Beyond Mind Maps: Expanding the Power of Concept Mapping

Hi Nick, and thanks for the offer. Do you mean a complementary tool or your own way of dealing with the existing possibilities of MM?

Hello Mike. It's a technique within MindManager that applies concept mapping principles to tree diagrams, helping to avoid the main challenges with concept maps, namely scalability and granularity.

Hello Nick,

Can you please show an example.

René

Hello Nick,

While the concept maps are still in development, I should probably be more open to continue exploring alternative approaches ;-)
Providing an example or a brief description of the basic idea would be greatly appreciated. While I've experimented with various methods, I'm sure there are still more to explore...

Hello René and Mike

I will write it up and post a PDF here.

Hello again Mike and René

I have tried to organise the ideas in this document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zp92aKpGy4tWgEF_sb378ougheaAydlH/view?usp=drive_link

Feedback is very welcome.

Hi Nick!

Regarding your general thoughts

Yes, concept maps are a very important analytical tool, as they come incomparably closer to deeper thinking processes and the complex nature of things than mind maps. However, they are also demanding and require high-quality modeling tools. MindManager needs to improve on this.

You also address the problem of spatial development, as concept maps can also become large. For mind maps, we have display/collapse branch and show/hide options, which are missing from concept maps. A functional extension would be welcome.

Considering 3D spaces as an expansion space, as you suggest, is interesting, and I would welcome their introduction into MindManager. However, from experience with 3D tools, I know that it takes extremely well-thought-out concepts to generate real value instead of just showmanship. But I am a friend of multidimensionality.

Even in 2D space, it is possible to work with huge concept maps or semantic networks with tens of thousands of nodes. However, extra features are needed if you don't want to rent a whole cinema hall for the presentation.

A QDA software helps me with this, for example. The basic idea behind it is similar to the show/hide principle in MindManager, but it is implemented on a completely different level. Instead of displaying the entire network, which is possible but not helpful if huge, I have the option of displaying the required elements in any number of partial views/subsystems and modeling them normally. At any time and depending on the goal, I can load or unload further elements of the large network. I can save and manage such views within the program in the same way as normal maps, while their content remains connected to the main network. But of course there are also capable accompanying tools, otherwise you would get lost in such a sea of concepts.

Your hybrid approach

Your method uses a typical mind map tree to map concept maps, using the branches alternately as links or nodes. Because it uses mind mapping technology, it gets support in some points, such as display/collapse.

The main problem: the concept to be mapped must have an inherently hierarchical structure, or it must be forced to do so. Even more: the hierarchy must also be strict. This means that a child node cannot have two or more parents. Alternatively: all non-strictly hierarchical relationships can be visualized by cross-relationship lines, which in turn would look and function differently from the rest...

I can certainly imagine that there can be usage scenarios for this, but the approach is so restrictive that for my type of use it remains only a rare, albeit justified, special solution and not an alternative to conventional concept maps.

Nevertheless, many thanks for the idea! Through such exchanges, our own "inner" concept maps are also constantly being developed ;-)

Hello Mike. Thank you for your comments. Agreed, this is not an ideal replacement for Concept Maps, but I still think that adding explicit relationships to mind maps pays dividends in an increased usable lifetime of the map.

Hello Nick,

I agree, expanding OR explaining mind maps through cross-connections can be very helpful, and I use this often myself for tasks that have nothing to do with classic concept mapping.

I only have little use for trying to place concept maps over the tree structure of mind maps. It does benefit from display/collapse functionality, but I find it rather hindering and restrictive in various other ways that are relevant to me. Others might feel differently.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for your paper on this. While we have discussed elements of this before it is useful to have your ideas so clearly summarised - and indeed this has made me think about how I present concepts in mind maps.

I agree with you about the need to make the nature of relationships in mind maps as clear as possible especially to other users. As you point out, part of the problem with mind maps and I suspect concept maps as well is that it is very easy for map authors to categorise ideas in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner which is not necessarily obvious to other users.

Your approach, ie, to make these relationships explicit, is a great response but as you say it does have its limitations. Some of these stem from the limitations of the program itself; it would be great for example if in MindManager you could place text along hierarchy lines in the way that you can do with relationship lines. It would be helpful even if you could colour code the hierarchy lines and then provide a simple legend, but none of this is easy or even possible with MindManager. Instead you have to resort to different topic styles as you have done in your example.

However, I think your paper points to a wider question. Are mind maps (or for that matter, concept maps) always the best tool for sharing information with others? I suspect that even if you try to make relationships explicit they may not be, at least once you reach a certain level of complexity.

Increasingly, I find myself exporting my more complex maps to other formats, usually (but not exclusively) Word. The resulting documents may sometimes be in the form of standard reports, but often they take on a more graphical format. Often I'm trying to overcome some arbitrary limitation of MindManager as a presentation tool, but more generally I wonder if people creating maps sometimes forget that they had to learn the mind map "language" before they could write maps, and the same applies to those trying to read them. And the more complicated a map is, both in terms of the number of topics as well as the extent to which it makes use of tags, icons, topic properties, progress symbols, priorities, etc, the more expert you have to be in the map language to decipher it.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that sometimes we should probably accept that a map may work best as form of shorthand for the author or for a small group of people, or as a draft for a document that will be presented more widely in some other way. While mind maps are an incredibly useful tool for developing complex ideas, perhaps it is in the process of translating these into other formats that the author can best explain the nature of the relationships and other facets of the underlying map to their audience..

Hello Alex. Thank you for your comments. Concept Maps were originally developed to help teachers assess a student's understanding of a subject (Gowin & Novak, Learning how to learn) so should be less ambiguous than mind maps.

I've been using MM for the past 13 years or so. I wish they would bring it back to the iPad.. especially the iPad pro.. :-)..

But back to the concept maps--yeah they definitely need to be less "quadratisch" with the implementation. :-)