindMap and tends to default to the German version, something I didn’t realise until I’d tried a couple of entries. However, the English version is second in line, and there are several other languages available as well.
While I was trying to remind myself of de Bono’s name (I find names don’t zip to the front of my brain as readily as they used to do), I put in red hat, and Six Thinking Hats was one of 14 possibilities that came up, including biretta, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kagyu (a Buddhist idea which I haven’t had time to check out as to how it relates to a red hat yet), the US Air Force (do they wear red hats?) and the Red Hat Society.
And it doesn’t stop there. Each item that turns up is itself a mindmap to other subjects. When you click a little green button it will take you to a new mindmap with new possibilities. And running your mouse over the main subject gives you more information, so that you can decide whether it’s worth pursuing further.
A great toy!
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