this is a mind map mind maps were coined by Tony buzan in 1974 your pattern is becoming an environmentally enclosed one this is what Justin s calls a mind map these don't look very similar and I'd like answers today we'll look at the academic literature on mindmapping from a learning perspective let's find out what the authorities say [Music] let's make a buzan mind map about buan mind maps first we'll open up our copy of Mind map Mastery to make sure we adhere to Tony's 10 laws ban mind maps have a central subject like everything else
in the mind map it's accompanied by images and symbols branches radiate and taper outward from the center each branch gets one keyword and that keyword is capitalized different branches get different colors connections can can be represented by stylized arrows or blank space and finally the Mind map should look nice and balanced bazon says mind maps can be used in infinite ways but from a learning perspective they're most well known as a nemonic device for memorizing pretty useful pretty fun but from a learning perspective I think they are too hierarchical don't scale well to large topics
have unclear relationships and don't have a focus on higher order learning so how do we get from here to grind Maps we need a [Music] bridge Joseph Novak developed concept maps in 1972 his goal was to create a method that encourages meaningful learning he also wanted to provide a window into how someone's understanding changes and improves over time here's Novak's process for creating a concept map we start with a focus question it should not be a simple topic like neuroscience it should be a deep question that requires explanation like why is the brain considered the
center of cognition or why do concept Maps encourage learning based on that question we find 15 to 25 Concepts and put them to the side in a parking lot we then order them from General to specific to make the next steps easier taking one keyword at a time we build a representation of our understanding of the topic when connecting keywords we write down the explicit relationships between between them to show other relationships we can even add nonh hierarchical connections called cross links usually the map is organized into a few levels of hierarchy where the bottommost
layer is examples the combination of two concepts and a link makes a proposition AKA declarative knowledge an example would be neuron sends a signal the clear problem here is that everything in the world is related in some way how do we choose which relationships to the show Novak points us to Bloom's taxonomy he says we should identify and create only the most prominent and useful relationships as defined by the higher orders of Bloom's taxonomy continuing we now have a parking lot from which we created a preliminary map with higher order relationships the next steps are
to keep adding to the concept map through three or more cycles each time we add new Concepts and rearrange the existing ones finally we do one last pass and clean up the Mind map to make it more presentable now that we've looked at buan mind maps and Novak concept maps by which criteria do we compare these and Justin Sun's grind [Music] Maps the research has a lot to say about this I've tried to consolidate down to a few key ideas a basic architectural comparison can be made based on three design decisions we could look at
the steps taken to create a diagram the rules of the final diagram and that's what it actually looks like and the checklist for how we or an expert evaluate the final diagram we can also consider more nuanced criteria both abstract and practical First we can look at the depth of learning that the method encourages in terms of higher order learning concept maps have a clear upper hand they answer a deep focus question and connections are made based on evaluative processing in terms of elaboration quality both methods encourage us to make connections with existing knowledge concept
Maps might have the upper hand again because of their explicit relation ships but buzan mind maps uniquely encourage visual elaboration the human brain is amazing brain is fish complex but it does have limitations so using a tool that complements it would be ideal one criteria we can evaluate these methods by is how well they offload our cognition Bon mind Maps use dual coding with visuals and words and do an okay job spacing things out into chunks additionally buan mind Maps use spatial relationships and images to improve m memorability even Novak himself admits concept Maps aren't
great for rote memorization practically we want our learning methods to be repeatable and rigorous we want learning biology on a Tuesday to go just as well as calculus on a Friday bazon mind maps do have 10 laws but concept maps have explicit steps and make the user create explicit relationships finally we have to look at usability none of the criteria we've talked about so far matter if we don't actually use the technique because it's too much work the explicit steps and relationships in concept Maps can be overwhelming and tedious for a new practitioner however that's
only usability on the encoding side after mind mapping we need to evaluate the work feedback is a core component of learning evaluating buz on mindmaps objectively is not easy there is a buzan mind mapping competition with criteria but it's not really learning related criteria concept maps are a little better at being evaluated they focus on explicit higher order relationships and hierarchy which lend them to object objective critiques in the literature there is both qualitative and quantitative criteria the qualitative criteria is pretty interesting it mentions that we shouldn't create maps that look like a spoke or
a chain our concept Maps should look a little bit more like a net now we understand buan mind maps Novak concept maps and the criteria by which we can evaluate and create these methods before we dive into grind Maps though I want to quickly highlight some smaller methods a visual metaphor is a metaphor that we draw it could be the three pillars of mind maps a pyramid taxonomy or even conjoined triangles take a look at the conjoined triangles of success we know from the last video that creating analogies and metaphors instigates good Germaine cognitive load
so while this doesn't compare to the size of mind maps and concept Maps it can be really useful for consolid dating interleaving and memorizing however like mind maps it can be hard to evaluate objectively on the other hand drawing plain old diagrams like flowcharts can be a great way to construct our own understanding as a bonus it can be objectively evaluated for example while reading about a process we might draw it out and then compare the drawing to the ground truth to get feedback on our understanding it's a trade-off we're working at a lower levels
of blooms but we're definitely getting the benefits of offloading and [Music] feedback Justin Sun's grind map methods are spread out over a lot of YouTube videos it could be hard to put it all together what we have to do is look at the three Architectural Components from earlier and use bazon and Novak's approaches as a baseline for the creation steps grind maps are very similar to Novac concept Maps both create a keyword list like what you can do is you can create a list of keywords and then you can create a subl list of keywords
both build the Mind map starting from the big picture you know kind of like a basic backbone that I'm creating this is the overall structure of the topic both build outward from the big picture you want to do broad topic first and then you want to do the whole topic again but at at another level of detail and another level of detail both go through multiple iterations of keyword collection and mapping simplify it group it make it make more sense then add on the next set of keywords pause group it simplify it connect it and
then continue to do that again and again until you finish that list both focus on the most important relationships as defined by Bloom's taxonomy and thinking which Concepts or which chunk and group of information is more important than another group it forces you to examine them in a more critical level of depth and both include cleaning the Mind map process of making it cleaner that forces you to activate higher order learning in terms of Bloom's taxonomy the biggest difference in my opinion is that Novak's concept Maps start with a deep evaluative Focus question the focus
question directs The Learning and encourages deep processing grind Maps don't have this it's unclear what a grind map is supposed to be about a topic a chapter I really like Novak's Focus question because asking different questions instigates different types of thinking it even changes the traversal order of the material you could ask two different questions about the topic and get two very different Maps here is a side by side of a buzan map a Novak map and a grind map from a Justin Su video I really like the grouping in grind Maps or as Justin
calls it chunking it's an improvement over concept maps and definitely resembles the spacing of buzan maps but it moves away from the purely hierarchical grouping subtly improving the visual layout of course there are trade-offs to everything while making the grouping more free form improves usability and encourages different thinking that means we're also making it harder to evaluate objectively emphasis in grind Maps would make Novak happy Novak wants us to choose relationships that are prominent and useful emphasizing relationships in grind Maps takes that a little further it's asking of the prominent relationships we've chosen which are
the most important directionality is somewhere between buzan and concept Maps ban maps have lines grind maps have arrows and concept maps have explicitly named relationships the trade-off here is that more explicit relationships ensure active thinking however they also tend to get more tedious plain lines aren't tedious but can be drawn without really considering what the relationship is grind maps are trying to find a balance between these two whether or not that balance overly compromises is up for interpretation all three methods use spatial layout and arrows but how pictorial they are is different bazon mind maps
are basically artwork they really emphasize abstract fun visualizations for memorability grind maps are a bit vague with this but they include Doodles and symbols concept Maps ignore visuals and focus on the encoding aspect rather than memorability in a way grind maps are again a compromise between the two but it's unclear why memorability is a focus when the goal is higher order learning not memorization from a learning perspective I think I'd prefer to see visual metaphors and diagrams they're kind of like scratch work at a higher level of Bloom's taxonomy especially when compared to pneumonic devices
like Doodles and symbols but of course Doodles can be used for dual coding and elaboration so don't throw them out for objective evaluation I didn't find too much in Justin's YouTube videos in Novak's concept Maps we're supposed to watch out for Spokes and chains there is some evidence that grind maps have similar criteria yeah this is just like a single chain but buzan and Novak maps have published criteria that people can use like a checklist grind maps have the grind criteria itself but as far as I can tell grind Maps lag behind here hopefully the
relationships between different methods is a lot more clear we looked at how Justin Sun's grind Maps probably draw heavily from the literature on Novak's concept Maps however we also saw how grind Maps made positive tweaks in usability and organization and brought over doodles from buzon Maps but we also looked at visual metaphors diagrams and fundamental criteria for good learning it's not hard to imagine improving on grind maps in a personalized way with experiments and self-regulation [Music]
