Mindmaps for Academic Presentations?

[Farid Behnia]

Hi folks,

I've used mindmaps to present a couple of times in my classes and have
received good feedback. I'm wondering if you guys have ever tried them
for presentations in academic situations (e.g. defending thesis, talks
& presenting papers, etc) and what experiences you've had with them.
Do you think tools like Freemind can replace traditional presentation
tools such as PowerPoint?

There are some downsides to mindmaps though e.g. including pictures
can be a little troublesome (at least in Freemind) or the need for
loading an external application for playback of animations/clips is
quite a distraction...

Nevertheless, I guess I don't need to emphasize the advantage of whole-
brain learning through a mindmap.

Cheers

[rickla]

I've played around with this idea a few times, though on most
occasions I've chickened out shortly before the conference and created
a conventional linear presentation in Keynote. The one time when I did
go ahead and use a mind map for the actual presentation, I was fairly
pleased with the results. I used OmniGraffle Pro to create a mind map
showing all the areas I was planning to cover, and a few others that I
wouldn't be able to cover but that it would be useful for people to
know about. Each of the items on that master map was hotlinked to a
more detailed map, or sometimes a conventional-looking "slide", on
another sheet. One thing I liked was that the PDF I generated from the
OmniGraffle file was similarly hotlinked and so could be emailed to
people who didn't own OmniGraffle.

[apisani]

I _only_ use mindmanager for academic presentations at this point. It
works really well! People are definately a bit distracted by the
technology at first, but once we get into the content that goes away.
Tony Pisani
http://riskassessment.wordpress.com/

[alex]

If you are on a Mac, I love OmniGraffle. Incredibly easy to use and
makes mind maps that look pretty easily.