eople all around the world are using Rationale™ to improve their critical thinking and decision-making. To be able to continue and expand the use of Rationale in the next decade it is necessary to develop an on-line version. Rationale Online will solve at the same time the inconveniences that Mac/Linux users have now with using Rationale. In 2010 it became clear…
Some people protest that they’re not visual thinkers and shy away from visual thinking approaches. My off-the-cuff reply is that most people — even avowed non-visual thinkers — tend to consult a street directory when trying to figure out how to get from A to B: A page from a street directory The general point…
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,…
Manual 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.…
Kevin 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!
Visual 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…
Both 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…
We 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…
Along 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…
Geoff Hyde is putting together a free online course on scientific writing, using Rationale as the tool of choice. He’s cautious, but it’s already up, and we expect that he’ll refine it over time. When the course is fully developed, its design will allow it to be done independently online by anyone who wants to improve their science writing…