On 10 June 2010, I went to a meeting of the Intellectual Capital Circle of the InHolland University of Applied Sceinces in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands, on the subject of visaulisation of knowledge. As visualisation of knowledge is one of the themes of IKM Emergent, I went along to see if I could gain any new insights to share with my IKM colleagues.
Mind maps and concept maps
The meeting had two main components. The first comprised presentations of how mind maps and concept maps are being used in tertiary education by InHolland and other Dutch universities and organisations. The second part comprised a brainstorm – in a world cafe format – on the power of visualisation on knowledge management.
The first part comprised how software called Inspiration was being used by InHolland. The second presentation described the use by Leiden University Medical Centre of concept maps, making links between clinical and biomedical knowledge explicit. In the light of IKM Emergent’s attempts to bridge various knowledge divides, I thought this sounded very interesting. Concept maps were useful in this regard because they can be used to make explicit knowledge more visible, based on mapping by multidisciplinary teams. They were also used to link clinical concepts with biomedical ones. Interestingly, it appeared that older people and experts had quite a lot of difficulty with this exercise because they find it difficult to look laterally at things and to access their implicit knowledge.
Brainstorm
In the brainstorm session that followed, one of the findings that most interested me was that visualisation can also play a role in codification and personalisation of knowledge, it supports out-of-the-box thinking, can play a role in negotiations of meaning and, because it replicates more clearly our own non-linear thought processes, it supports non-linear forms of work.
New ways of presentation
My fellow brainstormers told me about new visualisation software. The one that particularly caught my attention was something called Prezi and I thought I’d give it a try because I needed to make a presentation to my colleagues at Context in July.
Prezi is a new sort of presentation and can be used like PowerPoint which, although innovative in its time, is now rather standard and linear. For example, I like the way that PowerPoint reminds me of what I want to say, helps me structure my thoughts and takes the attention away from me but it does look a bit old and stuffy these days (unless you do something really special with it of course.)
Prezi
You can see the presentation I made to my colleagues All you every wanted to know about Sarah’s work and didn’t dare to ask. The presentation worked really well by using the trial version on my laptop but you need to navigate through it with either the arrows at the bottom of the presentation or with your own cursor keys, and not start panning through (that only makes you feel seasick, believe me!) Everyone I have shown the presentation has become terribly excited about Prezi too and I’m going to use it again and again. It’s so much fun and and so creative!
Filed under: concept maps, IKM Emergent, meetings, mind maps, visualisation, visualisation tools
