I've never used mind mapping, at least not calling them so. Probably it's because of my allergy to didactic "fashions".
Obviously I very frequently happen to draw schemes at the blackboard to graphically link concepts, organizing contents already dealt with and those still to meet, according to a certain logic (sometimes also following more than one logic at the same time).
In Kim Pericles's blog I found an enthusiastic post about a new internet service, called mind42.com (in a "public beta" experimental stage) for interactive and collaborative mind mapping, where the maps can be embedded in blogs or other multimedia presentation. There is also a link to her educational site, where she shows the service "in action": a mind mapping about natural disasters. Really the tool looks impressive, as well as Kim's work.
I'm grabbing the occasion given by Kim's great work to express my perplexity (or rather, my critical attention and curiosity): it is more about some possible ways of using mind mapping than about mind mapping itself, for the subjects I teach. It is very difficult to find a discriminating line between the freedom of logical organization of information that mind mapping allows, and that is connected to the different faculties and cognitive modes of each person, and logical anarchy, which is to be avoided especially in some subjects like the scientific ones: certain logic relations and relational patterns between concepts do exist and must be caught, independently on how freely and creatively organized a student's mind might be. It would be interesting to find experiences in this field.
Italian version
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