I’ve been using mindmaps as the main medium to present ideas in lectures for a couple of weeks. It’s an experiment and I’m still smoothing out some rough patches (If you’re one of my students reading this - yes you’re guinea pigs ;). The software I’m using MindManager Pro mainly because it is the only mindmapping software I have found that interacts nicely with a tablet and allows you to just write (instead of type) the content. For me this is critical as I can add equations, symbols and sketches without a second thought.

So far, the good:

• preparing lectures is great. I’m adding material all over the place and organising as I go. Mindmaps are perfect for this.
• The presentation can go nonlinearly - I can set the logical structure of the material down but present it in a different sequence jumping around making connections.
• getting an overview / summary is quite easy.

the bad:

• The software’s presentation mode sucks. It tries too hard. It’s OK as a default for a simple presentation where you just want to run down a list of dot points, but hell you’ve missed the point of a mindmap - it should be strongly visual. I’m a professional presenter - I want total control over what appears, when and how. A much better model for presentation would be to be able to define a series of views of the map and just transition smoothly between the views.
• Again the software is more set up for creation than presentation - the layout changes dynamically as you show/hide content and you cannot choose the layout of sub-branches. I would much prefer a flexible fixed layout - that way the placement of items provides visual cues, a way of remembering ideas and I can make best use of space.
• Printing lecture notes is a nightmare. There is a fair amount of material in a map and the geometry of the full map just doesn’t automatically split nicely into a series of pages at a reasonable resolution. I think the solution is again the set of views idea - maybe tag some of the views as printable.

The upshot so far is that the approach works quite well, and I prefer it over powerpoint. The software implementation though needs improvement, particularly for presenting. Maybe it will annoy me enough that I will write an alternative.

I’ll find out soon how the students are taking it …