Mind-Mapping, Exams and Dyslexia
The fourth and last exam for the MSc happened on the 15th May. It was for the long thin module, the two semster, CS961 Organisation of Knowledge. I wasn’t as nervous about this one as the exams in January. I was very anxious in January, based on earlier bad exam experience. Happily, because I was better prepared, the results for those three exams turned out just fine. The CS961 course tutor had given us two recap classes of ‘what cannot be avoided’ for this semester’s exam, and without hesitation I made a mind map for that information.
(The screengrabs give a sense of scale; for details, the mindmaps included are probably best viewed online through the links included beneath each map. A link to the May 15th map online:
http://www.mindmeister.com/289324400/msc-ils-organisation-of-knowledge-exam-prep-15th-may-2013)
I met with a researcher from Plymouth University on Friday 24th. Kassandra Clemens is writing a thesis about dyslexics in higher education. I first got involved in her research last year when I completed an online survey about my experiences as a dyslexic in higher education. We got onto the topic of mind-mapping on Friday, and for the last week I’ve been thinking again about how I’ve made use of it this year.
I came to mind-mapping quite late in learning really. I’ve always been a very visual learner, lots of drawings to understand and remember things, and doodles to concentrate. I didn’t find out I was dyslexic until I was 27 though, when I was struggling to organise my thoughts around my undergraduate dissertation. As soon as they diagnose you dyslexic, they start recommending mind-mapping to you. At first I was intrigued, and tried hand drawing mind-maps, but I quickly grew frustrated by the inflexibility and difficulty of developing complex ideas on paper. I don’t like erasers, and I don’t like redrawing (I’m that kind of one-take line artist, and mind-mapping by hand feels like drawing). Then I was introduced to Mindmeister, which, being electronic and cloud-based, lets you rejig layout, swap ideas around, and develop areas as you go along.
But I didn’t fully embrace mind-mapping until I started this MSc. Of course, I anticipated being pretty overwhelmed this year. It’s the increase in content, concomitant with edging up the academic tree, that’s the killer for dyslexics like me. So much of it is in words, and the volume of it is dismal. I can get text to sit still most of the time, I just get really tired processing. It can take me a while to unpack content wrapped up in words; looking at the words, and digging out their meaning, and connecting each word to the next. And it’s the only way to get anywhere, trudging through this kind of content. Word based content is everywhere in academia; lectures, books, papers, conversation. After a while of chomping through content, I get so damn tired that even an everyday chinwag becomes hard work. Getting my own thoughts in order after contact with a lot of word-based content has occasionally been very problematic indeed.
Especially under exam conditions. There were no timed examinations at art school, only essays, but I had a good exam experience after my undergraduate degree, when I completed Higher German at Cardonald College. The College granted me extra time for the exam, based on the psychologist’s report from art school, and the tutor prepared us all well. I got an A. This filled me with the courage to have a go at an undergraduate art history module with the Open University, which would be a different experience from my art undergraduate experience. After I enrolled, declaring the dyslexia, the OU told me I would need to arrange a skills assessment meeting at John Wheatley College in the east end of Glasgow to be granted extra time in the exam. I was working full time at this point, on a short six month contract, and on a very steep learning curve with Microsoft Excell. Maybe it’s manifestly dyslexic, but I just couldn’t manage to organise the needs assessment meeting, it felt beyond me. I made the best of things, reasoning that based on past experience I could probably manage the essays, or Tutor Marked Assessments (TMAs), and since I’d managed other written exams, (no hassles at school, ever) I thought I might get by there too. I was right about the TMAs, no problems, but I was so wrong about the exam. Although I’d got hold of the past papers, I didn’t seem to quite know what to do with them. I ignored the alarm I felt when when I read the questions, supposing it was just exam nerves. I hoped that it would just be like writing the TMA essays, only faster. In fact, exam essays are totally different beasts from essays with weeks to dither over and think out. Three essays in three hours is really hard work, even when you know the subject well, as I felt I did. It took this experience for me to understand the weaknesses in my approach. The exam questions covered precisely the same areas as the the TMAs, I recognised all the subjects, but I could not read the selection of possible questions quick enough to choose the three to work on. I could not corral, and deliver all my thoughts in response to my understanding of the questions quick enough in order to write them on the paper. It was a horrific thing to do to my head, and it put me off education for a bit. I flunked that exam.
When I finally decided to attempt the MSc, I heavily invested in trying to identify efficient working methods very early in the year. I got myself an iPad and tried out text editing apps that would be compatible with Microsoft Word. I got a Dropbox account, and synced everything up, so I could note take on the move, and it would be workable with on the laptop when I got the chance, to save on typing time. One of the things that suddenly seemed to work well for digesting and processing content was mind-mapping using Mindmeister, which can also be exported to Word. At MSc volume of content, mind-mapping has facilitated research, reading, and planning.
Below is a partially complete mind-map of the technical services section of Strathclyde University’s Information Services website, completed as part of the research for the second assignment of the module CS962 Libraries Information and Society:
(A link to the Information Services map online:
http://www.mindmeister.com/268944028/information-services-technical-services)
Below is the mind-map made to prepare for the exams in January. I was This was the first of the seriously large maps, and I was assisted in its construction by my partner Graeme, an MA in Online and Distance Education student with the OU (@thegrimmbrother). This map helped tremendously in planning and targeting revision, and time-tabling writing. It was this map that made me a committed mind-mapper;
A link to the January 13 Exam map:
(http://www.mindmeister.com/240555204/msc-ils-exam-prep-jan-2013)
Mind-mapping has been such a great way to unpack a paper, and it’s meant that I haven’t generally needed to reread so much. Coupled with digitally annotated PDFs using the Adobe Reader app, refinding references has been so much easier too. Below are a couple of examples of mind-mapped papers:
(A link to a map of a paper by Vasileiou and Rowley: http://www.mindmeister.com/261165051/vasileiou-m-rowley-j-2011-marketing-and-promotion-of-e-books-in-academic-libraries-journal-of-documentation-vol-67-iss-4-pp-624-643)
(A link to a map of a paper by Vårheim: http://www.mindmeister.com/255281061/v-rheim-a-steinmo-s-ide-e-2008-do-libraries-matter-public-libraries-and-the-creation-of-social-capital-journal-of-documentation-vol-64-iss-6-pp-877-892)
What I’ve realised by mapping papers is that although words arranged in sentences travel in a physically fairly predicable linear zig zag down a page, the contexts thus expressed are more often than not more web like in ther interconnections. Maybe non-dyslexic brains can hold these interconnections in a conceptual way; I know I struggle with that when the concepts are new or very complex in their interconnections. Mindmapping records the interconnections and structures for me, and takes the pressure off me holding them in my head.
Mind-mapping was only part of the strategy for the exams though. Because the exams are all hand written, I also did a lot of hand writing to prepare for January’s batch. It was important to develop writing muscle memory and coordination, and to have written paragraphs remembered that could be adapted to more than one question. I had a lot of help from my partner on this aspect of exam technique. Being an OU graduate, he has had plenty of practice of end of module exams.
It became like learning to draw the shape of the exam; parts of it from memory; and sometimes I could create diagrams to remember a sequence of points that was even more effective than a bunch of words. Below is a drawing I made that allowed me to remember twelve features of RDA (I wonder if anyone else can figure it out…).
So by the tine I got to the exams I found that I wasn’t trying to recall seven or eight different related things and fashion them into sentences, but some paragraphs/diagrams of my own making. Maybe that’s what everyone does, but it feels like I fashioned new mechanisms to augment existing ones inside my head. It worked in January, and I got similar marks to my essay marks for the semester, which made me very happy indeed. Let’s hope it also paid off on the 15/5…
Collectively these experiences have shown me the plasticity and adaptability of my own brain, and that’s been interesting to experience. None of this, as far as I understand, has made me undyslexic, whatever that might be. I don’t know what I am any more. Almost a useful Information Professional, I hope.
Maybe there’s an irony in making a massive blog post about mind-mapping that isn’t in itself a mind-map. Funny that.