Innovation with the "Every-day"

An Industrial Designer that I know sent me these links, and they show great examples of innovation for design in learning and healthcare. We need more examples that inspire one to think of ways that Industrial Design might overlap (or, become a part of) Instructional Design.

If you work with education and technology, then you've probably heard of TED before (I have to admit that I *love* the TED videos!):

Design is in the Details (great example of how little design changes can make a difference, with examples from a healthcare context):



Creating Tech Marvels out of Wii Remotes (great example of how we can be innovative with seemingly every-day objects)

Tag Cloud of Clinical Uncertainty

TRIPanswers is a repository of clinical questions and answers drawn from a wide number of sources world-wide. I like how they use tag clouds to show patterns of clinical uncertainty. However, in an area like medicine where subject matter experts often have a certain (sub)specialty focus, I wonder: how can common language and specialty terminology can be conflated to represent information in a meaningful way?

Twitter for Education

In considering recent social networking trends and the newest/best learning technologies that have emerged in 2008, I'll admit that I'm still a bit mystified by Twitter. Despite my slight reluctance to sign up for yet another social networking site (me and some of my friends are, at times, experiencing social networking fatigue), several months ago I signed up for my own Twitter account.

Yes, I find Twitter addictive, and sometimes I like having instant gratification when seeing immediate updates on what my friends and colleagues are thinking and doing. So far, one of the best descriptions of Twitter was in a post by Donald Clark. He points to many divergent views on Twitter (indeed, his post is a great collection of some of the views on the topic), and I like his reference to Jay Cross's analysis in "the points of tweets." Cross makes analogies between info patterns in Twitter and pointillist art. He explains that "[u]p close it can be meaningless. Back away and a pattern emerges" -- individual twitterers and "tweets" may not seem significant, the overall pattern of information becomes valuable (e.g., twitter patterns about the US election, etc.). People "pipe" into this information through Yahoo!, and I can see how this would have information mapping possibilities galore.

Even the Wall Street Journal has an overview of the technology in article on "Twitter 101." Tim O'Reilly lists his favourites things about Twitter, and others are thinking about how Twitter applies to areas like Healthcare. I feel some relief that I'm not the only one struggling with the true educational value of Twitter (see Tony Karrer's post on the subject, and his articulation of similar ambivilance to Twitter). I like Twitter, but can anyone tell me how this really an educational tool, any moreso than a email or facebook?

Online Collaboration Tools

I've been thinking about the Learning Circuits' question of the month, "what did you learn about learning in 2008?" I'm not sure I have the answer to that question just yet, but Dr. Tony Karrer's map of online collaboration tools has sparked a few ideas. To be continued...