An excellent day at the IoE for a Mirandanet meeting on visual communication. The project is sponsored by Inspiration, who make mind-mapping software, but the plan is far more ambitious than just exploring this sort of technology.

We’re looking at doing a number of small scale pieces of research within the area of visual, non-linear communication, from a range of different perspectives and in quite a few different ways. We’re also looking at a multilayered approach to writing this up, with a combination of blogs to document our own personal work, wikis and forums for shared work, and online publication, to have our work validated by the wider academic community.

The really exciting area though is the plan to document this in a similarly visual, non-linear way, using interactive mindmaps of some sort, so that readers can follow their own routes through the deliverables.

Now, whilst there’s a whole host of software to run mindmapping on a PC, and there are ways of uploading interactive maps onto the web, I’m not aware of any cool, web 2.0, AJAX application to integrate a wiki approach to collaboration with a visual mind-mapping interface. Any pointers? I’m aware of FreeMind’s integration into wikka-wiki, but this is limited to text editing online.

http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/8238.html