I was first introduced to mindmeister by Robin Good during a hectic, but thoroughly enjoyable, session on collaboration tools at last year's Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations. (BTW, do you say "at" when the entire conference was online?) I haven't played with it much since then, but I decided to go back to it today because I was working from home and didn't have access to my whiteboard. What you see above is the result: a rough draft of some of the elements (actors, settings, tools) of an e-Learning ecosystem.
While using mindmeister is very easy & intuitive, the experience was somehow less fulfilling for me than using my whiteboard. While I could add and remove nodes and text, link things, undo all of it, and make use of all the other cool functions, I missed physically doing all of these things. I missed my handwriting. I missed using my fingers to erase things. I missed drawing lines and shapes. So while the end product -- well, draft product -- was essentially the same in meaning, the process was much less enjoyable.
Maybe it's just a case of needing a better human-computer interface than the mouse/keyboard/monitor combination. If I could write and draw directly on my monitor with some sort of virtual marker and erase things with the swipe of my finger then I'd probably be a lot happier. I've never used a Tablet PC but maybe the experience is relatively similar. Maybe I should look into that...
Oh, and speaking of whiteboards, perhaps you might be interested in my earlier post, The Flickr Whiteboard Experiment.
0 comments:
Post a Comment