Think Inside the Bubbl

If you have not yet seen this interesting little tool, take a minute to check out bubbl.us, a free, online, flash-based idea-mapping application. You might want to start with the "Features" page, which does an excellent job of using bubbl itself to explain the basics of the application's minimalistic yet intuitive interface. As with most technologies, however, it's often best to jump right in and start playing around, which thankfully you can do without having to create an account first.

Bubbl may seem at first glance to be yet another instance of technology making a simple pen-and-paper process exponentially more complicated than it should be. Upon closer inspection, however, bubbl offers several interesting features that significantly improve upon the process of idea-mapping by hand. Creating a bubbl account allows you not only to save, print, link to, export, and embed your maps, but also to share and collaborate on them with other bubbl users, who may be given either read-only or full access. Unfortunately, the map is "locked" while one user is editing it, so users cannot collaborate in real-time, but this restriction is true of other collaborative websites as well, such as wikis.

I can see bubbl having a variety of pedagogical uses, both individually and collaboratively, both inside and outside the classroom. From teaching brainstorming in composition courses, to having students work together to trace the genealogy of the novel, to providing a graphic representation of intertexuality or patronage networks to accompany a lecture or in-class discussion, potential mapplications of bubbl abound.

Here's an example of bubbl at work, attempting to explain the organizational structure of the Emory English Department:



P.S. There is also a beta version of bubbl, which offers a slicker interface and a few additional features.

P.S.S. You may also want to look at Mindomo and Mindmeister, two other mind-mapping apps.