Mind Mapping

At the Burlington Art Centre I attended a day-long workshop on “The Art of Change” where the “mind mapping” software Mindjet: Mind Manager was demonstrated. Mind mapping apparently was invented by Tony Buzan as a way of unleashing the potential of the mind. See, Buzan Centres – Mind Mapping – Mind Map Definition. The presenter oversold mind mapping and it is not clear that visual thinking software running on a small screen is preferable to a good big peice of software or whiteboard, but at its heart mind mapping seems to be hypertext for thinking – drawing graphs of ideas. What is is strange is how this business technique has spawned software similar to what has come from the hypertext community, software like Storyspace, which bills itself as serious hypertext for writers.

There is free mind mapping software, see FreeMind – free mind. Written in Java, works on Macs. Of course, paper may still work better.

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