Do visuals impact the brain differently than text? Yes of course, but how? Bonnie DeVarco and I are exploring that in our book and Bonnie just passed along this link about a conference last Spring where artists and scientists came together to exchange information: Visuals

Communications consultant Natalie Shell has an excellent perspective on risk-taking. How many of us could produce a "failure resume/CV"? A new aspiration!
Natalie'sBlog

What if an elementary school teacher could have instant access to all the online resoures from the best science museums, tailored precisely to the state education standards -- and to interest level of her students? That question led Dr. Ted Kahn to create the San Francisco Bay Area School-Museum Collaboratory. All the great resources from the 9 Bay Area science museums have been linked to the specific standards so teachers can click and get an experiment, a drawing, a story to go with what they are teaching. Programming genius Jack Park created the back end structure (inspired by the ideas of Doug Engelbart/Ted Nelson- Ted asked me to create simple graphics for the pages. Teachers tell us the simple drawings helps the navigation and material feel more accessible. Here's a link to the 5th grade site. ScienceCollaboratory

IS THERE A "SHAPE" TO THOUGHT? That is one of the questions Bonnie DeVarco and I raise in our book CodeX: Unlocking the Power of Visual Language, and we find the answer yes in the interwoven stories of certain pieces of literature, music, art, symbols, and patterns that resonate with Nature, across generations and geographies. Why do certain experiences just feel "right" to so many people? Bill Daul sent me a link to a video clip that speaks volumes about the shape of thought in several natural languages--body, music, physics, dance-- Chris Bliss juggling to a song from Abbey Road.
THIS IS A MUST SEE (Click on link to "finale)

GOOGLE DOODLES. The Time magazine piece about Google (2/4/06) shows a lot of writing on the walls, another piece of evidence for emergent visual storytelling as a tool for innovation. Interesting to note: These doodle on these links clearly are the work of the participants, not a professional artist. At Visual Insight we encourage everyone to write on the walls, letting go of worry about perfection. Bringing in a professional visual journalist is a good idea when (1) you want an objective outside listener to pick up the themes (2) you want to capture the final product for a visual book or report. (See link to the Th!nk Electric car event at Google where the above mural was created Th!nk at Google But in any meeting anyone can spark the brainstorming process with random images and words. They have a way of coming together in surprising ways new ideas. (Thanks to colleage Christine Walker for bringing this to our attention)

Here is an animation of one of my murals. The idea: have a mural unfold images that inspire and relax the brain concurrent with podcasts: Eileen's animated mural

Great animation: link

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT originated the quote mentioned in my entry about gossip. (Thanks, Barbara!) Here it is:


"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
(This entry is not sanctimonious on my part. I was questioning old wisdom about gossip in a virtual world.

GOOGLE VS. GOLIATH (or maybe Google now is Goliath?)

Blogs Buzzing With Google PC Report :: http://tinyurl.com/ap4vt

A Los Angeles Times story says the search-engine company has been chatting
with Wal-Mart and others to sell a computer that would run a
Google-developed operating system, not Microsoft's Windows.

(thanks John Maloney)

THE END OF JOBS?

At the Future of Talent conference in October, Verna Allee talked about a day when traditional "jobs" could disappear and instead companies would have ongoing relationship with a "value network" of people who would move in and out of projects. Then at Elliott Masie's Learning 2005 in November, author Malcolm Gladwell predicted the "tipping point" for society would be the changing relationship between people and their employers (above is my mural of Gladwell's talk). I'm hearing more and more conversations about implications implications. What is the role of schools in preparing students for network-employment. What about health insurance, professional development and other benefits? Some are suggesting this is a new calling for old unions. The paradigm has already shifted for individuals. A lot of us whose work is based in Silicon Valley have our own small companies and affiliations with larger organizations, moving between projects. It helps to have a spouse with traditional employment. I'm looking for examples of small businesses or individual freelancers who have gotten together to address these issues. (Thanks, Robert Scoble and Anthony Townsend for inspiration to return to posting images on the blog!)

SMART VISUAL BLOGS. Anthony Weeks, fellow visual pratitioner, created a visual log of Robert Scoble's latest talk. Scoble is the blog guru we wrote about a couple of days ago after his session at Doug Engelbart's. This kind nof post is helping visual journalism come to life!

BLOGGING GETS REAL
By Jeff Saperstein and Eileen Clegg

Last year blogging was a curiosity to most people; today it is a force. Blogging is changing journalism, marketing, the way people are engaging with each other, and the power structure of society.

The blogging revolution was explained by Robert Scoble of Microsoft, during a New Years Day meeting at the home of Douglas C. Engelbart, technology visionary and inventor of the computer mouse. The venue was not a Microsoft platform; in fact, Engelbart once stridently walked out of a project with Microsoft. Scoble faced a collection of open-minded but somewhat skeptical writers, educators and inventors who are part of our loose-knit community of practice called the Next Now.

Scoble, who started blogging five years ago, offered a surprising theory about why blogging got started in the first place and, more important, he explained what is going on behind the scenes to make blogs serious business.

People are using blogs as a running journal. People record their thoughts, then other people react, and there is a dialogue. If it’s something topical—Hurricaine Katrina, the Xbox, the truth about your company or product—your blog may be faster and more accurate than traditional sources.

How did blogging get started? Scoble said that after the year 2001 tech economy crash, people were laid off and had time on their hands. They were bent out of shape about corporate scandals and wanted a voice. They were looking for work and needed to communicate with each other. They could be a neutral source of information – sifting through the hype about products. It worked for Scoble, who helped run the camera section of LZ Premiums in the 1980s and early 1990s and began his blog to write about different camera products. People read him because he had no vested interest in one manufacturer over another.


A few years back, you had to be pretty savvy to start a blog but now the barrier to entry is low. Anyone can start one. But not everyone makes it to the top of the list. Yes there is a list, and it is based on qualitative not just quantitative factors.

It’s not how many people link to your blog, but who they are. Somewhere there is a map of who is linking to whom. The search engines are driving this. It’s not just like posting bulletin boards. It’s not anarchy. If someone deemed highly credible links to your blog, your blog moves up the list. The links and rationale are all transparent. But qualitative evaluation of the blogger’s authenticity, veracity, and knowledge as well as how well they respond to comments, criticism, and corrections also counts. A good buzz sets off alarm bells.

Scoble gave five reasons for blogging:
1. It’s easy to publish. There are particular sites that get you started: blogger.com, typepad.com wordpress.com Anyone can create a blog without it being a big production
2. Discoverability. In the old days, to get discovered, you had to pay for it. Today, Google knows about you and tracks the quality of response to your blog and which experts are linking to you and that’s how you get discovered.
3. Conversationality. People can go back and forth, commenting on each other’s blogs.
4. PermaLinking. Instantly there is a record of posts, whose linking to whom. It’s all transparent.
5. Syndication. There is a “human filter.” People can create RSS feeds (RSS=real simple syndication), enabling them to see who’s writing about topics of interest. People can choose not only link to your blog but the parts of your blog that are getting the most feedback.

What are the implications for marketing? Consumers are paying attention to what bloggers are saying about a product. It’s a new journalism. If bloggers are saying that a product really sucks, people listen. Companies have the choice to respond to the feedback. Instead of press releases, people are listening to each other to learn about what’s hot, what’s not?

In the past, product marketing and communication has been a one-way street. Today, you can’t stop people from making comments about your products – in real time. Scoble says smart companies let employees blog and talk to customers instead of relying solely on a public relations department being responsible for all external communications.

Companies profit by empowering employees to monitor blogs. For example, Scoble said, Microsoft is monitoring blogs, and responding to complaints by writing back, “we’re hearing you….” It works to bring down the anger level. Microsoft can say, “we saw your blog and we want to address the problem.”
Being blog-savvy is a necessary current competency for companies.

But what about blogging for individual, ordinary people? Scoble said the best blog is when you are passionate and authoritative. You can designate different parts of your blog for different subjects and interest or just integrate everything into a running journal. People want reality. The best blog is informative, but the passion has to come through. People who share your passion will link to your blog.

Blogging is learning, Scoble said. You learn by the response you get on your blog. In traditional communications, there is an expert telling you how it is. In a blog, you are looking for response. If you are dealing with a service or product, you will get very good feedback even if some of it is critical.

How you deal with that feedback is critical. If you don’t want to listen, you are not going to have a good blog. If you are completely defensive, you will be out of the game. If you are open to listening and ready to engage, you will create a dialogue and everyone benefits, according to Scoble.

An interesting metaphor: The Jewish Talmud was developed by people responding to each other through commentaries over the centuries about a particular passages in the Bible. From that interaction, the Jewish laws emerged. Blogging expands this Talmudic practice, but enabling everyone to apply it to everything. People developed laws for living based on the asynchronous dialogue of rabbis over the centuries. In different disciplines today, instead of centuries, the dialogue is instantaneous.

(This article is based on the synthesis of Robert Scoble’s talk by Jeff Saperstein as related to Eileen Clegg on January 1, 2006. The meeting was convened by Bill Daul, leader of the Next Now: . Jeff will be starting a blog soon; visit his website at JEFF SAPERSTEIN Wikipedia entry about Scoble’s is ROBERT SCOBLE)

Please add your thoughts!

FIRST PRIZE HOLIDAY CARD: CLICK HERE FOR e-MAGIC
(Thanks, Bill Daul!)

HUMAN COGNOME...Dr. Robert Horn, scholarly father of visual language, maps out the future of what he calls the "Human Cognome" project using visual language for innovation and communication: COGNOME

GNARLY REALITY THROUGH A KEYHOLE, REVISITED. This link was forwarded by Bruce Kent of Vitesse Learning demonstrating optimum use of graphics for depicting complexity: VisualComplexity

WHAT ABOUT BLOGS? People disagree about their use: What are blogs for?
In May, a Business Week Article said blogs are imperative, but for what? People use them as:
- An "open" personal journal
- Personal Knowledge Management
- "Column" for others to read
- Source of paid advertising
- Obligatory activity if you are in business (ref: Business Week)
The concept of blogging first came to my attention in 2002 at the Creating a Learning Culture conference at Unversity of Virginia's Darden Business School in June, 2002. (Here a link to the site, scroll down to see mural about blogs, wikis, etc Darden ) These photos were taken and immediately posted by Jay Cross who already had a blog back in 2002 -- the longest-running blog of anyone I know: He writes about what he learns, does and thinks about in a day especially while traveling (with photos). Exhaustive. Jay's Blog A simpler idea came up about a year ago at the KM Cluster meetings in Cambridge. Bill Ives talked about blogs as a personal knowledge management tool. You write to keep track of your own activities and thoughts, and others are welcome to visit. One friend, Jerry Mikalski actually has his "brain" online -- a map of everything he has read, discovered, thought about and links connecting them. Jerry's Brain Cool (but exhausting!) I decided I encounter one new piece of knowledge every day. The challenge is to write it down. It's a discipline. The root of the word discipline is learning. I am trying to learn to keep it short!

HOW MANY WORDS DOES IT TAKE TO DESCRIBE YOUR JOB? We did an exercise at the Future of Talent workshop asking people to say what they were doing 10 years ago, what they were doing now, and what they expected to do 2015. The result? One word jobs in 1995 (e.g., "journalist"). Job descriptions today require at least a sentence and often a paragraph (e.g., storytelling on giant murals using words and images for thought leaders in leadership and learning while doing future-oriented research on symbols, technology and human resilience) and a lot of people wanting to "simplify" in the next 10 years (e.g., "writing" or "painting"). Mostly it looks like most of us want to be wise enough to get back to one-word jobs.

IS GOSSIP GOOD? Word origins sometimes deliver startling messages. The term "gossip" turns out to be related to the word "God" and originally had to do with "God'sSibs" (referring to religious caretakers, Godparents, for example). Historically, perhaps, it was thought that people talked about you because they cared and wanted the best for you. When I grew up, gossip was considered both bad and declasse. We had an embroidered piece on the wall from my Aunt Garnet "There's so much bad in the worst of us and so much good in the best of us, it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." Another saying was "Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about events, dull people talk about people." But lately organizations and relationships are so complicated especially with virtual teams. We don't see people every day or even once a year, and it's hard to really know them. You can work more easily with people if you know what's happening in their daily lives, what they're struggling with. Is it OK to talk about people if we're really trying to understand them better in the interest of cooperation?

LIBRARIANS RULE vs EVERYTHING IS MISCELLANEOUS.
Click here for mural:

Today there is an argument including from David Weinberger that people may not need a traditional library catalogue system but will co-evolve a new way to share all knowledge Wikipedia-style. (Weinberger is Harvard adjunct faculty, coauthor of Cluetrain Manifesto. Link above to the mural from his talk at COFES 2005) One result of "everything is miscellaneous," is that many people will look only to like-minded colleagues and friends for information. What happens to objectivity? Could we see a time when there are no shared norms for trustworthy information? Sorting information according to credible sources has been the role of librarians back to ancient Greece. Five years ago on an Intitute for the Future project on e-learning, my secret subtitle was "Librarians rule." I dream about a new role of journalist/librarian that would be similar to Dr. Doug Engelbart's idea of the "certified public logician." Like a CPA, the CPL would have to follow specific rules for auditing information, making sure no one can lie about fact vs. opinion. Perhaps the practicalities are a bit daunting, but it's a comforting concept. Meanwhile, we do have journalists and librarians trying to keep integrity while their institutions are changing radically. (This entry was inspired by Barbara Kelly of the Wisconsin Public Libraries Association's campaign to increase support for funding. Their headline is "Librarians' shouting!" They're trying to get past the old idea that libraries should be supported because they are "good," and to get people to realize they are essential. http://www.wisconsinlibraries.info/)

GNARLY REALITY THROUGH A KEYHOLE - What do good writing, good instructional design and good conferences have in common? I like Rudy Rucker's phrase, "putting gnarly reality through a keyhole." Rudy, mathemetician, computer scientist and philosopher (who believes and is close to proving that very nearly everything can be reduced to an algorhythm) spoke at a recent Institute for the Future meeting. At dinner afterward we chatted about his new book "The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul" (a great read) and commiserated about the challenge of turning messy complexity into a narrative with a through story. During "Extreme Learning" conference, I talked to instructors and leaders who are experiencing the same challenge. We agree that what makes us crazy is when we finally succeed in the step-by-step of putting gnarly reality through a keyhole, the result looks so simple, people figure they could have done it themselves.