Mind mapping is a great way to organise thoughts. The human brain may have many ideas and however scattered, learning stems from creating associations between two separate elements (thoughts), the connection between the two is what provides meaning and therefore a learning experience. Mind mapping entails breaking down certain concepts into the parts that create it’s meaning and this naturally organises one’s thoughts of particular concepts both in broad terms and specific notions of the concept. During this week’s Online Video Experiments, we created a mind map for ‘Online Video’, breaking the concept down into four distinct areas: affordances, purpose, avenues and format, where broad and specific uses or associated notions of ‘Online Video’ could be mapped out by their relationship with each other. This was a practice based learning experience as it required much analytical development of associated concepts in an interactive manner.

Below is the mind map that our group created and you can see how the visual factor of mind mapping generated the idea of categorising all of the associated terms into 4 groups.

Each group’s mind map was collated through the process of class discussion to create the below ‘mother’ mind map. Similarly, groups of associated terms were formed through this process, although to a larger extent.

The process of mind mapping is something that I rarely practice, however I can see from the extent of discovery resulting from today’s mind mapping process, the importance of using visual brainstorming to create associations thorough associations that may not have been possible otherwise, or at least to the same extent.