What are your experiences with mindmapping?

I use a piece of paper and a pencil :). You can also use mindmanager which is a cool piece of software but I just prefer a big whiteboard or paper for personal mind map.

Whiteboard is the way to go. It’s spacious enough for several people to work on, it’s flexible enough to make changes throughout the exercise and it’s a good place to capture it on to paper from after the session is over.

One of the best mindmaps I’ve seen had a lot of images attached to the concepts it was mapping – if you have someone who’s good at drawing in your group, get them involved in making the final version. Mindmaps are very visually oriented tools and these little sketches made it so easy to follow and grasp – I’d highly recommend it!

@wildflower An inspired comment. Check out the artists we had at our Meet the World event in January: http://www.debaak.tv/?p=422

PS: I’m the guy with the microphone. :-)

Last year I attended a course “MindMapping and Radiant Thinking”, by a cetrified teacher. We first learned to juggle with 3 balls (apparently the way you normally learn that is wrong), did some memory quizzes and started with a clean sheet of paper and coloured pencils. Since that day I have used mindmaps every day.

Although there are free MM software applications, I am a great fan of NovaMind and OmiGraffle pro for the mac.

Cheers,
Count Pollen

I second Novamind for mindmapping. I love OmniGraffle for charts but not mindmapping. I’ve found mindmapping to be really beneficial for brainstorming and for organizing thoughts. In fact, Novamind revolutionized my thinking about teaching. Great stuff.