EDUC 504/649: How to make a concept map navigation of a wiki

A few weeks ago I was searching high and low for a solution to making a pretty concept map with text links to use as a navigation / home page for a wiki. I eventually got smart and asked Kristin for help, and in the end we came up with a pretty good solution.

You can see the end result here, on the home page for our place-based education wiki.

Here's the solution Kristin helped me come up with, in case it saves someone else some time some day:

The concept map was created using bubbl.us -- a free, intuitive online concept mapping tool that supports collaboration with multiple users, much like a wiki.

Within bubbl.us, the text label of any concept bubble can be converted to a link by adding the link address in front of the text and putting the text in brackets. For example typing the following in a bubble:

        http://www.google.com[Google]

bubbl.us will create a link in the text bubble that looks and works like this: Google.

Finally, the concept map can be embedded in your wikispaces page as follows:

1. Click on the "Menu" button on the lower right of any bubbl.us sheet and choose the "HTML embed code" option.
2. Copy the resulting html embed code from the box on the bubbl.us page and insert it as a widget in your wikispaces page, by
3. Clicking the "Widget" button on the Edit menu bar, selecting the "Other HTML" tab, and copying the embed code from bubbl.us into the box
4. You may also wish to alter the size of the embedded box by changing the width and height parameters within the embedded html codes.