Replying to LO29537 --
Hello Martin, dear LO'ers,
I found your mail in the yet unread mails of the list. I have seen some of
the later reactions to your original request.
I think that some participants have already contributed to the insight of
insight. However, there was another request in your mail. You asked for
some suggestions for graphical methods/techniques for visualisation.
Contrary to the litterary meaning of 'insight' which suggest that one
inters the inside of some sort of subject, I think that the surroundings,
the context, of the subject enlightens much of the more complete picture.
Thus the relationships, links and bounderies of the subject. In my mind
the mind mapping technique is rather primitive and too simple. It depends
of course on the quality of the fascilitator, but I was seldomly inspired
by the results. And my impression was that also the rest of the group (in
a group session) was not that enthousiast.
I have never brought it in practice during a workshop, but personally I
have good experience with another technique. This technique is known in
the information sciences as the "science map". I have said some words on
this technique in the past on this list. Possibly you could find some
examples on the web. Some years ago the search engine Alta Vista had an
advanced tool were a primitive type of science map could be created.
The schience map tries to visualise the relationships with related
subjects. The result is 'realy' some sort of map: closely related subjects
are close to the main subject, loosely related ones are at greater
distance. But the crux is that one should also try to 'connect' these
related subjects to each other. Also for these matters counts the rule:
closely-related close nearby, farther related realtions at greater
distance. The result is a kind of map where lots of keywords are
distributed. The areal distribution of these keywords illustrate the
relationships. I think that in a group session it will give rise to in
depth discussions and increases the insight. Another way to do it is to
ask each individual to construct such science map and later all the
individual maps are combined to one map.
I hope I was clear. You know that an illustration could tell more than 100
words :-)
Leo Minnigh
--leo minnigh <minnigh@dds.nl>
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