« Beloved's Intentions | Main | Kindred »
April 02, 2007
Mind Mapping: Harnassing your creativity
For Paper 3, you will each be developing a mind map to organize and explore your thoughts. Non-linear mind mapping - either as webs (blobs of thoughts connected by lines), mind maps with images and words on lines, or a combination of both - allows you to simultaneously "brain dump," group your thoughts in related clusters, and trace a train of thought. As such, it frees you from the formality (and sometimes restricting nature) of the sentence or the word, but still provides you with the opportunity to explore ideas in an organized, creative way. Mind mapping also allows you to break free of the outline - a form of linear "pre-writing" that really belongs after the mind map because it assumes you know the order of the paper before you've even had a chance to think carefully and freely about your ideas. It also allows you to employ other non-linear organizing strategies like images, color, highlighting, three dimensional shapes, etc. Because you will each design your own mind map based on the question you will explore in your paper, I recommend checking out a couple of websites that offer some great insight into the benefit of mind mapping - an exercise that is itself akin to a brain "workout" of sorts! One site called EdVibes offers some great suggestions for online mind mapping software (for those of you who are digitally minded and panic at the thought of having to use pencil and paper). This site also links you to a interesting podcast of an April 2006 interview with Michael Gelb on the Theater of the Mind site. Gelb has his own version of mind mapping that he argues is much more efficient than the bubble approach. You be the judge.
Posted by lauraaw at April 2, 2007 10:55 AM