Mind Mapping

Personally I have never been one for spider diagrams.  They always reminded me of the Michael Collins despairing reference to DeValera “How could one argue with a man who was always drawing lines and circles to explain his position”.  Still after using Freemind I am ready to reconsider.  My initial distaste for spider diagrams and mind maps has probably something to do with the way my mind works: I am the kind of character who likes lists.  The great thing about lists is that you can keep them tidy and logical.  Mind maps and spider diagrams on the other hand usually ended in a kind of disaster of erased ideas, crossed out lines, scribbling and branches going off the edge of the page and on to the other side.  Not the best way to come up with a logical plan.  Freemind however eliminates all this messiness.  For a start there is literally no edge to the paper (because there is no paper, one could frame a few faux-philosophical Zen questions based on the change from paper to digital form).  Below is my first effort at using Freemind.   I decided to use a mind map to illustrate the factions involved in the 1953 Iranian Coup and the principle characters involved in the coup.Personally I think it’s pretty good.  It makes it easy to see the principal actors involved in the event.  (If you can’t see the full mind-map, just right click on the image and have it open in a new tab).  I also developed a mind map to plan out the issues I will tackle in the course of writing my thesis.I have only made a small use of Freemind so far but already I can see that it is potentially a fantastic tool for organizing and planning ideas to shape into a thesis.  Frankly I wish I had done a bit more much work on the thesis so that I could Freemind a few more ideas.  Freemind also allows maps to be exported in different formats including HTML like so.  A seperate option allows the map to be save as the files for a webpage, although I haven’t quite figured out how to make that work yet.  Still the potential for Freemind is great.  The following statement has been a common theme throughout my blog post but I feel it is worth repeating again.   I strongly feel that the use of programs such as Freemind should be taught to undergraduate students at an early stage in the first semester, preferably during the first week before alcoholic fatigue sets in and they, inevitably, stop turning up to lectures.

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