Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I have something special for us today, something we have never really looked at on DottoTech.
Today, we are going to look into mind reading.
No, that’s not right, mind mapping.
That’s what it is, mind mapping today on DottoTech.
I am a big fan of the mind map.
If you haven’t played with mind maps before this is what a Mind Map is.
It’s basically a hierarchical diagram that conveys a concept, an idea, a thought, a process
or something like that.
Now you might call it whiteboarding or spit balling or the sort of thing that you do on
a napkin with your buddies as you’re planning out your future.
We all mind map one way or another but now we have software, actually we’ve got long
time software that formalizes the mind mapping process.
But while mind mapping itself is a very simple concept, entrenching it into a piece of software
can be a little bit more difficult.
Now there are some very expensive solutions out there for mind mapping but fortunately,
there are also some very free solutions out there for mind mapping such as Mind Mup, which
is what we’re going to take a look at today, 100% free.
Now you can actually spend maybe up to $20 a year or so on it if you buy the advanced
version, which I will talk about.
It really doesn’t do anything that the simple version does, except it will allow you to
share your mind maps a little more easily plus they also provide some storage for you.
But the bottom line is this is the software here that I used to create this little simple
mind map, something that’s available and accessible and you should be trying out.
Mind mapping is taught in a lot of school systems in the world.
Germany, for example, they teach mind mapping to everybody.
Now they don’t teach it in Canada as far as I know nor in the States.
There are certainly university level courses where they involve it and it is something
that we inherently do but actually making it a formal part of the curriculum hasn’t
happened yet but it would be well worth considering personally, I think.
So let’s take a look at how the mind mapping software works, Mind Mup in this particular
case.
You can go to MindMup.com, sign up for a free account and you access it through the web
browser.
You can also install a Chrome extension which will allow you to run it through Chrome.
You can save your maps on Dropbox or in Google Drive.
There’s also desktop version that you can use for offline access.
But for the most part, just go to the website and start playing with it.
The whole idea behind creating a mind map is just to empty your mind, to throw everything,
all the different ideas down onto the page and then create a hierarchy out of it, create
linkages between it.
You do that just by basically typing ideas and going along.
So here I am, I’m just working on it.
This is more just to give us an example, to have something in place, but I’m working
on my thoughts around planning a webinar.
I’ve been doing a lot of webinar planning type stuff lately.
So here I am putting all of the different pieces together.
Now Mind Mup is designed by geeks for geeks so everything that you can do, you can do
from the keyboard.
You can also have this little toolbar here that does everything that the keyboard does
and allows you to select it and be able to see exactly what happens.
But basically what we’ve got if we’ve look at the relationship is each of these
little nodes here have siblings, which are other nodes at the same hierarchal level as
them and then they have children.
They have child nodes that are related to them as well.
If you look at this, this is kind of a family tree or they call it a sub-tree.
So there are these relationships.
It’s all how things are related to each other in a workflow.
You can create workflows or you can create information flows.
You can find the areas of opportunities.
There’s a lots of different ways to view mind maps but the visual representation of
a process or a concept is awesome to have to be able to work with.
It allows you to entrench ideas.
It allows you to share ideas.
It allows you to work through problems and to plan more effectively.
So there are lots of different use cases for it.
Let me add something to this.
If I’m working on a webinar here.
I know what I’m doing.
Let’s say I’m looking at the rundown right now.
So here’s where I put the rundown.
In the planning process I’ve gone through, you have to have content.
We need an outline.
We’re actual going to need graphics and stuff and the marketing materials we’re
going to need.
But here’s the rundown which we’re going to need done for any webinar so that we can
plan everything else.
We don’t know how we’re going to market it, how we’re going to tell people it till
we have our rundown done for all the different content.
So it starts with a welcome.
We’re going to set expectations.
We’re going to do a poll.
Then it’s going to be Part 1.
Now the way that we add child nodes or sub nodes to a node like this, to the rundown,
is just by hitting the Enter key.
The Enter key will create a new one at the same level as this so it creates a sibling.
So this would be sibling, sibling, sibling.
That’s not what I wanted to do.
What I want to do is hit the Tab and that creates a child.
That’s right.
Tab creates one.
Do you see how it’s linked?
It’s in the rundown and it’s going to be intermission as we start laying out the
webinar.
I hit Tab again and it creates a sub category for the intermission.
If I hit Return, it would have created another one at the same level, which might be Part
2.
Do you see how this is all coming together?
We have ability to build out all of the different content this way.
You can multi-select different nodes so that you can apply formatting and other things
to them.
For example here, for some reason we didn’t get the right color so now it’s the right
color as the rest of them.
So there we’ve got the ability to slowly build out the different ideas.
You can attach graphics to any of these and you can actually even turn them into a to-do
list if you choose to.
So you’ve got the ability to lay out the mind map thusly.
So every different piece of mind mapping software is going to create different opportunities
and allow you to apply it in different ways.
What they’ve done with Mind Mup is they’re really trying to do two different things.
One is if you go into the View menu here, we’ve got something called the Side Pane
that allows us to turn on measurements and storyboards.
This really speaks to the authors what they want to do with the piece of software like
this because obviously, it’s a blank canvas, excuse me as far as we can do with mind mapping
software.
But they wanted to create a measurement tools so we can apply values and we can keep score.
So there are a lot of different things that can be done with that as far as scheduling,
as far as ordering.
I’m going to be using it as far as scheduling out the webinar.
I’ll show you the measurements in a moment.
They also thought that people might want to use it for storyboarding so if you think about
this as a hierarchical representation, we’ve got all of the different elements.
But if you’re writing a book or if you were writing a blog post and you’re doing your
research and putting all the different ideas down, then you want to create a narrative
out of that that doesn’t necessarily follow the hierarchical form because storyboards
don’t.
So they could also turn on the storyboard.
Let’s start with that and then we’ll go to measurements and show you how that works.
The storyboard if you just turn on the storyboard, what you can do is—you see I’ve already
started with it—you can drag out different elements from the mind map itself and then
you can put them in order so that you can start to lay out a concept of a narrative
of a storyboard that you might be writing against.
Here it becomes a nice research tool for preparing for any sort of document writing at all.
I think even more interesting is this one here, which is where we go into the Measurements.
Measurements is so cool.
I’m going to choose for the webinar here—let me just clear this out because I was playing
with it earlier—I’m going to create a new measurement and I’m going to call this
a Rundown of the webinar.
Just bear with me for a second.
I add that and when I add that, all I need to do is I’m going to go into the rundown
here, I’m going to add all of the different pieces at the same level of the webinar, all
of the different modules of the webinar essentially.
Then just you see we’ve got a little spreadsheet here so we can say for the welcome, I want
the welcome to be 3 minutes.
For the setting expectations, I’m going to do 2 minutes.
Do you see what’s happening in the bottom?
It’s totaling things up for me.
I’m going to spend 2 minutes on the poll.
Let me go down to the poll, I’m going to spend 2 minutes.
I’m going to spend 15 minutes on Part 1.
I’m going to spend 5 minutes on the intermission.
I’m going to spend 15 minutes on Part 2.
How much time does that leave me?
That’s 42 minutes of my total hour of the webinar now that’s been used up.
So you can use it for creating sort of calculations based on content within it.
So that opens up a huge variety of different ways that you can use a program like Mind
Mup.
It’s, as I say, 100% free.
You go to MindMup.com.
Get it.
What I encourage you to do with a program like this is just start to play with it.
See where it fits in your life.
If you like it, you can use it for as long as you want for free.
If you decide that you want to do a little bit more with it, this is the more that you
can do.
Let me just toggle this off.
Let’s close it.
There we go.
Let me show you what I found really interesting.
If we go into the Share menu because I’ve got the gold version—I’ve got the $20
a year version and it’s based on how much storage you take up; I think it would be hard
to spend much more than that—I can take this and actually embed the HTML code from
this into my own website.
So you can create a mind map that you can then publish into your blog or onto your site
using this.
It gives you lots of opportunities for sharing.
You can also of course if we take a look at the Share menu, you can tweet it out to social
media or send it into Facebook so you can take this idea, this map.
And when you start thinking about the ability to add graphics to it and to be able to add
different linkages, using different colors, adding some titling to it, you could create
a really nice description of a process with this tool and then be able to share it.
Now the reason that you need to get the premium version to share is you can save it in your
Google Drive but by the nature of how Google Drive works, it doesn’t allow you to share
things directly other than that so you can’t share it directly out of that.
It’s the same with Dropbox.
You don’t have the HTML code.
You don’t basically have the web address to be able to share it.
So you need to use this if you want to be able to share it.
That’s the prime reason that you might consider the premium version.
Pretty cool, aye?
I hope you like it and give it a shot.
And if you do create some cool mind maps, let me know.
I’d love to hear what you use mind mapping for.
That’s a great use of the comments area here below.
That’s it for today.
I hope you found it useful.
There are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
First, subscribe to the channel.
Secondly, subscribe to our newsletter.
Then you’ll hear about upcoming webinars that we do like the ones that I’m planning
here on my mind map.
And finally, DottoTech is a crowd-funded site through the site, Patreon.
If you want to know what it’s like to be a DottoTech Patreon and what the perks are
because there are some awesome perks, I encourage you to visit our Patreon page.
That’s it for today.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.