Mind Mapping Corporate Law

If you haven't seen the infamous PowerPoint slide some Pentagon numbnut drew to explain the war in Afghanistan, you have to check it out. After all:

'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war,' General Stanley McChrystal, the US and NATO force commander, remarked wryly when confronted by the sprawling spaghetti diagram in a briefing.

Law professor Dave Hoffman has been using PowerPoint to teach his corporations law class this semester. He's of mixed minds:

On the one hand, I think I digressed less and covered the material in more depth. On the other, I’m not sure that I succeeded in using slides to provoke discussion.

Those are the tradeoffs. It's hard to do the Socratic Method well with PowerPoint (raising the question of whether one ought to use the Socratic Method at all, of course).

In any case, some of Dave's students presented him with a version of the Afghanistan War PowerPoint slide adapted so as to recap corporate law in a single slide. Setting aside the dubious spelling (and who am I to complain of bad spelling), it's kind of amusing.

Gazing upon both the original and the derivative works, it occurred to me that what we really have here are efforts to use PowerPoint as a mind mapping tool. Although I'm long been an avid PowerPoint user in class and other public speaking settings, I've been very impressed with what my UCLAW colleague Jerry Kang has done with mind mapping in both class and public speaking.

So I've decided to use my upcoming sabbatical year, in part, to experiment with mind mapping as a teaching, research, and drafting tool. I had my IT people install Mindjet MindManager 8 for Mac on my new Wall o' Macs (me still so happy).

In connection with a statutory drafting project I've undertaken, I've started creating a mind map of the corporation's key attributes (using Larry Ribstein's book The Rise of the Uncorporation as a starting point):

Constructive criticism and suggestions would be most welcome.

Comments

[jellis58]

Your colleague Mark Grady used mind map extensively in his antitrust class I took two years ago and so did Steve Yaezell when I had him for civ pro. I liked it (I liked your use of power point too). Maybe they would have some pointers for you on using mind mapping in class.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Could you put this on Issuu or Scribd or anyplace us old people can read it?

[Kevin R.C. O'Brien]

I use mindmapping extensively, although IANAL and I most certainly ANALP. I use NovaMind, which includes (only in the Platinum version I think) a rather slick presentation interface.

Brainstorming and presentation are two sides of the coin. It is also useful for making instructional graphics -- I've used it to make large posters containing, for instance, all the material a sport pilot must know. If you're going to make a very detailed presentation you need to print it large enough... students seem to enjoy following the links and have made many good suggestions.