Spread a little visual language. Join the theartoffee: POST IT NOTE! project on February 1st.
Category: visual thinking
What I’ll Be Doing at Northern Voice 2008
Ohh, goody, Northern Voice is just over a month away, Feb 21 – 23. I’m excited. Here is what I’m doing from a scheduled perspective on the main day (Saturday.) Still cooking ideas for Friday’s Moose Camp. Dave are we still doing something with Improv? Oh, and don’t forget Thursday night’s party!
First I’m hosting a session at 10:45 on Saturday (up against Marc Canter – drat), “Why I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls.” The gist? How can drawing, doodling and other visual practices make a difference in our blogging and in other parts of our lives? Blogging really helped me find my writing voice. Now, what is my visual voice? How can drawing, doodling and other visual practices make a difference in our blogging and in other parts of our lives? (Please bring paper, pens and such, but leave your inner censor at the door.)
Right after than Chris Lott foolishly asked me to sit in on his panel, The Blog is Dead! Long live bloggers. I have no idea what we are doing and that sounds fun to me.
Most of all, I’m looking forward to hanging out with folks, old friends and new. NorthernVoice always has this friendly vibe where I feel comfortable. I have the ability to act extroverted, but conferences usually trigger my inner introvert. So I appreciate the NV vibe and especially the people.
So, what will YOU be doing at Northernvoice 08?
Reflections on Our “Drawing Together” Session
Argh, I have been wanting to finish this blog post. Work is crazy, so I can’t be as complete as I’d like to be, but I have to get this out. There is so much incubation going on in my head about visuals, and not enough time to release it all into the wild!
This past week as part of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 08 “event” we did a session on Drawing Together Online. Leigh Blackall arranged for us to use Otago Polytechnic’s (corrected – thanks Leigh) Elluminate room. Elluminate has a shared white board. Hmmm… possibilities. Could we draw on paper then take digital photos or scans and upload to Flickr? Draw together on the white board? The key was I wanted to create an irresistible invitation for everyone to draw something during our hour together.
We started off with a few ruminations and images from me. Leigh gave us a short lesson on drawing human figures then we just jumped in. And the white board became the center of attention. At first it was chaotic. Then we played with constraints. A theme. A request to work smaller and slower. We reflected on how we felt looking at the images. How we felt when we could not find space to make our mark, or when it was erased by someone else – and not being able to know quickly who it was. We talked about our inner censors, keeping us from drawing. How they came to us as childhood melted into adulthood.
I had a great time. For me, it was a wonderful session. The Elluminate Recording is here. A montage of some of our drawings is below as well as a link to Flickr: Photos tagged with drawingtogether
I invite any of the people who played together that day to share your impressions as well. Some of us said we want to do more exploration of drawing together online. YES!
1. flnw_ambivilance_2, 2. Commute, 3. flnw_coffee, 4. My Texturized Cofee Picture, 5. cogdog’s texturized coffee picture, 6. flnw_boundaries, 7. flnw_ambivilance, 8. I Need MORE COFFEE (PicNik-ed), 9. Our first collaborative drawing, 10. I Need MORE COFFEE, 11. Coffee, 12. Our first collaborative drawing
While we are thinking about visual thinking together, here is another amazing link of a video that really uses visual thinking, from Christian Nold at PopTech. follow that link to take a look at this video. (Edited to remove the embed because it kept auto-playing, driving some of us nuts.)
Monday Funny: Fridge Secrets
Oops, I forgot to post this on Monday. Uh oh.
.Well, I’m not sure if this is funny. But here is an amazing set of photos from .”>Eugene Kim, the fridge equivalent of Postsecret. Click into the full set to read the post its.
I have been thinking about the power of anonymous declarations, particularly those that we can touch, move, modify. A wall full of post-its that express what is on a group of people’s minds that can be annotated. Shifted.
We have so many high tech tools that we can co-write with. But when we publish on the web, it doesn’t feel the same as a post it on the fridge. These pictures got me thinking…
Flow of Donations from a Networked Response
As a follow up to a post from a few weeks ago, here is an update from Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas.
Pyramid of Peace
Ways to help Kenyans, Kenyans to call, latest news organized by cityThe latest emails from Kenya and around the world
Send phone credits to Kenya – purchase them from mamamikes.com or sambazanow.com
Click on the image above to see a diagram of part of our Pyramid of Peace. We’re thinking through how best to show all the data.
So here is the image referenced above. First, it is really helpful to me to see the impact of Andrius’ fundraising efforts. This is an interesting sort of “front end” of the ROI problem Beth Kanter is wrestling with these days. Second, and more interesting to me, is how we can visualize in some tiny way our impact in a network. A lot of what made me donate was simply trust. But to see this image, it is a positive reinforcement to make the effort again in future situations.
It is not “verified” data, but insomuch that I trust my network, the visualization offers me both a community indicator that together we can do more than I can do alone.
