Beyond linearity... Mapping your brain

It has probably occurred to many of us over the years, that some of our research and teaching was lagging behind the times in terms of the way in which it is organized. To sum up, over the last decades the web has had a collossal impact not only on the way people access knowledge but also, more crucially, on the way they organize it. Our students litterally think with hyperlinks and are used to circulating endlessly on the WWW, which is a particularly intuitive, spontaneous and decentralized way of organizing knowledge.
At the same time, we by and large continue to write books, present powerpoint slides and occasionally even lecture in a sometimes thoroughly linear style. Proposition B comes after proposition A, and there is simply no time or space to allow everyone to navigate their way through knowledge as they wish.
Of course, an interactive classroom can do a lot to compensate for this linearity, by reorganizing ideas in a chaotic yet controlled, logical but interactive way.
But the problem remains that the mediums at our disposal until recently forced us to be linear, even when we were not thinking linearly.
That is, until a new generation of "mindmapping" software emerged. At its simplest, mindmapping is something that many of us have done on a piece of paper when "brainstorming". The problem with doing it on paper is that it can very quickly become quite messy and defeat the purpose. And then bits of paper are lost, and are hard to update.
Clearly there was something that a smart piece of software could do, but as often with these things it took a bit of time. First, there were a number of tools that were little more than improved drawing tools. Microsoft's visio is one of them. It is neat enough, but you need to spend a lot of time rearranging things if you change your mind about your ideas. That can take a long time. And it is not interactive, hard to share (except by emailing back and forth).
The next generation are tools like Mindmeister, which allow you to essentially collaborate on drawings online. Now that is a significant improvement if what you are looking for is mostly collaboration, and it may be that for some academics this will indeed be a very useful tool to interact with research assistants. Still, I think most of us are not looking mostly for an interactive collaborative tool that helps us draw diagrams with students.

What we are looking for, I think, is what personalbrain has done. Personal brain is hard to describe and you will have to check it yourself (or any number of demos on youtube, some of which are specifically addressed to academics) to understand what it is about, but let's just say that it allows you to organize yourideas in a very dynamic, three dimensional way, that can constantly be updated and seen from a variety of angles. In other words, your personalbrain is really starting to look like... well, you follow me.
There are not many drawbacks. The software is easy to use and very intuitive. You can link "ideas" to folders, documents or websites, which can make it a great way to organize your ideas.

In fact, I foresee three possible uses for academics.

1/ teaching without the tyranny of powerpoint: one of the greatest problem I have encountered with powerpoint is that it essentially does not allow you navigate very freely. There are of course ways around that, for example you can have any number of slides ready, and only access those that turn out to be useful as the course progresses. But invariably the temptation will be to follow some sort of sequence. The second students pick up that there is a "sequence" and that you have scripted a whole course, then you can forget about the joys of class participation and improvisation which is, after all, the fun of teaching. So instead of using powerpoint (or only powerpoint) I can see how I could start every class with a personalbrain devoted to the class topic. Each idea might be linked to a number of materials (text, powerpoint, web, video), but I would let the students decide where they wanted to go: let them, literally, navigate the map as they wish. Now I think that would replicate very much what many of our students actually do these days.

2/ Planning research: one of my problems has often been that whilst every now and then I seem to cook up a half-decent idea for an article, I may have too many of them, and fail to see how they create patterns and larger projects. This is especially true if one is involved in a variety of related but subtly isolated fields. Having a personalbrain of all one's research projects can be a way of creating all kinds of links between the many facets of one's intellectual activity. In other words, personalbrain can also be a tool of self knowledge, in that it can reveal to us complex or subterranean connections that exist in our minds but that we never fully become aware of until we have visualized them. Another obvious use is mapping a particular complex research project, such as a book or a thesis.

3/ Organizing documents or tasks: this is one of the uses that personalbrain promotes, and it is of course not specific to academia (although we are perhaps more in need than others of help in terms or organization).

Anyhow, I will go on experimenting with personalbrain, but I think it is a groundbreaking piece of software for academics, and that it will soon be difficult to do without it for those who have only minimally experimented with the technology.