No! It should be critical thinking andcreative thinking. Some definitions, from Tim Hurson‘s book Think Better: Creative Thinking: generative, nonjudgmental and expansive. When you are thinking creatively, you are generating lists of new ideas. Critical Thinking: analytical, judgmental and selective. When you are thinking critically, you are making choices. Experts in both styles of thinking will prefer more nuanced definitions,…
DetailsMicrosoft Visio is primarily a computerized drawing program. With it you can draw very precise diagrams in a multitude of different styles. It is great for visual communication. In fact Microsoft suggest that we all “Learn why Visio is the key to Visual Communication”. Fair enough! But before visual communication, you need to think and work through…
DetailsManual tools are not good enough for real visual thinking. The conventional whiteboard is big and tactile, but has only two operations: Draw Erase You can do visual thinking on a whiteboard, but rearrangement — which is crucial if you are trying to solve a problem or gain insight, rather than simply present — is only possible with constant rubbing out and rewriting, which is prohibitively difficult.…
DetailsKevin Hoffberg of Decision Quality has a nice presentation:Making Smart Decisions I particularly like his straightforward process for making a difficultdecision: bCisive Online and bCisive desktop are flexible enough to apply these steps. Give it a try!
DetailsVisual thinking — especially boxes and arrows — allows people toorganize and communicate their ideas more effectively than almost any other means. Visual thinking helps to take the implicit and make it explicit. Compared to linear text, visual thinking helps by easily revealingstructure and relationship. There are many different types of visual thinking: Some types of visual thinking (click to enlarge) In future posts I’ll look at…
DetailsBoth bCisive desktop and bCisive Online have powerful facilities to take your maps and break them into sequences of PowerPoint slides. There is also a simple strategy to break a complex issue embodied by a big map into an easy-to-follow story. Together, this facility and the systematic approach add up tocompelling presentations. Maps trump bullet…
DetailsWe have just released bCisive 2.0.4 and Rationale 2.0.7. These are largely bug-fix releases, and they do include a new facility for multi-page printing, and it’s very cool. In the past both our bCisive and Rationale would simply scale your map or workspace to fit a single page. If you had a big map you either had to break…
DetailsMy favorite box is the plain box. It has three great uses: Brainstorming Categorizing When no other box will do Brainstorming In bCisive (Online and desktop) and Rationale you can get an empty box by just double-clicking on the workspace. This is great for brain-storming — just getting ideas onto the workspace: Brainstorming for this…
DetailsAlong with free-form mapping to encourage the development of critical thinking skills, Rationale includes a nifty Essay Planner to help students learn how to plan and produce clear, well-written essays. We’ve produced a 3-minute video showing the Essay Planner in action: (To watch it at full size, click Play and then click the title or the YouTube logo) If you’d…
DetailsVisual thinking is probably most effective when using a suitable methodology as an aid to construction and communication. Simply said Visual methodology = visual language + rules of thumb For example, bCisive Online comes with the following set of boxes, which together making up its out-of-the-box visual language: This set descends from the non-visual Issue-based information…
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