Concept Maps

A concept map is a representation of your topic in a pictorial format.  It shows relationships between different concepts.  Concepts are drawn as nodes (I have used boxes) which are then connected with labelled lines.

• A concept map is a graphical representation of a person's (student's) knowledge of a domain. (Alpert & Grueneberg, 2001).

Plotnick (1997) lists five purposes of concept mapping:

• To generate ideas (brainstorming);
• To design complex structures (long texts, hypermedia, large web sites);
• To communicate complex ideas;
• To aid learning by explicitly integrating new and old knowledge; and
• To assess understanding or diagnose misunderstanding.

So how is this different to a mindmap?

A concept map represents knowledge.  The topics can have more than one parent and connectors, so the whole thing can be connected like a web.  It's a bit like multiple inheritance in C++ or Python.  Whereas if you are writing in Java, that does not permit multiple inheritance, so the heirarchy ends up looking more like a tree with branches and twigs.  I found this graphic on http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/concept-maps-vs-mind-maps/ 
which also explains it much better than I can!

There are various software tools available to make concept maps, and the course materials suggested a free online tool at https://bubbl.us/  but I just made mine with flowchart shapes in Visio.