Testing A New Mindmapping Tool...And You Can Join In! (Popplet.com)

One of our amazing alums (Thanks, Justin!) sent me a link to a beta version of a new, web-based, collaborative mindmapping tool called Popplet.

I have been playing  around with it for the last half hour or so and found it easy to use and potentially very useful.

What I don't know is how well it works as a collaborative tool (which is where my real interest lies -- there is plenty of good stand-alone mindmapping software), so I thought I would throw it out there for anyone to examine (Popplet makes this simple with an embed code.  Yeah!). 

If you are interested in trying it out, however, you will need to drop me an email (kwheaton at Mercyhurst dot edu) and I will send you an invite.

These kinds of open, collaborative tools that are easy to set up and quick to learn are great for classroom exercises; they are interactive and engaging.  In my experience, students love them (If you are looking for another example, try Willyou.typewith.me)

It is also a great way to build a mental model of an intelligence problem. This app is in beta though and has no way (that I could find) to safely share or export the data. There is an offline reader application called Popplet Presenter which would allow a single individual to show his/her work securely (-ish) to others, I suppose.

I suspect these features are coming (offering these features for a modest price is the way most of these kinds of apps, like Mindmeister or Webspiration, make their money) but until then, this is probably best confined to the classroom.

Welcome USA Today Readers!

If you have found your way to my little slice of the internet today, it is probably because of this article in USA Today. 

Hello!

If you are interested in learning more about my use of games in my intelligence studies classes, you will probably want to read my online article, Teaching Strategic Intelligence Through Games.

If you are interested in a specific example of a game and how I used it in class, you will probably find this article, Spot Report From The Future, to be worth reading.  If you want all of the games-related posts, just search for "games" in the search bar at the top left of this page.

If you are interested in where I teach, you can find out more at the Mercyhurst website.  If you are interested in the intelligence studies program at Mercyhurst, you can find out more about it on the Mercyhurst College Institute For Intelligence Studies website.

If you want to look at some of my other research or observations, just poke around this site.  I post updates concerning most of the things I am working on here as well as some links to various projects on which my students have worked.  Finally, if you have a question for me, please post a comment or drop me an email directly at kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu.

Thanks for stopping by!  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this site directly at the link on the bottom right or through your RSS feed reader.  If you use Twitter, you can follow all my postings @kwheaton.

Evaluating The Reliability Of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs (Link List)

I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links and this week contained an extraordinary crop!  Here are three of the best things that happened to cross my desktop:

Some of the Ushahidi Deployments

How To Verify Social Media Content.  We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here.  Not only it is a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only such document designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts).  When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here).  He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises world-wide and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifcially).

While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up. 

http://envisioningtech.com/

Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond.  Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. 

While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources.

The technology roadmap he has built is awesome (you can see the compact version to the right but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here (Note to Michael Zappa:  If you are going to make it Creative Commons, you might as well make it embeddable as well...Please!)).

Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War.  Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decisionmakers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats.

For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (the PICL -- analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory").  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see some of his intelligence, at least, in the form of short videos.

(Note:  One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is called, generically, the Short Form Analytic Report, usually pronounced "Ess-Far".  When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post).

Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film but, whatever the reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence -- that is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decisionmaker that the intel unit is supporting.

You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!).   I have embedded my favorite (because I lived through it...) below:

An Internet Murder?

I ran across this remarkable video today and it occurred to me that I might be able to use it to offer a brief but challenging thought experiment:

Given this video, what question would you ask first?

Leave your answer in the comments!

How To Improve Your Open Source Search Skills -- One Day At A Time!

If you scratch the surface of the web you will find a ton of articles, websites and videos about how to search for information more efficiently.

Not that this makes any difference.

Students, according to the Project For Information Literacy, "while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research." The report goes on to say, "Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research."

There are a number of reasons to be worried about this. Many people tend to focus on the over-reliance on Google as the search engine of first resort. While some of that logic is true (for an interesting and illuminating experiment that makes the point, I recommend this site...), I find the inability to use even Google very well to be one of my largest concerns. I mean, if you are going to rely only on Google, you ought to be incredibly good at finding stuff with it.

The best way, in my mind, to get good at finding stuff with Google is to practice doing it and Google apparently feels the same way. The Wizards of Mountain View are now offering a game that is designed to use "your creativity and clever search skills". The premise is simple. They ask a question and then you use Google to find the answer. The game is called "Google a Day". You can try today's challenge below:

I can easily imagine this as an icebreaker in a computer equipped classroom or as a homework or extra credit assignment. Leave your own ideas in the comments!