I teach several technical courses online and I’ve been thinking about ways to get my students more involved in a group. However, being online, that’s hard, so I’m trying the idea of collaborative mind mapping with my students in Antenna Modeling. I’m trying two sites where free accounts are available. On Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com) and Bubble.us (http://www.bubbl.us/).

The major objective of this effort is to see if I can help people more with the course, to improve the graduation rate. Antenna Modeling, since it’s setup as a self-study course with little need to send things to the teacher, often has problems. It’s easier when I can teach in a classroom where I can see people’s reactions and jump in to help when help is needed. Online I can’t see a problem developing, so it’s hard to help until it’s almost too late.

Most of my work so far has been on Mindmeister. One of the mind maps I’m working on with students is about selecting software. Here’s the start of the map:

We’ve started another map on definitions and another on basic modeling. You’re welcome to come take a look at what we’ve done and are doing, or join in the collaboration if you’d like. If nothing else, we’re building a collection of maps that will be useful for figuring out what’s important to learn.

If anything useful comes out of this effort, I’ll share it with you. If you’re working on assembling some sort of knowledge, whether you’re teaching something, designing something, or just learning something, an online mind map built as a collaboration can be an effective method of bringing everyone together. I used to do this kind of thing using GoToMeeting, but this looks like a better, more hands on way to do it.

UPDATED: Spelling correction

Categories: Practical Applications, Tools, Web & Internet Communications