Learning by... Avoiding mistakes (Richard Gaskin)

[Ronald Zellner]

Starting in the 70s I often had students (psychology & educational psychology courses) map out the course content using 3x5 cards and newsprint as a way of fully understanding the concepts and interrelationships.  I continued that technique in educational technology areas but gravitated to Mind-mapping software (content/concept mapping).  In education we were partial to one named "Inspiration". 
While not as complex as the programming development described here, tasks like conceptualizing a tutorial, storyboarding a video, or planning a website seem to benefit from the ability to lay out the components and easily adjust the "nodes", their locations, and the connections among them.  It also helps planning/communicating in group projects where participants are at different locations.

Going full circle, I developed a Revolution app that lets the student interact with embedded instructional videos and "take notes" by constructing a concept map of the video content.  The nodes are created at any point in the video and are displayed as a thumbnail of the current video content.  The student then names & defines that node, arranges the set, and creates different types of connections among the nodes to represent the nature of the relationships.  All nodes are hot and adjust the movie to that content for selected playback.

Has anyone here tried using "Mind-mapping" software  for development?

-Ron