What’s a mind map, Doc?

Answer: A visual way to organize your thoughts, ideas, knowledge blocks, and more.

How did I end up making a mind map, you ask? IDSA’s Medical Education Community of Practice came up with the idea of educators creating bite-size concepts in infectious diseases, ID Chalk Talks, that can be easily digested by students, residents, fellows…you get the idea. I thought it would be a good opportunity to use Freeplane, an free and open source software (FOSS) application, in order to create a mind map. Per Wikipedia, a mind map is “a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole”. With that in mind, and because I want to share the gospel of FOSS in academic medicine and research, I spent some time designing a mind map to review basic concepts of pulmonary Mycobacterium avium intracellulare complex (or MAC for short), based on the latest guideline. I have no idea if this will be accepted by IDSA or not, but the limitations on the submission (one script, and one slide, both send in PDF format) don’t make justice to the actual way of interacting with the mind map.

Here’s a screenshot from Freeplane:

Pulmonary MAC as a mind map, courtesy of Freeplane

I feel this might work better than a Power Point presentation, if you could share the mind map and let the student interact with it. I tried opening the file with a popular iOS app, MindNode, and it worked for the most part (zooming in and out, expanding nodes, and opening hyperlinks), without in-app purchases. I believe you will have a better chance to engage with your student if the mind map can be explored in a mobile device.

Freeplane file after being imported into MindNode

You can download the latest version of Freeplane from Sourceforge. I tried this in Linux Mint (which has been freaking awesome, by the way), but the version in the software repository is behind the Windows and MacOS versions. It’s written in Java, which will be inconsequential for the majority of users (my opinion). For anyone interested in designing an ID Chalk Talk, you can find the author’s instructions and submission tool here.