Adult Learning & TheBrain

"There is evidence that someone else's mind-map is only minimally useful [to others], and it is the act of organizing the content yourself that helps you learn it." ~ Matthew Lee

Using a Mind-Map to Teach

I used the Adult Learning map I shared for a student-teaching session in one of my classes on cross-cultural teaching, and I got very good feedback from the professors and students . . .. I'll be trying it again with a couple of topics in Phonology this month. Several of the students followed along or explored the WebBrain. At least one student started using TheBrain.

For a long presentation, using TB gives me the freedom to use media, hide funny Easter eggs, to jump around, and ask and respond to questions by returning to previous thoughts. The "Green" lines point to the critical bits that the rest of the class requested to discuss a few days before (I did a simplified learning contract), and so I intended to touch on each of those during the class-period, but many of the tangents were accessed and discussed when they came up.

For an adult learning environment, where one acts as a facilitator, having a rich knowledge base from diverse research can help you to discuss and address felt needs of the participants that you didn't plan to present. There's little point in teaching something that the others aren't interested in.

On the Value of Building a Mind-Map Yourself

First, I want to say that building the model/map is (for me) one of the best ways to learn, and I don't expect you would disagree with that.

When I build a mind-map, I have to decide how to structure my content and I discover links.
Sometimes a good teacher will give an advance organizer that gives a simplified mental representation of a system (think the circle of the water cycle), and that model evolves as details are added. The mental model also gets pruned procedurally as we forget irrelevant details.
- This process of growing and pruning your own mental bonsai tree is similar to mind-mapping. Sometimes the same forms can be represented in a mind-map, or at least an image, and it can be pruned intentionally as less relevant information is identified and moved/deleted/rewritten.
I remember what I was thinking about when I found a piece of information, and can use that context to find the thought later in the mind-map. Such structure must be explicitly represented to be useful to a reader.

On Someone Else Using Your Mind-Map

Much of my "purported" evidence that someone using your mind-map is less effective is related to the fact that they didn't have the experience of building it. I'm not saying that it can't be useful for teaching, just that the reader loses out on the part that cemented it in my mind,

Unfortunately, when someone else uses your mind-map, it's mostly passive learning, and they may not understand it the way you organized it. Layers of organization (authors, topics and subtopics, dates) will help to a point when someone is trying to find the data they want, but there is a diminishing return on interconnectedness. I found a balance for me, but eventually, there are just too many lines to "see" important connections.

They can explore, so there is a "spatial" element that is positive.
It's passive, so they don't get the synthesis activity of deciding what is important and where it goes.
When you show someone your mind-map, and the structure happens to make sense in their brain, they can be lazy and use your mental model when looking at the map, but it doesn't get usefully internalized.
When your structure doesn't make sense to them, they can't even find the bits of content you showed them.
For me, the map evolved from simple to diverse, and I remember that process. A reader can get lost in the details when they don't have that over-arching structure in their head.

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