Open Source E-Learning Development 7: Freemind
Structuring a course, curriculum, or syllabus, is one of the key activities learning professionals undertake when creating content to meet learners’ needs. I discussed instructional design in a very comprehensive series of articles beginning here only a few months ago, so there’s no need to reiterate my views on ISD here. I also strongly recommend Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) as a good place to starting if you want to investigate this broad discipline in your own time.
Instructional designers spend a goodly proportion of their time trying to develop instructional models and approaches to making the task of delivering knowledge and skills to learners. In my view, one of the most effective methods of eliciting and structuring information for instruction is to use mind maps.
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Based upon what Buzan and Buzan call “radiant thinking” (2003, p.53) mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Mind maps may also aid recall of existing knowledge.
By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mind map represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework.
Figure 1 A mind map in the Freemind UI
[Click to Enlarge]
FreeMind is an open source mind-mapping application. It enables users to edit a hierarchical set of ideas around a central concept. The non-linear approach assists in 
developing outlines and projects as ideas are added around the mind map. As a Java application, the program is portable across multiple platforms including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. FreeMind was a nominee for Best Project in SourceForge.net’s Community Choice Awards for 2008, which featured Open Source software projects.
FreeMind developers (and developers of other OSS projects) have made plugins for various wiki and content management system software so that Freemind files can be viewed – and in some cases created – via the master programs’ interface. Systems include Confluence, Drupal, JSPWiki, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, Moodle, TikiWiki, Trac, TWiki and WikkaWiki.
It supports the following features:
- Branch folding
- Export to XML, HTML, XHTML (a static ‘all-expanded image’ plus expanding +/- list below image). Also exports an ‘all-expanded image’ in the following formats: PNG, JPEG, SVG and PDF format (non-interactive). The current version also supports export to Flash SWF.
- Icons on nodes
- Clouds around branches
- Graphical links connecting nodes
- Search restricted to single branches
- Web and file hyperlinks from nodes
According to its developers, FreeMind is used for the following activities:
- Keeping track of projects, including subtasks, state of subtasks and time recording
- Content development project workspace, including course outline, learning objectives, learning theory, methodology, media types, links to necessary files, information sources, information management
- Workspace to capture internet-based research
- Knowledge base to manage collections of information, with links on nodes which expand as needed. Such a collection of notes is sometimes called knowledge base.
- Essay writing and brainstorming, using colors to show which essays are in progress, completed, not yet started.
- Maintaining a database of information with a structure that is either very dynamic or not known in advance.
- Manage commented internet bookmarks.
Click here to download Freemind.
More…
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References:
Bloom B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.
Buzan, T., Buzan, B. (2003). The Mind Map Book (4th Ed.). BBC Active, Harlow, England.
Links:
Freemind website on SourceForge.net [Internet] Available from: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (Accessed 19 October 2009)
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October 26 2009 03:30 pm | e-learning
Marco Milani on 06 Nov 2009 at 4:15 pm #
Nice post!
Thank you
A Toolkit to Develop E-Learning in an Open (XML) Environment | E-Learning Curve Blog on 01 Dec 2009 at 10:44 am #
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