Re: Inspiration 7.6

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2899

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-05 21:03:55

I think it would be great to have a tool that can be adapted to different learning styles, but I don’t see how mind mapping ties into a visual style of learning, just because hierarchies are represented with captions and arrows, as opposed to indentation, which after all is inherently just as visual. It might even be argued that more salient visual cues are needed by persons who are less visually oriented, but which ever way it goes, I haven’t seen any reason to think it’s non-trivial in magnitude.

I’m inexperienced with mind mapping—with actually doing it, as opposed to reading about it—but I have been playing with the diagrammer in the latest version of Inspiration. It might be my inexperience with mind mapping keeps me from seeing benefits obvious to others, such as articulation with a visual learning style, but what I see is better characterized as a differential usefulness with different facets of information. The order items appear in an outline exert a possibly significant effect on my reasoning, and a diagram minimizes the obtrusiveness of an arbitrary ordering or one I want to abstract away for some other reason.

Most mindmapping programs miss one key strength of diargramming, in my opinion, because they don’t permit you to label the connections. Inspiration does so permit; Axon does also. If you are interested in data where the precise characterization of linkages is important, beyond the abstract notion of hierarchy, a diagram could be useful. This is more likely to be the case for highly structured, systematic material, a diagram of a system, as opposed to _being_ a systematization.

These are just some initial thoughts. But I’m wondering, now that we’re on Inspiration, why you seem to prefer TAO. What features does TAO have that Inspiration lacks? (My only Mac is System 9.)

Stephen R. Diamond

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