Legal Commentary

If you?ve grown weary of PowerPoint, but you?re not ready to go back to writing on the whiteboard, take a look at FreeMind. A ?mindmapping? program, FreeMind allows you to organize information in a hierarchy of interactive bubbles. Click on a bubble, and it generates a series of ?child? bubbles. Click on one of those, and more bubbles appear.

I first saw this program used by Prof. William Fisher ("Terry") at an IP scholars conference at UCLA. As Terry explained to me, unlike PowerPoint presentations, which proceed linearly, FreeMind allows you to skip around, delving deeper into some topics, and leaving out the details of others. That functionality is especially useful when time is tight.

Instead of the computer presentation controlling the flow of discussion, as is the case with PowerPoint, with FreeMind, the discussion can control the computer presentation. When indicated by a question or the meanderings of the conversation, the presenter can jump to another part of the mindmap and open up the relevant bubbles.

In the first two weeks of my Torts class, I used FreeMind to present an overview of the doctrine we would be learning. (See photo inset.) Students reacted very positively, and I loved it. I exported the mindmaps to an html format and put them on my class website so students could easily access the text. An example is here. Moving around in FreeMind gives you a sense of control, as you have with a whiteboard, but without the tedium of needing to write everything out. I still use PowerPoint for many things, especially where graphics and pictures are important. But FreeMind is my favorite for presenting text that lends itself to a hierarchical outline.

FreeMind is free ? in both senses: The software costs no money to download, and since it is GNU-GPL-licensed, programmers are free to tinker with the source code. You can get the program from the FreeMind project website.