My Mind Mapping Dilemma

Just last week I was asked to do a hands on assistive technology workshop as a kick off for the school year. Since I was going to be using the computer lab and their SmartBoard to do the workshop I decided that I would use the school’s computer to do my presentation and demonstrate the software. As I was putting together the presentation I thought wow, I could use one of the on-line mind mapping applications as my presentation tool to show the teachers the features of the software and give them a good overview. I knew that I would have access to the Internet and thought that this strategy would work well with my audience. So I fired up Mindomo, logged on a started to develop my feature mind map. Mindomo is very easy to use and if you don’t look up at your browser you would swear that you are using a desktop application. The fluid ribbon interface looks great and it is easy to find the features that you are looking for. Within minutes, I had developed a comprehensive visual mind map to highlight all of the features of the software that I was introducing. After finishing the mind map I decided that it would make a great handout and decided to print it. This is where the process broke down. No matter what I did the quality of the printed copy looked fuzzy and not sharp enough for my standards. I tried exporting the mind map to png, jpeg, and PDF but still the quality was poor.

At this point I made an executive decision and decided to redo the mind map using MindManager Pro 7. I quickly redid the mind map and then printed it out on my new OkiData 6100n color printer. The outputted mind map looked crisp and clean and something that I could be proud to hand out to the teachers that I would be working with. So I printed off 20 mind maps and then was faced with the dilemma, how do I use this as part of my presentation? Looking at all of the alternatives I decided that I would download the MindManager 7 Viewer and install it on the Instructor’s computer and simply view it that way. So I downloaded the MindManager 7 Viewer and my mindmap and saved it to my USB drive. When I got to the school I quickly installed the MindManager 7 Viewer and was up and running. While this solution worked it took too much time on my part to make it happen.


As I was pondering this scenario for my blog, and I said to myself there has got to be a better way to handle these kinds of scenarios. It should be that you create it once, and are able to publish it as you see fit without the need to have a viewer or a plug-in. I for one hope that the publishers of mind mapping software begin to think about what mind mapping 2.0 looks like, so that we can create our visual mind maps with our desktop applications and they are automatically synchronized and pushed out to the web at our discretion. Once on the web, we should be able to have an environment so that we can modify, access, view and print them. I know for myself that having this functionality would have saved me a great deal of time.

I would be interested in your comments and ideas.