Use in the classroom
In keeping with my professional development series on programming (see week 2). I have created a mind map which shows how SOLID design principals interacts with other best practices. In a professional development setting, I would start by having already mapped the Principals, Major Principal Branches, as well as, having the starter branches for Test Driven Development and Metrics. As a team, we would expand the branches as a group. Once we had a fairly “full” mind map I would give each team member homework, giving them a sub-branch or two for which they would have to find a resource which talks about the specific subject. For example, under Test Driven Development (TDD), Unit testing I linked to the book The Art of Unit Testing: with examples in C# 2nd Edition (link) by Roy Osherove. This is a wonderful resource for TDD and unit testing.
Application:
I am using Coggle as my mind mapping tool. Coggle, by its very design, embraces the Coherence Principle in that it looks clean and you are able to “hide” the hyperlinks behind text allowing the user to simply click on a mind map item to get more information.
Reflection:
I like Coggle as a tool. It helps you to create a visually appealing mind map. I did run into an issue in that the free version doesn’t allow you to do a couple really important things. First, it doesn’t allow you to cross-link to pictures, videos or other web resources. All your assets have to be uploaded to Coggle. I even tried to trick Coggle into doing this and they have purposefully limited their software to only linking to images which have been uploaded to their servers (which are hosted on Amazon’s cloud service). Because I understand how Amazon’s services work I know this is a choice by Coggle to intentionally limit their technology and, in general, I hate that philosophy. Secondly, when you do upload pictures, it shrinks them to an unusable size AND you are not allowed to hyperlink the pictures.
So while I find Coggle to be a really neat tool, unless you are willing to pay for a monthly subscription, it really doesn’t have enough features. Google Draw, while not as nicely organized, gives you the missing features and is free.
Lastly, their embedded window really doesn’t look good on this blog so I am including both a direct link and the embedded window.
Mind Map in Coggle
Embedded:
Hi Eric,
ReplyDeleteAwesome job on your post, you did an awesome job. I agree that Coggle was a great site to use to make the concept map, but I would never pay for it, there was some stuff that I wished I could have done differently with mine. I think this was a really good concept map, I wish it was a little bigger, that is the only thing. I had to keep pushing the arrow buttons to move around, but that was fine. I also agree with you on Coggle not letting you do much with the pictures. One of my pictures is actually backwards, and I tried every single way to turn it around, and there was no way of doing that. Other than that great job, you did a really good job on it. Keep up the hard work, only 2 weeks left!
Take Care,
Katie
Good concept map Eric. Thank you for sharing. I saw their little coding that you can actually play with the pixel size but it is deceiving. You make a picture from 100 x 200 to 200 x 400 and it messes up the resolution. I do agree that they want you to pay for it. This might be my last time using coggle but would love to see professional coggle concept maps where people had paid for the program.
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