Mind Mapping with Bias

I am prefacing my review of the two free word mapping tools I test drove this week with the mere fact that I am a bit of a design snob. Having spent over 24 years as a professional graphic designer, I can customize any kind of mind map from scratch with just about any desktop publishing software. My program of choice would be InDesign for such a task. Although there is a bit of a learning curve, it is by no means free, and designing a mind map would require a great deal of time gathering graphic assets.

My first attempt to use a cloud-based word map was with Coggle. I used it with an open mind for under two minutes and deduced that there had to be many better free tools to use on the World Wide Web. I prefer user-friendly software with not only a graphic interface, but more visual capacities. This application reminded me of the old typewriter used for printing dot matrix. It was awkward to use and relied on keyboard commands.

Next, I tried MindMeister and found it to be far from what I expected. It did deliver ease of use with a graphic interface and a few different templates. There were a few options for fonts, colors, and emojis. However, I found it very limiting. When I think of mind mapping it conjures up not only word mapping, but graphic organizers. With the limitation of only being able to change the size or color of the fonts, the vector graphics appeared as tiny dots on the screen. There also was no visual hierarchy to deliver the content. My mind map looked more like a spider web of bubble captions full of text. They really should rename this application WordWeb, WordBubbles, SpiderBubbles or BubbleWeb. The best I can say is I tried something new that I would never use in my classroom. While I did like the option to have my MindMeister available on its own URL, I would require my students to design graphic organizers using paper and markers before using this tool.