Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-12-14
- Timeline:
Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events.
Keywords: Ajax, WebServices, Presentations, Visualisation
- Back to GTD: Do a fast “mind-sweep”:
Keywords: GTD, Personal_Productivity
- 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better:
Keywords: learning, Creativity, Personal_Productivity
- Does this “next action” belong someplace else?:
Keywords: Personal_Productivity, GTD
- Exploiting Amazon Web Services via PHP and SQLite:
Keywords: WebServices, PHP
I posted these via Spurl a while ago, but the Spurl-to-del.icio.us functionality is broken at the moment.
Amy Gahran writes about the power of context – How Arranging Ideas Spawns New Ideas – to stimulate new thoughts around a subject:
No idea exists in a vacuum. It is connected to related ideas, and to the real world, and to other people’s perspectives. Those connecting threads of context are where the vast creative potential of the human mind lies. cite=”http://blog.contentious.com/archives/000288.html”
The idea that the mind works associatively is pretty well established – amongst many other things it’s the key behind mind mapping. Making public some of my own associations I can see a connection between Amy’s thoughts, Tony Goodson’s Butterfly moments and bricolage (worth noting that Tony is a fervent advocate of mind mapping) and the ideas I tried to capture here, in particular:
The benefits of any specific piece of knowledge are not always forseeable until the right combination of circumstances and other people arises – in other words unpredictable emergent behaviour;
Another possible connection is to The Social Origins of Good Ideas
Where Amy particularly extends our thinking is the way she then derives some very specific ideas for enhancements to knowledge management tools that would take advantage of associative thinking:
* Random elements [...]
* Visual juxtaposition [...]
* Embedded brainstorming tools
* Sticky notes (that capture context for the thought) [...]
There’s an interesting challenge for developers here but not an insurmountable one I think… Just needs someone with the skill to hang together a few existing tools perhaps?
In a sense a blog entry like this is a form of the fourth item (“Sticky notes”) because it captures an idea and via a combination of hyperlinks and the use of trackbacks captures a a lot of the context as well – but it’s not exactly fast – how many ideas slip by before you can grab the idea and it’s context? I think we need a system that treats “ideas” as some kind of atom and deals with the messy business of collecting and managing URIs in the background.
For embedded brainstorming tools could someone integrate Freemind with a bliki?
Are there any open source developers out there who feel inspired by this?
FreeMind – free Java-based mind mapping software
The KJ-technique. Good summary of this group process for establishing priorities.
(more…)
Just getting around to reviewing my notes from another workshop with a coach from The Mind Gym, this time called “Unleash Your Creativity” (see also Creativity for Logical Thinkers)
Workshop outline:
- Beliefs about Creativity
- What is creativity?
- Why is it important?
- Preferred style
- Innovators
- Connectors
- Enhancers
- Pattern Breaking
- barriers – circumstances
- barriers – beliefs
- barriers – environment
- Techniques
- Brainstorming / Brainwriting
- Collective Build
- Random Picture / Word
- Creative Break
- 8 Rules for success
- Believe you can be creative
- Be clear about objective
- Don’t evaluate until the creative part of the session is over
- Persevere
- Create an environment that enhances creativity
- Use creative techniques
- Make sure you evaluate at the end of the session
- Take creative breaks
Whilst I was absorbing and reflecting on that I noticed that a few people in my blogosphere have also been paying attention to the subject of creativity.
One of the most prolific is Dina Mehta who has been collecting lots of links to creativity discussions and creativity tools for some time.
Also this week I see Gary Murphy is pointing to this that suggests creative people have brains that are more open to incoming stimuli from the environment. This shows up as low values of latent inhibition, a property that is shared with certain forms of mental illness.
So maybe the old saying “you need to be a little mad to be creative” has some truth in it after all… 
Participated in a training session today with this title with a coach from The Mind Gym.
Covered three main tools:
# Outrageous Opposites
# The Idea Beam
# The Morphological Matrix
(more…)
I’ve been spending time re-familiarising myself with the nuances of this tool. I’ve been using it for about six months, and now use it for planning meetings and pretty much any major document. I’m about to start a project that will also benefit from its ability to link with MS Project and Powerpoint, so I’ve been digging into that part of the functionality.
What I love about the project management link is the way the functionality of this tool complements the total left-brain-ness of standard project management tools. The most important part of any project is the first meeting where the people involved get engaged with breaking the scope down into manageable chunks – to be able to do that with a mindmapping tool and then export a first-cut WBS or PBS is just…cool…
I’ve played around a bit with mind-mapping for a number of years and although you can’t beat the flexibility of pen and paper for personal notes, for collaborative work some kind of electronic tool seems essential. (apart from anything else, I lose paper!)
Links to old broken wiki removed
The other idea that’s nagging me tonight is a need for a MMToWiki tool. I’ve slowly started putting some NLP Wiki pages together but I’m finding the flat-file format of a Wiki rather frustrating when writing a set of interlinked documents. I’d love to be able to outline and write the first major tranche of those pages in MindManager, then export to a set of Wiki-formatted text files.
Hmmm… and when, I wonder, is tool-building a displacement activity from the writing?
[update 2003-02-13] Have found Mind2XML an add-in for MindManager that does “exactly what it says on the tin”. So now the gap in my knowledge that comes into focus is how little I know about XSL
[update 2007--4-11] And almost exactly 4 years after I wrote this post, a very similar idea about the combined use of wiki and mindmaps emerges over at Activityowner.Com – with the big difference that he has actually produced a first draft of a conversion tool…
