The digital journeyman

In this blog post, we’re looking at mind-mapping software - a great addition to any learner’s toolkit. In case you haven’t come across them before, mind-maps are a way of creating a structured, visual summary of your ideas on a particular topic. You can see a simple example at the bottom of this post. Mind-maps have plenty of applications for learning, such as preparing for an essay, planning a project, or connecting concepts during revision. While paper-based mind-maps work fine, digital mind-mapping tools give a whole new level of flexibility. Here I’m going to review one such tool, the free, web-based version of MindMeister , and briefly compare it with an open-source alternative, Freemind . Free? What’s the catch? MindMeister is run on a “freemium” model (‘Freemium’, 2020) , where a basic service is provided without charge, but more advanced features are available on payment of a monthly subscription . This marketing model assumes that you will enjoy the features of the free ...

Picture yourself as a teacher, with a class of new university students in front of you. You’ve been teaching for 20 years, and by now you feel you can confidently predict which ones are going to be overdue with their assignments, who will consistently come to class late, and which ones probably won’t last the year. That’s what experience has taught you. The question is, what will you do with your predictions? Stop wasting your time on those students now… or put extra effort in to help them get over the line? Equally important – will you ever question your assumptions and the impacts they have? Those are among the issues faced, on a massive scale, by higher education institutions which use learning analytics – the collection and analysis of large amounts of student data to understand the behaviours and contexts of their learners (Vu et al., 2020). Institutions are increasingly combining student data from a range of digital interactions (online learning, enrolments, academic results, fin...