Mind Mapping Course — Accelerate Learning w/ Keywords

1. Intro to Keywords: Hi, my name's I should borrow. I'm a graphic designer and my mapping enthusiast. In this class, we're gonna talk about how to get the most out of your mind maps by specifically focusing on keywords. Keywords are important because they give your mind maps, more freedom, creativity and clarity by allowing you to summarise large chunks of information down in the one or two East Central words. Ideally, after taking this course instead of having your mind mats filled with long sentences and phrases instead will be able to pare down those my maps with just one or two key words. More specifically, we're gonna go over basics like why keywords are so important to mind mapping. How do you distinguish keywords from all other words, as well as offer you plenty of opportunity to practice choosing keywords on your own? And don't worry if you're not already in mind mapping pro. This course was created for both the beginner and the my mapping enthusiast 2. Keywords, the Linchpin of Mind Mapping: key words are the lynchpin of mind mapping. What that means is that key words are the glue that holds everything together. So let's take a look at this mind map behind me. This mind map of the brain has a central image in it. I chose a brain because it's all about creativity and learning. And for me, nothing says creativity and learning more than a brain. So I've chosen a keyword underneath it inspire creativity and from that inspire creativity . I've listed out different types of keywords and branches that describe what it means for me to inspire creativity and myself and others. So one of things is, is that happy learned, stuck, creative believe experiment. Five. Good. He's all those things boil down one huge main topic down into bite size pieces that are essentially the essence of mind. Mapping keywords allow you to do just that. For example, if you were to describe your day what one word would come to mind, go ahead and think about it. I'm listening. All right. Would it be fine? Good, great. Even okay. Or provoking? Now which one of those words best caught your attention for me? It was provoking because fine and great and good and even okay, yes, they are keywords. And they, in essence, describe how my day is going. But they don't really stimulate curiosity. They don't make images pop into my head of associations and ideas and different thoughts. However, perv okay, definitely is. For me, the better keyword of the group for describing on My Day is provoking because it stimulates all kinds of things. Is it provoking in a good way, what's going on? Did someone ask me a question? Did someone do something? Did I have like, this great, wonderful revelation? Who knows what it might be? But provoking just inspires all sorts of things inside of me as faras thoughts and images associations, etcetera, keywords at their best, stimulate creativity. They ask us to give more detail, and they can take a word or an idea, a situation in a completely new, unexpected direction. 3. Quick Review: How to Make a Mind Map: all right. So before we move any further into our journey off effectively using keywords in our mind maps, let's briefly review what a mind map is in a nutshell. Ah, mind map is a visual diagram used to record an organized information mind maps can look at simple. Is this as complicated as this, or even as creative as this? No matter how your mind map looks in the end, regardless, if you're creating it digitally or through APS and software or hand drawing your mind map, more than likely you'll end up using any number of these basic universal principles to structure the creation of your mind map. The first principle being the use of a central image. Central images are drawn in the center of your mind map. They're based on a central theme or topic that your mind maps Centers around. Central images are one of the most important parts of your mind map because they serve as an anchor in which all connecting thoughts, images and ideas can radiate outward from since the theme of this mind map is how to create a mind map. Having an image of a brain with two circular arrows around it seems appropriate. The second principle consists of using main branches, each main branch you use in your mind map acts to connect the central image with associate ideas, thoughts and images rating outward from the central image. Which brings us to the third principle of mind mapping the use of color. Yea, using color markers, pencils or lines in your mind map allow you to quickly distinguish information contained within your map. Therefore, making it easier to remember and understand that said, using color in my hand drawn my maps isn't something I always do, especially when I'm in the middle of a quick brainstorming session. I'll just grab a piece of blank paper, the pen that's in front of me and get to work mapping out my ideas as quickly as possible. It may not be the traditional way to mind map, however. It works well enough. The fourth principal centres all around keywords. Even though you can create a mind map without color, you absolutely can not create a mind map without keywords. Key words are the lynchpin of mind mapping because they sum up the entire idea sentence or phrase under one or two essential words in this course will dive deep into how using keywords effectively can take your mind maps to the next level. But for now, let's move on and keep reviewing what my maps are. Sub branches. The fifth principle of mind mapping sub branches are the fifth step of mind mapping because they allow you to connect additional associated thoughts, images and ideas to already existing main branches. The's additional connections allow for further exploration in expansion of each new topic, or idea the number of sub bridges that you end up having will again be mostly determined by you, the subject matter and how deeply you'd like to explore and expand upon each keyword. For some topics, it's important to dig deep and not be afraid of adding even more branches within branches within your mind map. For every new ideas section or thought, you have feel free to add a new branch. When it comes to mind mapping, the possibilities are endless. The seventh principle is all about images. Images make your mind maps more awesome and mawr amazing by just simply using them. And images don't need to be good when you use them in your mind. when you take the time to draw out pictures, symbols, icons or whatever for your mind maps to accompany keywords, something seriously astonishing happens within your brain that unlocks and unleashes your creative thinking. Oh, along with your ability to recall or remember all the little details within your mind map. Whoa! Hashtag mind blown. 4. Distinguishing Keywords: Yeah, What distinguishes a key word from all other words? So with keywords, let's go ahead and zoom out of this mind map right here. Okay, so a keyword always has significance. It's accurate, it's important. And a keyword is memorable. It's something that you are going to remember. In the previous video, I talked about what's more memorable, someone saying, I'm fine, I'm great or that they've had, like, a provoking day. You know, provoking is more memorable than fine or great. So yes is more memorable. It's more important. They usually serves a greater role as faras memorability with memorability is that there's meaning, and it is expressive, so nice and memorable. It has a lot of expressions. So now, with summarizes key words, summarize main thoughts through the glue to a topic so that summarizes a list. It summarises an entire page, a new entire section or even something as small as a sentence. Keyword can completely summarize it into the main bits and pieces. We'll skip definitions for now and come back to define. So with keywords, keyboards also they have defined. They define things. They define the topic. They define the idea, and they define the content. Keywords also are descriptive. Descriptive as an keywords usually take on the form of a noun and or the form of a verb. So with noun, noun is being without going into a gram per lesson. But now, being a person, place or a thing. So an example of this is a dog just barked. In this case, the noun is dog. So with verbs and everything, burbs are usually expressive. They described one state or a relation between one thing and another, so keywords are descriptive. Keywords are also informative. Keywords reveal all sorts of things. They help modify things, and they're also great for retrieval of information. Soas, faras reveal reveals all kinds of information because they're informative. Now let's go back to definitions right over here. So with definitions, we have a couple of different ones. We have the 1st 1 being is, Ah, word that serves as a key. That's one definition of keyword. Another definition of keyword is any significant word or phrase used to describe the contents of a document. So how you would break out this sentence, for example, into keywords? It's basically significant and descriptive these two words right here are going to help me remember this entire sentence. It's close. This one out were that serves as a key. A key is something that unlocks opens to ciphers. So this is more of associations with this sentence to help me remember it and decode it down into keywords. So I hope that was helpful as far as talking about what exactly defines and distinguishes a key word from all other words will be going mawr into the other lessons about keywords, how to use thumb practice examples and so forth. So stay tuned, and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. PRACTICE: Choosing Keywords: keywords Let's talk more about keywords and about how to basically pull key words out and choose keywords from a phrase. So I've got a popular nursery rhyme here. Nursery arms are part of my life right now I've got a 19 month old at the moment, Um and yeah, so we've got hey diddle diddle the cat in the fiddle The cow jumped over the moon The little dog laughed to see such sport And the dish ran away with the spoon So let's go ahead and start pulling out the key words here Starting from the first sentence I'm gonna highlight Diddle and I'm not gonna highlight the 2nd 1 word. The second time it said dental because I already knew that saying it once is enough. So another key word out of this is in the second sentence is cat. We also have fiddle cow I'm gonna highlight jumped an moon. Now, the reason why I'm highlighting these particular words is because they have a little bit more significance A little bit mawr meaning to them can be broken into downs and burbs. They're not just for filler so words such as Hey, diddle that and the the over the words like that. They're just fillers for sentences. So everything else the action is all within what's been highlighted. So moving along, we have the little dog laughed. Dog is definitely a keyword. And the dog is a laughing I could even if I wanted to highlight little just because little defined dog. So to see such board, I really don't see a keyword worthy of being pulled out. And there and then we have And the dish ran away with this bit. So definitely dish. And ah, spoon is definitely a keyword, and even we could do ran and away. So now what I'm gonna do is I am going to highlight this and copy and paste. All right, So what this is now allowing me to do is go and and really start to remove unnecessary words. So I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of Hey, I'm going to get rid of diddle diddle. I'm going to get rid of the and the over its get rid of these highlights as well. Okay, now we can really start to see how we are moving into taking all of Thoenes keywords right here and these are 30 keywords in total over on this side. And here we have 12 three. So right now we've moved from 30 keywords to 13 keywords. So a little bit more than half which still seems like quite a bit So one of ways that we can go ahead and start to remove more keywords is looking at these that we have here. So we've got diddle. One of things I could do is I could remove that because I know the first phrase of hey diddle diddle I know that there's a cat of fiddle The cow did what jumped moon I'm going to get rid of jumped and just keep cow and moon Now we have little dog laughed So I'm gonna get rid of little and I am going to get rid of laughed. I'm also going to get rid of ran away and now we just have these keywords, right? Here's we've got cat fiddle, cow, moon dog dish, spoon. So this right here are plenty of keywords and everything toe work with. So now what we're looking at is one to 34567 seven keywords. When we started with originally 30 that's taken it down quite a bit. And I think that this is a good amount of keywords based off of what we're looking at with over here and everything with all the keywords that we've are all the different words that we have going on here now. One of things that I definitely want to say in this is that keywords really gets to the point where it's personal. It's all about images and associations. And so, you know, for me, if this is something that I'm wanting to memorize so that I can tell my son or if this is something that I'm going to be performing later and I want to make sure they're remember Okay, now what's going on? Oh, that's right. The cat has the fiddle. I know the cow jumped away with the moon. That's easy enough for me to remember. So I would just basically go in and start to delete things that I know. So okay, cat fiddle. Uh, dog? What kind of dog was it? I could even go back in here and put the little dog. And what if the dog do all that's right? The little dog laughed. So for me, putting the little dog laughed. Might be absolutely a central if that's something that I am getting caught up on. So, yeah, keepers condemn finitely, be personal. They are not something that is written in stone. What? They are our memory joggers. Something to get you to remember what the images and associations and the overall picture is for. For example, this Hey diddle diddle nursery rhyme 6. One Keyword Rule: There are several different rules when it comes to mind mapping rules such as Start your mind map in the center of a piece of blank paper. Other rules that say only use an image for your central image. Other rules that state that you should use color always with your mind maps that you should use capital letters for your mind maps and then progressively go down to smaller letter occurs. There's tons and tons of rules out there, and you'll find all kinds of people telling you that a mind map is not a mind map unless it follows a systematic set of rules. So with all the rules out there from mind mapping, there is, however, one rule that gets the most debate, and that rule simply states that you can only use one keyword per line or branch for your mind map. The one keyword per line rule simply states that when mind mapping Onley, one keyword is allowed to be used per line or branch at a time. Now the reason for this is that one keyword per line offers were way more flexibility to your mind map, then, using a large cluster of words each keyword acts as a multiplier, generating its own images and associations. Also, there's a higher chance of being ableto spark new ideas, thoughts and associations when you only use one keyword. Her line, now mostly sentences and phrases do have a dampening effect on triggering keywords for your mind map. So the rule one keyword per line rule does have a lot of validity to it. 7. PRACTICE: One Keyword Rule in Action: to really understand the one keyword per line rule is to see it in action. So going back to hey diddle diddle the nursery rhyme, let's go ahead and highlight our actual keywords again. So I'm going to use cat, fiddle, cow move, dog dish and spoon. Those are the key words that I chose. If you're kind of confused, what's going on right now? Go back and watch the previous lesson, the previous practice of how to choose keywords. So moving ahead. First of all, I'm choosing of the Red Marker because what I'm going to do is I am going to use hey diddle diddle as my central image. Then I am going to use the line that goes three cat and the fiddle as a second dairy branch or as a branch. And then we're gonna go ahead and use the cow jumped over the moon. That's gonna be another branch upon itself. I'm running out of colors here, and then we've got the little doll, laughed to see such sport, and then and the dish ran away with the spin. So here we've got several different types of, uh, we've got our central image, and then we've got our first branch, our second branch, Third Branch and our last branch, also known as the Fourth Branch. Now, to keep things simple, I'm going to go ahead and put the diddle diddle in the center. This is our central image, and I'm going to draw an image of a book to show me that this is indeed a nursery rhyme. So we've got our hey diddle diddle nursery rhyme. The central image is right here in the center And now we're gonna go ahead and do our first branch. So we're going to do branch number one. And this is where we get into the cat and the fiddle. So one keyword in this case will use cat right here, which is going to get its own key or own branch. And then fiddle would get its own as well. Then we've got our second branch, the 1st 1 being cow and the next branch being moved. Then let's move on to our third branch. So we have a dog and it looks like that is the only image for our third branch. And let's go ahead and finish with our fourth branch, and I'm actually gonna switch things up and use red just liking these color for the branches. So here we have a keyword dish, and then our second keyword is spoon. Now, let's go ahead and fill this mind map. And with the branches toe where it really looks like a traditional mind map with the branches moving from think did. Then let's get this central image to look more like pages of a book. All right. I think that looks pretty good. Okay, so one keyword per line. We've definitely done that with this mind map here. Now, how it works as far as acting. As you know, being flexible and serving as a multiplier is in this right here. Okay, so let's go ahead and grab our blue pin and go to Cat. All right, let's start putting different things out here. As for as a cat. A cat? Zeke, I'm going to put Zeke for cat because I have a cat. Does outdoor cat and name Zeke. I'm also Let's see, Zeke is two years old. So two years we've got that fiddle. Fiddle is a instrument, and I'm basically just writing down the first things that come to my mind. And this is how my maps work. As far as allowing me off a lot of flexibility and being able to act as a multiplier. Two years, two years is how long I was at my last graphic design jobs. I'm just gonna put job. So all these things that are maybe not even related to the word cat I can go in and just start putting all sorts of things down two years. Uh, what else is two years? I don't know. A house. Say I want to buy a new house in two years. You know, it's just fiddle instrument. I can go on with that. I can create cow. What do you do? You could eat a cow. You can have hamburgers. Sorry if there's any vegetarians, vegans or, um, the like out there. So we've got hamburgers and eat Moon Moon comes out at night. Let's switch to dog backyard. I'm putting down images and associations that just come to my mind. Spoon spoon reminds me of dinner in the eating. It also makes me think as dishes and cleaning dishes. Spoon also makes me think of forks, knives and so on. Okay, so that's the thing with mind maps is that you can really use them to brain storm and get all kinds of ideas. They allow you a lot of flexibility, whereas let's go ahead and erase all this now if I went through and I did the same thing, but I didn't put one keyword per line. Then what that would look like is this All right, So this right here shows you not using the keyword ruelas faras one line per keyword or one key work per line. So this right here, basically, you can create a mind map that looks like this. The only thing is this is that if you were to go in and take cat and the fiddle, I mean, really What? How do you What do you do with that from there? You know, it's like, OK, cat and fiddle. Oh, cat and fiddle is a part of ah, nursery rhyme, Useful nursery. Wrong. So you go in and, you know, maybe put a branches is nursery rhyme. And, uh, cute. Funny, whatever. You would also go in and Cal jumped. Um, Cal jumped Question mark Decals jump. I don't know. Over the moon over the moon is a phrase see such sport as really nothing I can do with that . Nothing immediately is triggered or associate id a little dog laugh. That's actually kind of sounds kind of funny, So I'm gonna put funny down here. It's kind of cartoon, like a little dog laughing and a dish ran. I'm not sure what to do with that Away with, Um, I would have put wind because I think of the wind when I see a way with and spoon again, Spoon makes me think of dishes and laundry and so on. So you can really see the difference between the previous mind map that I just created and this one, this one right here, using phrases and sentences. It did have a dampening effect on my mind map. So with this particular type of my map, the one keyword her line rule definitely plays or rule. So we'll talk more in a later lesson about the problem with the one keyword per line rule and the goals of keywords as well. But for this, you definitely see a difference between using one key words per line and not using it 8. The Problem w/One Keyword Per Line: The problem with the one key worker line rule is that it's great. But the thing is, is that it's a little too great at just one thing. What I mean is this. Let's take into account the mind map behind me. All right, so we've got this mind map right here. The inspire creativity mind map. I've got one keyword per line in this entire mind up, but the thing is, is that it's something that I created that came out of my head. That was mawr creative. It wasn't for learning. It was basically just a form of documenting my own thoughts. Now, when we get into learning in my mapping in keywords, that's where things get. Basically, everything moves into a gray area from my experience. Using mind maps quite a bit is that with doing something such as this and trying to learn about the trying great and taking notes and everything about the neocortex in the reptilian brain, the limbic system something that for a graphic, designers such as myself, it's not something that I'm used to talking about. It's not something that I can easily create. Keywords take a large portion of an idea or concept word and be like, Oh yeah, I know how to boil that down real quick. So it's like even looking at this quote from Mika Lean. It says the brains operate like three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, each with its own subjectivity, each with its own sense of time and space in its own memory. Now I can do what I did here, and that is highlight the first part where it says the brains operate like three interconnected biological computers. But when it gets into creating keywords, I can't just jump from a Z. I can't go from this entire quote to something such as brain three computers and that b three different types of lines for keywords. It's something that if I'm trying to study and learn this topic, but I'm gonna be really, really lost. So that's one of the major problems with the one keyword per line rule is that it's not a universal rule that covers everything. Yes, it's great for simple mind maps such as this. It's great for brainstorming and just getting a lot of ideas out there that really have maybe just images and associations but they're not really interconnected except for in my mind. But when it comes to actually learning, that's where I personally have a problem with. The one key were per line rule. So I say all that to say this. Is that the goal of keywords? Let's talk about that in the next lecture. 9. Goal of Keywords: now, the goal of keywords is this is to basically act as a stimulant for you, and that's what it is about Mind maps. Mind maps fall into a wonderful category because they are so personal, you can personalize them with your handwriting. You can personalize them with your own thoughts and images and associations. So if five different people were creating five different mind maps, they would look very different, based on the keywords in the color, choices and central image and everything. And that's one of the beauties of mind mapping now with keywords and the goal of keywords. It's just there to stimulate, Ah thought stimulate in your mind an image or association, and that's what a keyword is best at. 10. Class Project: your class project is split into three parts. The first part requires you toe open up your favorite book article or block post and pick any page or large chunk of text. Begin pulling out the keywords from it. And once you've extracted the most essential words on the page, you're then ready to create a mind map from those keywords. Whichever book, article or blood post you chose to go with the goal is to start with quite a bit of text in front of you so that you can begin paring it down and extract the most important words from it. When you're done creating your keyword based mind map, you'll want toe bloated to the class project section of this course so I can make comments and give feedback on what you've uploaded, and that's it. Thanks for taking the class. I hope you found it super helpful, and I look forward to seeing your mind mats