Apologies for cross posting

Hi all

Back in August I posted up a question across several forums in order to get some feedback on how mind mapping / concept mapping software was being used in universities in the UK.  At London Met we have recently purchased Mind Genius so I was particularly interested in this program and seeing whether others were using it, or any other visual planning software, as a strictly assistive program or for more mainstream use.  The aim of the small in house project that I am working on is to promote the use of the software so I was looking to get a feel for what others were doing in terms of promotion and training as well. 

I posted the question in both disability and learning technology forums in order to try and get a wider range of views. The attached spreadsheet shows a summary of the anonymised responses. The first worksheet shows the answers to the specific questions that I asked. The second worksheet shows a range of more general comments on how people use visual planning software and what they like/dislike about different programs. The third worksheet has some links to publicly accessible resources.

I had about 40 responses in total across the various forums.  There seems to be a much wider range of programs in use than I initially realised although some of these are only used on a small scale according to the subject or individual lecturer.  There seems to be a desire to move towards more mainstream use of visual planning software in general although judging by the responses it quite often comes down to how much time one individual has rather than a concerted institutional wide push.  One point of interest is that I think I had a disproportionately high number of responses from Scottish institutions.  I suspect that this is down to excellent work undertaken by JISC RSC Scotland North & East who some people will know from AccessApps and EduApps. For those that haven’t come across organisation or the resources these are a collection of freeware/shareware resources which include mindmapping software - http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/eduapps/. 

With regards to how I’m using the feedback I think the main thing I want to do is to try and develop some training materials that get away from how to use the basic functions.  There were some examples of materials which showed how to use the software for specific study tasks, e.g. note-making and revision, but there seemed to be little use of subject specific examples that could be used to encourage staff and students to make wider use of this type of software. 

Thanks to everyone who responded. If anyone has any further thoughts or feedback then I’d be happy to update this spreadsheet and re-circulate it at later date.

Kind regards

Kevin Brunton

Disability IT Co-ordinator

London Metropolitan University