Using Mind Mapping Software
The Case for Presenting Information in Context
Professor Martin Clarke
I began my academic career as a postgraduate in 1976. That was after 3 years as a geography undergraduate at the University of Leeds where teaching styles varied from the older lecturers giving lectures from notes with the minimum of visual devices to others who used the blackboard and some who had 35mm slides of peat bogs, Peruvian farmers, landslips and the like. It was only when I became an academic that I realised that I would now have to take part in this process of knowledge transfer by giving presentations at conferences and seminars, and also to students through lectures.
Interestingly, in those days, there was little if any advice given to academics on how to produce effective presentations. The only thing I can remember was being shown a video of how not to undertake a tutorial, a film that featured John Cleese (ex of Monty Python fame), who apparently made more money from his training company than he did from his TV appearances! Seeking advice from my colleagues suggested that the state of the art was to use an overhead projector along with hand drawn acetates. So I subscribed to this approach, producing reams of badly written but highly colourful slides. We used a sheet of paper to prevent the audience from seeing the slide in its entirety, the writing would smudge if you had sweaty fingers and inevitably you would spend ages putting the slides back into order. And then, of course, the bulb in the projector would fail and the whole performance was put in jeopardy.
Presenting Information
With the advent of word processing and PCs in the mid 1980s we could dispense with the pens. Instead we produced our ‘slides’ on the PC, printed them out and then photocopied the results on to acetates. The slides were less colourful but probably more legible. This continued for several years until the advent of Microsoft PowerPoint around 1991. Now a treasure box of colour, graphical effects and animation was opened up, and certainly academics were seduced by the possibilities this provided.
Never mind the content, conference presenters, lecturers, sales people and the like were more likely to be judged by the ‘quality’ of their slides than anything else. However, before the advent of PC projectors we still often had to print out our slides (in colour) and send them off to be photographed and turned into 35mm slides. Eventually, projectors became relatively ubiquitous, so we now plug our laptops into them and demonstrate our PowerPoint prowess to audiences of students, businessmen, colleagues and so on. Many companies have emerged that can help us with improving the attractiveness of our PowerPoint presentations and in many ways the outputs are very impressive.
I am not a fervent anti-PowerPoint person, I will leave that to others, like Edward Tufte, who are much more able of fighting that battle. I have, however, during the last decade been subject to ‘death by PowerPoint’ on more occasions than I can remember! To understand my discomfort with this as a tool for knowledge transfer it is worth me saying a little about my research interests that I have been pursuing for 30 years.
I am fundamentally interested in what is known as a ‘systems theory’ approach to understanding urban and regional systems. For example can we understand how accessibility to employment influences residential location decisions? To do this we have to understand the relationship between a large number of variables, income, household composition, car ownership, congestion, availability of public transport, house prices, schooling and so forth. In many academic subjects we are forced to try to reduce the complexity of the systems we study to make them tractable.
This reductionist approach often leads to simplification and misunderstanding. To properly understand how systems might evolve or respond to stimuli (using the example above, the impact of, say, congestion charging) we have to embrace the inherent complexity of the subject matter we are dealing with. It is not an easy task and poses many challenges. One of these is to get other people (e.g. students) to think systematically about subjects they study, such as in my case, cities and their regions.
To try to understand the impacts that global warming, fuel shortages, demographic change, economic development, terrorism, waste management and congestion have on the future evolution of cities is difficult enough in the first place but to get students to even think about these issues in a systematic way is very difficult. Everyone wants to simplify the processes and problems, so that increased CO2 emissions will naturally lead to an increase in temperatures in the UK, rising sea levels and so on. Those that understand the complex processes that are at work realise that it is not so simple!
When I was first introduced to Crystal Mapping (a type of mind mapping software) I could see immediately how it could be used to address the problem of getting students to think in a systematic way. PowerPoint presentations, however well prepared, lead to a linear way of, one slide after another, a serial process.
For me Crystal Mapping (unlike typical mind mapping software) allows the presenter to continuously remind the audience how things are related in a hierarchical and parallel way. So you can drill down and explore the detail of a particular entity or process but then zoom out again and see how that entity or process fits in to a bigger system. Like most good ideas it is both intuitive and simple. It doesn’t provide an alternative to PowerPoint, it is instead a completely different way of structuring and presenting knowledge. Indeed it is perfectly possible to embed PowerPoint slides within the Crystal Mapping system.
By using Crystal Mapping software to make presentations to colleagues and clients they often express as much interest in the software than in my contents and several colleagues have been so enthused they have become users of the approach as well. In an era where the media and other forms of communication seem to want to dumb things down into simple packets of information Crystal Mapping helps embrace the inherent complexity of the world we live in and allows us to make sense of it and help others achieve this goal as well.