Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
A Cloud Chamber of the Mind

January 2006 History Notebook

An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Ideas by Peter Watson

Source: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005.

I bought this book at The Book Warehouse in Lismore in early January.

I have read chapter 1 Ideas Before Language and have yellow highlighted sentences that I thought important. Now to make a few notes and add a section to my mind map. Here is a screen capture (I use a software package called Snag-It for this) of part of the mind map for the prologue:

The + and - symbols indicate that the node may be expanded (+) or compressed. Here is a view of the History node when it is expanded:

It is clearly much better to actually be using the Mind Genius software as I can expand and compress nodes to suit my current purposes.

Here is a mind map for Chapter 1 "Ideas Before Language" [p. 21 - 38].

• Creating the above chart provided me with an opportunity to highlight the patterns for stone tools, different species and ideas within a common time frame. Spectacular!
• The actual mind map is far more versatile than the above screen captures as I can "zero in" on any area, or change a node as I Learn more.
• The mind map provides a much better set of notes than either a paragraph or a list of bulleted items would provide.
• I quickly figured out how to use color and bold styles to highlight different dimensions of the chart (e.g. species, types of stone tools, brain size)