Web 2.0 app - Mind Mapping - Mayomi

The elementary education program has trained many teachers on how to integrate software into the curriculum. Inspiration has been a tool that we have seen teachers make use of to help students scaffold writing and facilitate brainstorming activities. Many teachers in the field are not even aware of Inspiration, nor are they willing to go through the trouble to jump through the hoops required to get it installed on computers.

"Web 2.0" (man, I hate this buzzword) technologies offer the opportunity to distrubute javascript or flash based applications through the web. The only technical piece that a teacher needs to make certain of is that the computers that the students will use has the necessary plugins installed and that the web site hosting the application is not blocked by their firewall.

I am going to spend a few days researching some of these web based applications and see if they are decent replacements for the software we use here in the School of Education. The first "title" I looked at was a replacement for Inspiration. There are many lists of these "Web 2.0" apps available on the web and it took little time for me to find one that did concept mapping. It was called Mayomi and it was a flash based application. I was quickly able to create a hierarchical map of the LSB web site (see below). However, I noticed that there was no way for me to relate items together in any way other than a hierarchy. In the below example, I was not able to relate "About Us" to "Staff". While the app does a fine job of self organizing the display of the map, there was no way to reorganize it. WYSIAYG (What you see is All you get!).

Mayomi Map
Concept Map of the LSB web site created with Mayomi.

However, there was a feature that looked for relationships between items in your map to items in the other maps in the system. This "social" mapping idea is intriguing, particularly if the system's search was confined to the context of a classroom. The ability of students to converge on ideas independently and link to each other's maps to create their own understanding and meaning of the content is certainly the "Holy Grail" of this type of software... and not one where non-networked tools like Inspiration have excelled.

Submitted by Sean Keesler on Thu, 2006-05-18 08:38.
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Comments

1

Christoph:

Hi, I am not sure if you were aware of this, but you can simply reorganize the hierarchy by drag&drop. Simply click on a node, hold the mouse button down, move it over another node, and the one you picked up will become a 'child' of the one you dropped it on. There are also various shortcuts available, such as holding the space bar down and moving the mouse to pan the map and using the arrow keys to navigate the nodes. They are listen in the help panel under shortcuts. Hope that helps, Christoph
2006-07-05 20:18
2

Jay:

I think Sean is asking for one-to-many relationships, rather than a top-down hierarchy. That is, a mind-map "cloud" rather than nested lists.
2006-11-10 10:29
3

Sean Keesler:

What I am looking for is a networked app that can facilitate linking between maps made by different students in real time.  It would be great for jigsaw activities. CMapTools sort of does it.
2006-11-10 23:14