So here’s the next step in my exploration of this idea, a data sketch that generates a Freemind .mm format mindmap file for a range of OpenLearn offerings using metadata puled into Scraperwiki. The file can be downloaded to your desktop (save it with a .mm suffix), and then opened – and annotated – within Freemind.

You can find the code here: OpenLearn mindmaps.

By default, the mindmap will describe the learning outcomes associated with each course unit published on the Open University OpenLearn learning zone site.

By hacking the view URL, other mindmaps are possible. For example, we ca make the following additions to the actual mindmap file URL (reached by opening the Scraperwiki view) as follows:

• ?unit=UNITCODE, where UNITCODE= something like T180_5 or K100_2 and you will get a view over section headings and learning outcomes that appear in the corresponding course unit.
• ?unitset=UNITSET where UNITSET= something like T180 or K100 – ie the parent course code from which a specific unit was derived. This view will give a map showing headings and Learning Outcomes for all the units derived from a given UNITSET/course code.
• ?keywordsearch=KEYWORD where KEYWORD= something like: physics This will identify all unit codes marked up with the keyword in the RSS version of the unit and generate a map showing headings and Learning Outcomes for all the units associated with the keyword. (This view is still a little buggy…)

In the first iteration, I haven’t added links to actual course units, so the mindmap doesn’t yet act as a clickable navigation surface, but that it is on the timeline…

It’s also worth noting that there is a flash browser available for simple Freemind mindmaps, which means we could have an online, in-browser service that displays the mindmap as such. (I seem to have a few permissions problems with getting new files onto ouseful.open.ac.uk at the moment – Mac side, I think? – so I haven’t yet been able to demo this. I suspect that browser security policies will require the .mm file to be served from the same server as the flash component, which means a proxy will be required if the data file is pulled from the Scraperwiki view.)

What would be really nice, of course, would be an HTML5 route to rendering a JSONified version of the .mm XML format… (I’m not sure how straightforward it would be to port the original Freemind flash browser Actionscript source code?)