Interactive Mind Maps on the Web

I have written about mind maps before.  These are great tools to summarize complex information and relationships between concepts.  In the past I have created a flowchart with bubbl.us and a few mind maps with Vue.

I really like Vue as it gives you the greatest flexibility in the look and content of your mind map.  It also is a tremendous tool for presentation with the use of pathways.  Combining hover zoom and pathways, one can create a very customized flow or a presentation and focus attention on specific nodes or groups of nodes.
The biggest draw back I have found with Vue is a non intuitive collapse and expand function for nodes.  The other drawback is the difficulty in publishing it to the web in an interactive format where a user can click on a node to collapse or expand it.  This functionality is helpful when a map gets really large or when a user is looking at it with a small screen device.

After a very brief search (meaning I probably missed some other good tools), I decided on Freemind for these 2 reasons:

1. Easy collapsing and expanding of nodes
2. Maintaining this functionality when publishing to the web.
3. It does have some formatting options that are quite sufficient for my purpose.

How do you go about this?

1. Download and install Freemind (Freemind.sourceforge.net)
2. Create your mind map
3. Save the mind map (*.mm) and upload to your web server.
4. Download the Freemind applet (zip file which includes an HTML template) (freemindbrowser.jar).  You need this hosted on your web server.
5. Create a HTML wrapper using a template included with the freemind applet zip file that points to the location of your freemindbrowser.jar file and your *.mm mind map file.
6. Upload this HTML file to the web server.
7. Make sure the MIME types on the web server for .mm are set to application/freemind.  You may need your server administration to do this for you.
8. Point your browser to this HTML file and you are all done.

Static Image exported from Freemind

Just to test out this functionality, I summarized this information HERE using Freemind as an interactive mind map.

Caveat - needs JRE to work.  User will be prompted to download this if they don't have it

Caveat - this means it will NOT work on iPad or other iOS devices as they don't support Java :-(

Visual Understanding Environment (VUE)

Came across this very interestring and useful tool from the Tufts Academic Technology. I have written about Bubbl.us before as a mind-mapping utility. VUE appears to be much more than that. While I have not explored all the features yet, some things that stand out:

1. Lot of flexibility in placing and formating nodes - shapes, fills, outlines
2. Does not appear to have the ability to have a parent > child heirarchy but nodes and subnodes can be clustered to create something similar to a heirarchy. Does not allow collapsing and expanding subnodes attached to a node.
3. Links can be labelled, colored, and can even have curves or "S" shapes.
4. Extensive Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to zoom in, out, pan, focus, etc.
5. The beauty of the software is the ability to create presentations from the map
6. Each node can have text or images attached to it.
7. Pathways can be created linking nodes/subnodes in various orders and then a presentation can be created that displays the text/slides
8. When displaying the slides, moving the cursor to the extreme right will show all the nodes linked to the node being displayed allowing you to navigate your presentation in a non-linear manner
9. Multiple pathways can be created in the same concept map.
10. You can show nodes connected to a particular pathway by hiding the rest of the map.
11. The map can be exported in multiple formats
12. There is also a semantic search function that one can run on the concept map.
13. VUE also allow import from datasets including Zotero. I have not tried that yet but sounds fascinating that it will automatically create concept maps based on the imported references!
14. The part that I want to explore is how the map can be exported to OpenLabyrinth to quickly create virtual patient cases.

I am just scratching the surface as I have used this software for barely a week. I was running a course on "Technology in Teaching" at our institution and created the following VUE map.

During the course I took the participants on a journey from the fundamentals of learning theory (Yellow nodes) to understanding the learning environment (blue nodes) to the various technology solutions (green nodes). I created a couple of pathways that allowed them to see how each portion of the course related to the whole concept map.

The Logical Flow of a Physical Exam

The other day I was observing a 2nd year medical student examining a patient in my outpatient clinic. The student did a very good job- doing a very thorough examination of each organ system.

The only problem was the flow of the exam or the lack of one. He would start at the head and examine the mouth and then move down to the neck. Later he would come back to the mouth to check for the midline tongue and the gag reflex.

The patient would have to lie down for the abdominal exam, and then sit up to have the lumbar spine examined; lie down for the Straight Leg Raise test and sit up for the knee and ankle jerk; you get the idea.

It seemed an example of a logical flow of a physical exam that combined the elements of:

1. Going down from head to toe
2. Patient comfort and convenience
3. Efficiency

might be helpful. Of course everyone will have a slightly different protocol for doing this.

As I was wondering how to present this information, I came across Bubbl.us a cool mindmapping tool. So I created the following schema of the Logical Flow of a Physical Exam using Bubbl.us

The problem is that the site is transitioning to beta and is very very slow! Also if you use the beta it does not let you share the mind map or embed the code. So here it is in its slow but still glorious 1.0 form (Click the - sign in upper left to zoom out. Click and drag to see different elements, to see the full size, click the read only link at the bottom):

If you want to check it out on Bubbl.us, here is the read only link