I've got you under my skin Where the rain can't get in But if the sweat pours out, just shout I'll try to swim and pull you outGot one of my more melacholy CD mixes going on the stereo. Am somewhat temporally out of sorts, since I was actually up, dressed, and out of the hovel before noon today. Wonders never cease.
Thanks to InfoDesign, and sort of as a follow-up to the linkage I posted about depicting thoughts graphically, I've come across a site about diagrammatic reasoning.
I love being able to depict my thoughts pictorially (which is kind of funny, for a "writer"). When I discovered mind mapping a few years ago, it was like someone opened a door. I remember being in grade school, or high school, and the teachers would try and stress that there was only one was to record information "properly", that being linearly, with words, in proper sentences, or for the more radical, point form was acceptable.
Bullshit.
Even through university, I was still burdened to some degree with this rather outmoded form of studying. My academic record wasn't exactly outstanding -- of course there were a number of reasons for this, but I remember that with increasing amounts of information to process, the old grade-7 style paradigm of making study notes became increasingly inadequate.
When I went back to school part-time a few years ago, I relied on mind-mapping to summarize what I learned. It was great to be able to summarize an entire chapter on a single page (I used 9"x12" sketchbooks instead of regular notebooks), and being able to rely on not just words, but spatial organization as well to convey meaning. And colour. I love colour, which of course was another big no-no in the grade-7 paradigm (blue or black ink only, with red used to underline titles and headings).
It's been a long time since I was in grade school, but I would imagine that they're still teaching to same stiff, plodding, linear manner of "proper" studying. It strikes me as being even more outmoded now, in the age of hypertext and the web. Don't get me wrong -- linear rhetoric has its place, and I still think it's important to be able to string together a proper sentence, but let's not kid ourselves that it's the only way to do things.
(Also, check out Google's directory of mind mapping links.)