Re: GrandView 2.0 castaway sending smoke signals

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1778

Posted by srdiamond15
2003-12-30 20:18:57

MindManager doesn’t require a hierarchy—when new ideas arise they can be plopped down anywhere. This allows moving things around to see where they might fit best to be done more easily.
I have done similar things with outlines, but being able to spread things out seems to be helpful to me and the groups I do it with. MindManager also allows collapsing but my favorite part is grabbing a chunk of ideas from one place and moving them elsewhere—much easier to follow what is happening when things are laid out than in an outline. SInce I often do this in trying to make sense of what a group is saying, and the group members are looking at the projected map, this is pretty useful—and often accompanied by a sigh or exclamation.

Words that describe how it works are a poor substitute for playing with it and seeing if it is personally useful.

It figures that a difference between a mindmap and outlining fanatic might come down to what verbal descriptions can accomplish.

But seriously, I downloaded Mind Mag today and looked at some of the academic literature on mindmapping, and I still don’t get it. Its not exactly that I don’t see potential value in these maps but rather it seems to me that hardly anyone uses them as anything more than cumbersome outlines.

Buzan seems to have omitted from his mind maps the distinguishing characteristic of concept maps, as developed by his predecessors. A concept map really is not a graphical outline. Outlines deal in hierarchies, and concept maps graph relations that are not necessarily hierarchical. But to capture these non-hierarchical relations, the connections between the boxes, not just the boxes themselves, must be labeled.

The academic proponents see the labeling of the connections as the hardest but most important part of conceptual mapping. In an outline the hierarchical relations speak for themselves, but if you have a box A and a box B, and you connect them to show a non-hierarchical relation—say one of causality—you have to name the arrow as causal to capture it. Nobody seems to be doing much of that, which is why a mind map can be reduced to an outline, but a concept map can’t.

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