Back in March, which seems to be already so long ago, we organized the first Mahara conference in New Zealand, Mahara Hui. On the first day of the hui (gathering, assembly in Te Reo Māori) we asked participants to write down their 5 wishes for Mahara.
We gathered them in a jar, and at the end of the day, I took them home and categorized them to identify common themes. I then prepared a presentation of these findings for the next morning as we had a session planned on sharing the wishes. Since it was not possible to discuss every wish, the grouping of them was crucial, and top themes became clear quite easily.
You can review the recording of the session as well as take a look at the slides.
The tool I used to visualize the wishes and connections between some of them for myself was IHMC CmapTools. Originally, it’s a concept mapping software, but you can also create simple diagrams with it where you have items connecting amongst each other. The killer features for me are its easy use as well as the auto-layout functionality because with that I can create very messy diagrams and connect individual items and CmapTools finds the best arrangement of them avoiding overlap as much as possible. In addition, it is also great that you can export a map to several formats and also decide onto how many pages you want to print your map.
In the conference frenzy, I did not save the original map that I had created. 🙁 But since I still had all the papers, I could re-create it again and finally make available.
If you also have wishes for Mahara, you can add them to our sticky board that we just opened.
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