This morning’s Advanced Cmap Tools workshop
It was pretty useful…
We focussed mainly on the new graphical style palette capabilities of CmapTools: adding background images, the new styles of nodes, preferences for lines (including whether lines show arrows when the concept flows is opposite to the page). Tom’s talk included stretch the spacing of a group of nodes and align/distribute.
And there is more in the pipeline: the Panama project is touted to add far more images, shapes etc, to help children express themselves. Future versions include voice recording too - I understand Gloria Gomez will give a talk on this in the next few days.
The advanced class highlighted the issues of computer interface design: that the complexity has to be hidden to ensure the system is usable to new people, yet that there has to be a way to help people escalate their competence.
Some people, like myself, are forever pushing ourselves to discover new features and functionality. Yet, most people don’t: they use it to a comfort level, and then when satisfied, don’t know to explore further. This is why Microsoft has the wizard helper features, like the yellow exclamation mark that appears in powerpoint when
All these help the author convey what’s important: such accenting brings a gourmet quality to the otherwise meat-and-potatoes plain concept maps that are “correct” but visually boring. When we present to management and leadership staff we use powerpoint for a reason - everyone is attracted to visually compelling outline, and when you are competing for attention visuals really matter.
Autolayout - good for knowledge elicitation, but bad where you need visible evidence of what they thought about the project.
