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
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If you’re interested in writing, then the place to go for both the good and the bad is the web. There is so much of both ends of the spectrum and everything in between that it’s an amazing place to study. Now the study of the web has been launched as a formal area of study by a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton. In November 2006 they launched the Web Science Research Initiative to study the web and how it works.

Scientific American Oct 2008

The article in October’s Scientific American ( “Web Science Emerges”, Scientific American, October 2008, pp76-81) is an interesting overview of this new science, the insights already gained and some of the interesting questions up for study in the future. So what does this have to do with writing? A lot actually.

If you’re going to communicate something, you need to understand the medium and how it’s used. That goes for any medium. Most importantly, you need to understand the people who use it and how best to communicate with them. I expect that this new science will help us put the whole phenomenon of the web into a better perspective so we can use it better.

Web Science is a multi-disciplinary activity involving many areas of science. Insights from Biology, Brain Science, Population Dynamics, Ecology, Sociology, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Socio-Cultural Systems, and in fact nearly every area of knowledge will be important. If we start to understand the evolution of the web in all its complexity and how messages are best structured and delivered, it will have a major impact on how we communicate. Blogging, Audio-Blogging, Video-Blogging, Social Networking, and many other innovations on the web have introduced new ways to communicate. If we understand them better, we can use them better.

For example, I believe that poor writing style & grammar will hurt a communication, even on blogs. Many people disagree with me, believing in turn that writing without prior thought makes it somehow more real and more believable. But who is right? Maybe we’re all partly right and what truly matters is the specific audience or the topic or the intention or some other factor or combination of factors. It will be many years before we can get answers to questions like this, but as we start to learn, we’ll do better on ‘Getting Out Point Across’.

Categories: Web & Internet Communications
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