EDC 664 - Learning Adventure #4 - Inspiration with Webspiration

My initial thoughts about Learning Adventure #4: When asked to do this “adventure,” I was like why are we doing mind mapping? What does mind mapping has to do with learning? As always, I am willing to try a new tool to assist towards my learning. Furthermore, I cannot like using a tool without trying it. So, I am going to try it and see if this beta product (tool) will come handy beyond using it for this Learning Adventure.

What did I learn while using Webspiration: This tool was fairly simple to use without a huge learning curve. When reading Papert’s book, “The Children's Machine - Chapter 3: School: Change and Resistance to Change,” it allowed me to gather my thoughts about education from a new teacher’s point of view. I actually recorded the key points from this chapter and placed them first in Microsoft OneNote 2007 and then I pasted them into Webspiration via its Outline View. The Outline View allowed me to paste my outline in without any problems but, it still didn’t format my notes correctly when I switch over to Diagram View. In the Diagram View, it shows a “nifty” map of graphics from the highlights that I had listed in my outline. My cadremate Jamie showed us a tool he uses called Mead Map (aka Comapping) which is very similar which seems to have a bit more structure with its “Diagram View.” If I had to compare the two programs, Mead Map would be an ideal tool to use for this exercise than Webspiration. Again, Webspiration is free and its still in beta so, I didn’t expect too much from it other than allowing me to collaborate with others to compare “notes” on the assigned chapter.

http://www.mywebspiration.com/view/294150a778f is the URL location of the mindmap created in Webspiration.

My reflection: As I reflect back on this learning adventure, it reminds me of the times I would use Microsoft Visio to create flowcharts and diagrams to make textual thoughts more vivid through the use of graphics. I’ve used several different note taking software programs and one of my favorite would have to be Microsoft OneNote 2007 and a close second would be Evernote. I’ve used Adobe Connectnow, Elluminate, and Microsoft LiveMeeting to collaborate with other team members, colleagues, business partners, etc., online. The low light of them all is that most of them are not free of charge and they require a fairly high price tag to subscribe for use. Also, they require quite a bit of bandwidth over the network (Internet) to have real-time collaboration work effectively. The highlight of these software tools would be that you can use them anywhere without any restrictions other than not having an Internet connection. Over the time of using these software tools, the learning curve became minimal upon having more times to practice delivering my presentations and prepping for meetings. Practice makes perfect more so excellence. Webspiration is actually pretty good and I’m pretty sure that I will use it for future use to help me gather my thoughts for future presentations/projects. Lastly, this seems to be an easy to use, straightforward Web 2.0 application that will continue to be used for my learning.

Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts.