For the uninitiated, a mind map is a graphical organization of ideas and concepts that can be used to facilitate the generation of ideas and the learning process. The reason why this has been argued to be more effective than the traditional method of learning (e.g. rote learning, linear text reading, etc) is because such structuring of ideas and concepts resembles the way our brain works – i.e. via links or associations.

Mind mapping is done by connecting one idea to another with the aid of colors and images to tap both sides of our brains. When that happens, creativity gets a boost without compromising our sense of logic.

If you’re thinking of how you can start adsopting mind mapping in your learning or brainstorming needs, check out these 43 great examples of how mind maps can be made. The variety of these examples only goes to show that there’s no one right way to create a mind map. It all depends on your preferences and the topic of choice.

Course Structure. (Image Credit: Sam Bradd)

Global Rewind. (Image Credit: Sam Bradd

L’art Invisible. (Image Credit: Marion Charreau)

Metaphore Sur Le Cerveau. (Image Credit: Philippe Boukobza)

Another Life Mindmap. (Image Credit: Astrid Morganne)

Learning Styles. (Image Credit: Astrid Morganne)

Art & Design. (Image Credit: Ian Gowdie)

Seven Da Vincian Principles. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

The Art Of Mind Mapping .(Image Credit: Thum Theng Cheong)

Creating Powerful Learning Experiences. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Creativity & Innovation. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Time Management .(Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Personal Development .(Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Dreams. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Workshop. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Rules Of Mind Map. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Who Moved My Cheese. (Image Credit: Thum Cheng Cheong)

Visual Thinking. (Image Credit: Pooja Thacker)

My Living Space. (Image Credit: Pooja Thacker)

Better Earth. (Image Credit: Priyanka Tiwari)

Diabetes. (Image Credit: Creativeinspiration)

Doing Things Differently. (Image Credit: Paul Foreman)

Peace Of Nature. (Image Credit: Paul Foreman)

Drawing The Line Of Forgiveness. (Image Credit: Paul Foreman)

How Might Our Buildings Combine With Nature. (Image Credit: Paul Foreman)

How to Focus in the Age of Distraction. (Image Credit: Jane Genovese)

Get Ready For Exams. (Image Credit: Jane Genovese)

Inauguration 2009. (Image Credit: Learn to Learn)

Math Mind Map. (Image Credit: Learn to Learn)

Mind Skills. (Image Credit: Shev Gul)

Exercise Motivation. (Image Credit: Shev Gul)

The Breathing Code. (Image Credit: Shev Gul)

Matt Bacak. (Image Credit: Matt Bacak)

Annie’s Mind Map Of Her Cranium Contents. (Image Credit: Sucky Poo Poo)

Taiwan. (Image Credit: Teddy Ni)

Global Understanding. (Image Credit: Shubham Kumar Singh)

Tree House at APQC Complex. (Image Credit: APQC)

Siviglia. (Image Credit: D Plastino)

Getting It Done. (Image Credit: Dan Porter & James Baylay)

Choosing The Platform. (Image Credit: Dan Porter & James Baylay)

Next Generation Handhelds. (Image Credit: Dan Porter & James Baylay)

Handheld Basics. (Image Credit: Dan Porter & James Baylay)

Playing Made Easy. (Image Credit: Margaret Brandman)

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Facebook has become so much a part of our life now that it’s so prevalent across the world. With close to a billion users out there, one can easily throw a stone and hit a Facebook user. The amount of time users engage in Facebook activities, like updating statuses, posting photos, commenting and ‘liking’ posts has also been increasing with smartphones and 3G/Wi-fi networks becoming commonplace in recent years.

(Image Source: Voices from Russia)

Given the accessibility and ease of use of Facebook whenever and wherever you are, it’s no wonder more and more people are addicted to the popular social networking site. You may ask, what’s wrong if you use Facebook frequently as a means of entertainment, or as a means to relieve your stress? Well, there’s nothing wrong. However, when Facebook activities start interfering with your everyday life and become detrimental to your daily functioning at work or in school, you might have a problem.

Here are some telltale signs of Facebook addiction you should take note of.

Recommended Reading: The Psychology of Facebook

1. Over-sharing

At a time when many netizens are concern over the issue of privacy online, it’s strange to find that there are still a number of us who voluntarily share our deepest secrets about our intimate lives on Facebook. It has perhaps a lot to do with the gratification of being acknowledged or approved by our peers. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier article, The Psychology of Facebook, such social affirmations by our friends in our network is a key draw of social networking sites.

There’s no basis for me to say that sharing about ourselves is wrong, because each of us have our own social needs to fulfill. It’s what makes us humans. What I’m talking about here is the idea of over-sharing, of saying too much and then regretting what we said. When we’re addicted to something, we’ll do anything just to get a satisfying dose of engagement in the activity. So in the case of Facebook addiction, we may become unable to judge what’s appropriate to share, allowing our desire to be heard to override our privacy concerns.

2. Checking Your Facebook Whenever Possible

This means checking out for any updates to your newsfeed or responses to your posts every time you don’t know what to do. In other words, the default choice for your freetime activity is to be on Facebook. So what do you do? You leave your Facebook open in the background, switching between work or assignments to the page every few minutes. Even when you are outside enjoying a drink with a friend, you log in to the Facebook app on your smartphone every now and then during brief moments of non-interactions.

(Image Source: tecca)

The end result is that you get distracted in whatever it is you’re doing and you may find it hard to be fully present at the moment. Perhaps you may take a significantly longer amount of time to complete simple tasks or maybe some of your friends may complain that you don’t pay enough attention to what they say. No surprises there, seeing how your attention is always diverted to some Facebook notifications.

3. Overly Concerned with Facebook Image

Have you ever spent more than fifteen minutes of your time thinking about what you ought to type for your status update? After you’ve decided on what you should update and posted it, do you eagerly anticipate how others will respond to it? This is what it means when I mention your ‘Facebook image’. To some extent, we are all concerned over how we project ourselves to the rest of the world, even when it comes to our online presence.

Some of us though, may have been spending too much time managing a friend’s impression of them. It gets out of hand when you’re always trying to think of something cool, humorous, entertaining, etc to post just to show how awesome a guy or gal you are. After which, you get restless while you wait for others to comment or ‘like’ what you’ve posted and so you just keep checking and re-checking your Facebook to see if there’re any new notifications.

4. Reporting On Facebook

Most of us have seen friends in our network who almost certainly never fail to appear on our newsfeed each time we log on to Facebook. It could be some status update, check-in, posting of their photos and such. Their posts tend to be on very mundane matters, much like how someone reports to another what he or she is doing at any given moment. They report to you their daily routines (e.g. taking a piss), broadcast check-ins to uninteresting places like the street they live in, upload self-portraits and such.

(Image Source: Telegraphe)

It appears to be an attempt to remind others that they exist. Either that or these people are just trying to make their offline life co-existing with their Facebook one. If you are one of these people, I think it’s good to ask yourself the reason behind such ‘reporting’. To me, it seems to be a sign of obsession, as if you need to post something, no matter how ordinary or unimaginative, in order to relieve your anxiety of not doing so.

5. Spending Hours Browsing Through Facebook Every day

Spending about an hour or so daily looking through your newsfeeds and checking out profiles of your friends is still okay, but if it starts going beyond that, it’s an indicator of a problem. Sure, there’s loads of content on Facebook like photos, games and other interesting apps, but if you start using increasingly more of your valuable waking hours surfing aimlessly on Facebook, it’s time to reexamine your lifestyle.

The issue gets worse when you actually sacrifice your sleep to use Facebook. It’s as if the amount of waking hours you have aren’t enough for you to satisfy your Facebook cravings. Lack of sleep will undoubtedly affect your performance in school or work the next day, which is when Facebook becomes an addiction problem.

6. Mad rush to add more friends

For some users, Facebook addiction may manifest itself as an intense desire to add more friends. There is a perceived ‘arms race’ between you and your other friends to see who has the highest number of friends on their network. The keyword here is ‘perceived’, because you may think there’s a competition but in fact there might be none (i.e. your friends could not care less about whether they have more or fewer friends than you). The contention on who has more friends may just be your personal quest to be seen as more ‘popular’.

(Image Source: jimake)

Interestingly, a research done by psychologists from Edinburgh Napier University found that Facebook users with more friends on their network tend to be more stressed up when using Facebook. The more friends you have, the more you feel pressured to maintain appropriate etiquette for different types of friends while remaining entertaining. In other words, the competition in adding friends may result in a vicious cycle of increasing Facebook-related tensions, resulting in worse addiction outcomes.

7. Compromising offline social life

As you get used to communicating on Facebook via messaging, sharing photos and posts, commenting and ‘liking’ others etc, it may come to a point when you get more comfortable socializing online than offline. You become over-reliant on Facebook to fulfill your social needs and may start sacrificing the time spent on real-life meet-ups for coffee with your friends.

That’s not healthy. Let’s face it, face-to-face communication is a far richer experience than communicating online where one cannot actually see non-verbal communication as in the body language, gestures, voice tones, etc. It’s not surprising that text messages often get misinterpreted, resulting in misunderstandings. In the long run, your social life suffers because your communication is limited to Facebook and not with a real-life friend.

Overcoming Facebook Addiction

Looking back at the signs and symptoms of Facebook addiction, I realize I am by no means immune to it. Over-sharing? Check. Refreshing my Facebook newsfeed whenever I have the chance? Check. The only consolation I have for myself is that I don’t do that on a regular basis; I simply fall in to the trap every once in a while. That’s not considered an addiction… I hope(?). I’ve read a number of articles that offer tips on how one can overcome Facebook addiction, and most of these offer precise step-by-step solutions on how to address your issue.

(Image Source: Lowlandet)

Tips like first admitting you have a problem, setting aside a fixed time to check your Facebook, turning off notifications, etc are all legitimate. However, it might be more effective if we deal with the root of the addiction problem by finding out why you are depending on Facebook so much.

Is it because you’re using Facebook to avoid dealing with some things, such as your work or personal issues at home? Once you know what the underlying issue is, you’ll be more confident to manage your addiction. If there’s none to be found, then maybe it has to do with habit. Put Facebook away for awhile, go out and experience the offline world by interacting with your friends face-to-face. You’ll realize how much more wonderful that is than to stare at your newsfeed all day long. That’s when change can begin.

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I’m sure you use Youtube a lot, to watch oh, I don’t know, funny home videos with babies or pets, strange and bizarre occurrences, the latest music videos, tutorials, game walkthroughs etc, recorded events and talks, [insert anything that can exist in video form here] etc.

Watching Youtube videos is second nature to most Internet users, which is why if you are an avid Youtube fan, you really should know about these Youtube shortcuts. This quicktip will share with you shortcuts that give you better control over the videos you watch on Youtube.

Read Also: More keyboard shortcuts

1. Skipping Parts of a video

Almost every video you see starts with some random or irrelevant scene or introduction, so it’s only natural to hurry the video along by clicking on the time slider bar. Here’s how to do it without mouseclicks or the touchpad.

You can skip part of a video by pressing the numbers on your keyboard: skip videos at 10%, with button number 1, or 9 for 90%. The numbers do not refer to the minutes in the video, so if you want to start halfway, press 5 for 50%.

Note that this will not work when the video is already playing, although putting the video on pause rectifies this. Pressing button 0 on your keyboard will bring you back to minute 0:00 of the video.

2. Tab to Select Tool Options

The Tab key is useful if you don’t want to navigate with the mouse. In YouTube, the Tab key lets the user highlight tool options such as those listed below. Just press Enter or Space to execute.

1. Watch Later
2. Seek Bar – Press any number between 1 to 9 to skip parts of the video.
3. Play or Pause
4. Volume Control – Press up / down arrow keys to control.
5. Change Quality – Press Enter or Space to execute, then press Tab key again to select quality.
6. Large Player
7. Small Player

3. Common YouTube shortcuts

And lastly, here are a few more YouTube shortcuts for better control over the Youtube player.

Shortcut	Actions
Space	Play / Pause
←	Go back 5 Seconds
→	Go forward 5 Seconds
↑	Increase Volume
↓	Decrease Volume
F	Fullscreen
Esc	Exit Fullscreen

Conclusion

So there you have it. Quick and easy and straight to the point. And one last thing, note that while these shortcuts work fine on videos on Youtube, they don’t do so well with videos embedded in external sites. If you know of any more youtube shortcuts, tell us in the comments!

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