Dan Roam: The History of Visual Thinking

Here is a great short movie by Dan Roam on the history of visual thinking. It is a great example of how we can improve learning.


SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

I would love to see more trainers put this type of thinking into their presentations. Specifically on ideas that can be abstract.  I wonder if we can convert the iPad into a tool to make these types of presentations. Does anyone know of a specific tool / app for presenting through the iPad?

Home vs School: The best 21st Century Learning Environment

I was thinking about a comment I heard on Rocketboom from an Intel employee discussing the release of their classmatePC designed for the classroom. His comment was something to the effect that since students have broadband and computers at home, they are set back 20 years when they enter the classroom. (I am paraphrasing). This is an interesting idea on a couple of levels.

At School

From Flickr

The school technology experience often looks like working on a document, creating a presentation, researching a planet, or maybe even blogging if you are lucky.  Most technology at school is limited to controlled weekly or maybe even daily time slots working in locked computing environments on very structured lessons.  All for seemingly good reasons - equal access, meeting learning standards, protection from harmful content. These types of situations are a good start, but they just don't support the kind of deeper learning that happens in a more open online environment.

Compare this to Home.

I think it is certainly true that the majority of our youth now has internet access at home. Many have multiple devices that are connected to broadband access, including the traditional desktop that is typically in the home office area, at least one parent as a laptop from work (if not both), they may have a netbook that maybe a grandparent got them for Christmas, an ipod touch for their birthday, many have iphones, and then many have game consoles like the xBox360, Wii, or Playstation that are connected. (not to mention the PSP and iPad).  Soon, we will be able to add AppleTV and GoogleTV connecting our TVs throughout the house.  So, while a few homes have all these things, most have at least one.


We are beginning to see that students have more open access to the web at home then they do in the school. With this in place, the home learning environment looks a little different then what kids see at school. This open learning platform is more like having a constant feedback loop with repeated opportunities for reading, listening, and watching content and on-going collaboration.

Of course, this more open approach can be in conflict with the more controlled school environment, particularly when access to technology is limited and lessons are focused on specific outcomes and I think some of that tension represents an important value that educators bring to the process.

When our youth are given more freedom to work through a reinforcement loop that happens when you surf the web, they are able to accelerate their own, self-driven learning.

Now I don't want to create a stereotype that somehow our youth are in this constant mode of multi-tasking and can somehow manage all these things simultaneously for hours on end, because that is not really what I am seeing.  What it looks like to me, is that my 11 year old is switching among these various activities, waiting for feedback from a particular activity and filling the down time with content consumption or some other engaging activity.

So, it might be that he is maintaining an on-going chat session with a couple of friends online, while he switches back and forth with the realtime stats feed of an NBA game that is on the TV. When the announcer mentions something that is happening in the sports world, he jumps over and reads an online article about that event. Then after the chat has ended or at least paused he will launch an online game and play for ten minutes or launch a YouTube video to checkout.  If it is funny or compelling in some way he will send the link to a friend.


Each of these activities are in their own way a feedback loop and must be compelling for the young learner to stay engaged or they will simply move on and try something different. If the activity is compelling enough they will engage at a deeper level, reading it completely, making a comment, sharing it with a friend.

The determination of what is compelling is made on the fly based on a variety of factors including the topic, who is involved, and the emotional component of the content. (think baby laughing on YouTube). My son is a frequent online visitor of a guy who makes up parody songs about the NFL and it is really an emotional connection with that content and he always wants to share the with me.  

Provided with enough "free time" learners will begin to build reading and collaboration skills and hopefully at some point start to take the role of creator. If you want to really help today's youth, encourage them to be creators on the web. Post a video, write a song and post it, blog, and even engage in Facebook and Twitter (Note: I won't let me 11 yr old on Facebook and his Twitter stream is private to friends).  These are great skills they will use for the rest of their life.

Some Early Programs

So there may be some interesting things with the way kids use technology at school vs the way the use them at home. I have been fortunate enough to have been involved in two programs that are changing this reality for school kids.

The Globaloria program that has been implemented throughout West Virginia (I was the Program Manager for a year) and promotes this more open exploration of learning and extend computer use.

The second program, is a program that I am involved in is a 1 to 1 computer to student program at a local elementary school that will be entering it's second year this fall. Students each have a netbook computer to use for the entire school day, everyday and get to take the technology home for homework assignments and hopefully to explore additional content.

What do you Think?

I think that next question is, if the above is actually happening at some level, what impact will that have on our youth?  Who will thrive in this new environment? Is a single computer with internet access equal to many devices, or does having a mobile device at an early age give you an advantage?  Maybe you completely disagree with this assessment of what is happening?

iPhone 4 Announced

The new iPhone was announced today. Of course the hype is impressive. The phone will have Facetime (wifi-based video calling), a 960x640 display, multi-tasking, and HD video editing and playback, all on a new OS (details here).

Of course, it will take time to decide if it is open enough for those who value openness and I do at some level. No announcement on adding cellular carries that I saw or heard.

Over the next few days I will try to consider how the iPhone4 might be used as an educational tool. What type of learning can it enable?

What is your initial reaction to the announcement?

Adobe comes back with an answer for the iPad.

Adobe's new software is designed to build content for the iPad. I think it was a great idea for Adobe to come back with an ipad solution. A great example of bringing something positive to the market amid negative discussions with the HTML5 vs Flash issue.



In addition to bringing something positive to the market, they came with very specific influencers, Wired and Toy Story. I am not sure I am ready to pay $5 an issue, but it does show that Adobe wants to story top-of-mind in the new digital space of mobile computing.

Tweeting on-hold Wait Times?

So I have had the idea that I think would be a great service to allow people to tweet when they are being asked to wait on hold on the telephone, or at the doctor or dentist office. Something like #onhold or #waiting and then the company that you are waiting #onhold ATT or #onhold Frontier or #waiting Walmart.  It would be important to really think about how to handle the formatting of the tags and support information. I realize you could just start doing it on twitter and see it would take off, but it might be interesting to build a site designed to aggregate the data and provide the Zeitgeist in a human readable way.    If you could add an estimated time, that would be great as well.

I haven't thought it through, but it seems the service would be valuable to consumers if linked to Yelp or other consumer services and it could provide insight into customer service for many companies.  It might also be more of a mobile app, but I think there wouldn't be strong adoption if people had to download an app.

Is there anything out there already?  I haven't looked.

One positive angle would be to allow people to log something productive or positive they were able to do while waiting.

#waiting dentist 10min brainstormed new twitter service

UPDATE: Bob Coffield twitter stream reveals something along these lines in healthcare...

@iHealthBeat new web-based tool called @MedWaitTime
 to check wait times at hospitals and doctor's office: http://bit.ly/9r56Lo#health20

iPad App for Mixing Beats: BeatWave

My daughter and I have had fun creating four layered beats with BeatWave. I free iPad app that allows you to select a series or patterns of tones to make a cool collection beats. The really cool part was when we started experiment with the patterns that make the visual representation of the beat. It did have a feature to email the beat, but I am not sure how it worked once you received the email.

If you want to have some fun find a friend when you might check it out!

A Billion Users, But a Trillion Sensors

The web is starting to bring on new sensors that will change the way that we interact with the internet, data, and the world. By connecting the items of the world to the web, we will be immersed in a (insert really big metaphor like sea or galaxy) of data and information. This will change things once again. To get a grasp on what that looks like and to make a case that we will have to rethink how we build technical infrastructure and design user interfaces, the folks at MAYA Design created this video.


Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

I really like to the simple approach in the video, showing how big a trillion things are and how they begin to consider where we will probably have to look for our own design inspirations. It is interesting to think about how this will impact science, education, marketing, collaboration, etc.  These changes also once again underscore the need to improve content aggregation tools. We will have to have better ways to handle this data. Finally, for the first time, I think it has made me think about how cloud computing will become a real necessity for leveraging all the data of the future. This is going to be interesting.