The Underlying Blog

The Stork is Bringing a Visual Strategist Newsletter: Let Me Know What YOU Want to Read/See

Hi Folks,

Slowly and steadily, I'm working on the Visual Strategist Newsletter. Now, I've been accused of putting out the most comprehensive set of MindManager templates EVER, the VSS Template Set, so I'm not going to let my ego reign and just send you a newsletter I think is important (whole damn sentence was an oxymoron). I want it to be what YOU want, so please, leave a comment and let me know.

Sign-up for the Visual Strategist Newsletter now.

You see, the VSS templates are the outgrowth of my decade+ experience in knowledge management and mind mapping. Simultaneously, when I put them out last year as a free download, I had no idea how many of you were going to download them. So, it's a shared experience at this point and I simply cannot in good conscience send out a VSS-based newsletter that is hurled outward via my own tunnel vision cannon. I need YOUR input so I can ensure each time you receive an e-mail from me it's chock full of content that benefits you. Again, please bombard me with comments about what you want to see.

Kyle is a Dancing Bear

Need a Youtube video of me doing inverted cartwheels? Leave a comment. Need to know more about using the VSS Template Set icons to give you database-like functionality in MindManager? Leave a comment. Want video or written text? Leave a comment. Need a recipe for killer cheesy potatoes? Leave a comment and I'll tell someone who knows what they hell they're doing.

Sign-up now and be sure to download the free VSS templates while you're at it. It's all here.

And if you're feeling truly grateful for the hard work I do, you should pickup a t-shirt to support the Free T.I.! campaign, as my creative juices couldn't flow without the hits like 'Top Back' and 'What You Know'.

Sign-up for the Visual Strategist Newsletter now.

Technorati tags: Humor, VSS Template Set, Visual Strategist Newsletter, Mindjet MindManager, T. I., Kyle McFarlin, Cheesy Potatoes

Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

 

This is just too cool for school. It's a map that details web trends, and I found myself particularly partial to the online, interactive version:

Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

South Park's on, gotta run.

 

Technorati tags: Kyle McFarlin, Visual Strategist, Web Trend Map, Knowledge Mapping

Middle School: The Triumph of Public Education?

On the Student Tablet PC Blog in Trevor's excellent MindMapping overview, he mentions that the last time most people probably saw mindmapping was in the 3^rdor 4^th grade when it was called a web or brainstorm used to sketch out ideas for a school related task/project.  That’s exactly how it happened for me too, except my time of exposure was a bit different!  A teacher I had in 7^th grade, who in retrospect was very innovative, taught my class to put a topic at the center of the page and draw subtopics off of the central one as a “brainstorming” technique.  And then, I didn't heard about mindmapping again in school... ever.  As Trevor said, from there we were on to high school and forced to outline and complete essays.  Luckily I never stopped mapping, but it's too bad there wasn't carry-over in the public schools.

It leads me to think Middle School was actually the most enriching portion of public education for many of us.  The creativity of using crayons and markers that are used to illustrate concepts (largely right-brain skills) in grade school are still largely present in middle-school.  As an added bonus, many of the (left-brain) skills that define high-school such as list-making, paper writing, memorization and test-taking also present themselves in middle school.  After all, isn't that great when you have equilibrium between the left- and right-hemispheres of the brain in the academic realm?  The public schools really ought to receive more credit for this balancing act they pull off at the crucial mid-point of a child's education. 

As a thought for the future, I would love to see this balancing act carry-over more into the high-school realm.  Why not bring mapping into the equation so visual thinkers have a persistent resource for their creativity and intuition, and linear thinkers have a tool that taps into their visual side?