Concept Mapping with Compendium

Image by ryan2point0  I do a lot with concept mapping. I use it in my work as an instructional designer and I use concept maps in writing fiction and technical work, and I am really interested in Compendium right now. What is Compendium? It is more than just concept mapping software. "Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data." Compendium is a free concept mapping software package by the Compendium Institute, a group formed by Knowledge Media Institute of  the Open University of UK, Verizon, Center for Creative Leadership, and others to promote the compendium methodology. "Our own particular interest is in visualizing the connections between people, ideas and information at multiple levels, in mapping discussions and debates, and what skills are needed to do so in a participatory manner that engages all stakeholders." What is really exciting about this is the techniques they are exploring with collaborative concept mapping:

"Extending Compendium's support for personal sensemaking, we have a particular interest in what we term collective sensemaking, and have developed a technique called Dialogue Mapping, and its extension, Conversational Modelling. Our experiences with these techiques for capturing and managing -- often in real time and under pressure -- the perspectives in meetings that emerge in open discussion or in collaborative modelling, lead us to claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling some of the key challenges in managing knowledge and making meaning:

• improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems
• real time capture and integration of hybrid material (both predictable/ formal, and unexpected/informal) into a reusable group memory
• transforming the resulting resource into the right representational formats for different stakeholders.

There is a tremendous amount of useful tutorials, videos and articles on the method at the The Compendium Exchange.

I am interested in seeing how this software holds up against CMaps which is what I currently use. I have used Gliffy and Inspiration occasionally for group projects but I am always on the look out for open source solutions. Especially one like this that asks the users to be thoughtful about what kinds of connections they are making to and with the information they are using.

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Brainstorming: order from chaos

Image by MikeOliveri via FlickrBrainstorming is a method for rapidly gathering ideas from a group. These ideas can help individuals in the group solve problems and discover solutions. Brainstorming sessions allow members to express their ideas and creativity, and to discover connections between ideas and participants. There are marginalized voices in your class or organization that have something unique to contribute. Brainstorming can help bring forth these voices from the back of the room. By their nature, brainstorming sessions allow everyone to have an equal voice.

Ordo ab Chaos: Six Rules for Brainstorming Sessions:

1. Suspend criticism and judgment.
   Everyone must agree to accept all answers; there is no good or bad idea. For five minutes, everyone is brilliant. Reviewing and sorting of the ideas will come later.
2. Wild is permitted.
   Wild is good. Wild ideas give birth to great ideas.
3. Quantity not quality.
   The more ideas you can work from the better.
4. Everyone participates.
   All and any ideas will contribute to the whole. There are no bosses or teachers in a brainstorm.
5. Invent and recycle.
   Utilize ideas already stated and combine them with others. Do not fear your creative voice.
6. Record everything.
   Let people call out their ideas, but if the ideas are not written down, people will forget what was said. Use a white board or a computer projector. Misspelling, shorthand, and doodling are acceptable. Suspend criticism of the recording process as well; this is a creative process.

Guidelines for facilitating a brainstorming session:

1. Schedule a brainstorming session during a regularly scheduled meeting or class time. The participants will appreciate the added interaction.
2. Have the group or class help define the brainstorming topic. A facilitator may want to discuss general problems, but allow the group to decide on the question together.
3. Assign a facilitator for the session. This person will keep everyone involved and will encouraging everyone to give ideas and keep the session moving. The facilitator can keep the session moving by repeating what was said and keeping others focused.
4. Assign a recorder. This person will write down everyone’s ideas. The recorder’s goal will be to get everything down quick and dirty.
5. Review the rules before starting. Everyone must agree to commit to the process. The facilitator should encourage wild ideas, and if participants laugh, they should be reminded that no criticisms or judgments are to be made.
6. Set a time limit (for five minutes or so), but if ideas are flowing, let the process keep going.
7. After the brainstorming is complete, read through the list of ideas and discuss, sort, and analyze them.
8. Afterwards, have the recorder send out the results to participants as a document or webpage. Ideally, there will be some tangible record to promote further discussion. 

  Image by World Economic Forum via FlickrThis is where mind maps or concept maps come in handy. You can use an online concept map to record ideas and then send that map out to your students or co-workers. We typically use Gliffy or the web version of Inspiration. Gliffy, like Google Docs, allows the user to invite participants to the document via email. The email contains a link to the document and then it can be edited by that user as well. We will be using CMaps for this purpose in the future as part of an on-going experiment. We will report back here on the results of our investigations. We would love to know if you are using a combination of brainstorming and concept maps. Feel free to email me or to make a comment below.
 

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