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This looks good -- clickable links, favicons, maybe graphics -- my account is howardrheingold\n\nMindomo is a versatile Web-based mind mapping tool, delivering the capabilities of desktop mind mapping software in a Web browser - with no complex software to install or maintain.\n\nCreate, edit mind maps, and share them with your colleagues or your friends.

I located a couple of interesting examples of people using networks as a grassroots tool to help stakeholders develop analysis of the power networks they are embedded in as a strategy tool. Also great to see such a low-tech solution.\n\nThe NetMap toolkit developed for IFPRI by Eva Schiffer makes use of boardgame-like tokens which can be used to represent the various actors, their relative power, positioning, and modes of power. Relationships (drawn as lines on paper) and positioning are determined by participants as part of the discussion. The resulting maps are recorded by the researcher. (Why do I waste my time writing software? ;-)

All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims: 1. Not all social networks are the same. 2. You cannot assume network transitivity. 3. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks. To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.

As technology advances, new discoveries based on brain mapping are helping researchers understand how students learn. And those discoveries, in turn, are enriching and informing classroom practices in a growing number of schools.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

There's a lot of crime data. For almost every reported crime, there's a paper or digital record of it somewhere, which means hundreds of thousands of data points - number of thefts, break-ins, assaults, and homicides as well as where and when the incidents occurred. With all this data it's no surprise that the NYPD (and more recently, the LAPD) took a liking to COMPSTAT, an accountability management system driven by data. While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people's privacy, there's still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.