I first tried to create with CMap but got too caught up in the technology and not quite “getting it” – it wasn’t intuitive for me.
Downloaded “The Brain” and it was a breeze. Found it really easy and thought how closely aligned it’s principles are to the key ideas of how I currently understand Connectivism.
As a left handed Taurean wonder whether the more effective concept maps for me are simple to look at with an ordered arrangement such as Lisa Lane’s in her CCK08 blog or showing the full complexities as in Bradley Shoebottom’s – see “The Daily” post of September 23.
Clearly there are no simple answers but perhaps the concept is often more useful to the author than a reader. I’m also leaning more to the visual simplicity as espoused by Garr Reynolds in his work through Presentation Zen.
Still struggling with which way to go with my own concept. Maybe I write one for myself and one for others to comment upon.
Here is version #1 – the brainstorming unprocessed version.
Grant's Concept map v1
October 17, 2008 at 11:40 am
Grant,
Have not used the Brain but it looks like MindJet’s MindManger whishc is a per license fee software. In either case, it is difficult to build an ontology with a verb in the connector between the concepts. I like to use the connector versb becasue it lets me know if there are a variety of subordinate concepts if some are optional.
I recently used CMAP to build an ontology or information model around a survey I was running. Intersting thing was that the Sales and marketing folks had a hard time with it because it was “too detailed” (which is kind of the purpsoe of the ontology to show the complexity), but the techies understood it much better. The Sales and marketing types started to understand it better when I added colour coding to indicate Primary, secondary and tertiary tiers of informaiton, but in the end they asked for a Excell spreadsheet as much of the busines world is used to looking at things in that 2 dimensional way.
Goes to show you people need to be educated in the new tools and you just can’t “foist” the new tools or ways of looking at info upon them.