Abstract:

“Mind-maps”, or in other words “cognitive maps” (by Eden 1988), may serve as facilitative tools in knowledge acquisition and organisation (cf. Buzan 1995, 2013, Novak and Cañas 2008) whose functions are: to draw relationships between components, outline and visually represent ideas in an organised fashion, arrange and rearrange tasks in logical chains or flowcharts. By creating nodes as reference points, linking them in hierarchies or relationships, thinking of central notions and sub-themes branching out, making connections to other, supportive notions, we may capture ideas in a more efficient way. Structured thinking activated in mind-mapping helps in executing challenging cognitive tasks and conducting analyses that follow the processes of gathering and organising information necessary to endeavour such complex and time-consuming intellectual activities. The process of creative thinking is activated, whose ultimate goal is to understand the idea, concept, or phenomenon a given map represents. The study investigates the implementation of mind-mapping in a particular area of translation pedagogy, providing samples of the actual classwork at the MA level of translation studies. It is also targeted at analysing the relevance and usefulness of mind-mapping in e-learning, drawing attention to some of its aspects: creativity and design thinking, individualisation and student-focused learning, and the use of modern graphic techniques in creating digital concept maps for the purpose of content learning. The conclusions from the analysis lead to an observation that mapping processes activated at the tertiary level of education engage students’ critical thinking, their creative and synthetic skills, and help them form a broad overview of the studied topic in the process of becoming an independent learner. They are also applicable and highly relevant in distant learning. Thus, mind-mapping may be viewed as a useful didactic tool that can be implemented in both on site and on-line learning.

Keywords:

Creative thinking, mind-mapping, (cognitive) mapping, student-centred learning, translation pedagogy.