In this video from Cisco, two young lads from opposite ends of the globe have a staring contest to see who will blink first.

It’s a light hearted ad that has powerful ramifications for the future of our educational systems.

Every aspect of our educational system needs to evolve. From the classroom environment; reading from outdated text books; to the subjects being taught in schools; need to be torn down and reconstructed.

The speed at which we are taking on information is unprecedented. The knowledge that children have on any and every topic is years ahead of what my, and past generations, had access too because of the Internet.

Change for most is an uncomfortable process – including those who have dedicated their lives to the critical profession of teaching others.

That said, change must happen sooner rather than later.

I think the behaviors in class rooms, and attitude towards school in general from our youth, is the result of nothing more complex than sheer boredom.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with me on the perspective that kids are just flat out bored in the classroom isn’t the real issue. The real issue is that our children are the future for our global community. They are the doctors, the policy makers, the educators for future generations of our families.

Why is education not at the top of the list of priorities for every country? Why is there not a global community of practice on setting global standards for education?

Don’t blink now, but the future is already here.

I dove into the Second Life application when it first came out, but I haven’t had time in the past few months to see what’s new. I also wanted to see how the global community would use the tool over the longer term.

Second Life is a 3-D online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents.

The residents of this virtual world have responded with vigor and enthusiasm!

Adam Curry, host of the Daily Source Code Podcast, created “Podcast Island” for Podcasters to meet virutally and share ideas; talk about their shows; and to find inspiration from other Podcasters.

Recently, Peter Morville gave a talk to members of the Information Architecture Institute on Information Architecture 3.0

Even Dell has entered Second Life to allow customers to review products and services, and even purchase computers.

Probably the most robust and detailed use of Second Life was written about in this month’s issue of Wired Magazine. The article describes how the art gallery in Dresden Germany has used Second Life to duplicate every detail of the museum, virtually.

All 37,700 square feet of the 150-year-old building, plus the grounds outside, have been recreated, down to the trash cans and fountains in the courtyard and ceiling moldings, staircases and furniture within. The highlight, of course, is on the virtual walls: 750 paintings spanning 500 years of European art.

I’ll be jumping back into Second Life in the coming weeks, updating my Avatar, and teleporting to these various communities to check them out in more detail.

For those Second Lifer’s already on line, my Avatar name is “Community Wise”.

See you on the other side!

In this article from UIE’s Jared Spool he discusses why the iPod, though inferior in technology to their closest competitor, remains the most successful and widely used mp3 player on the market today.

The reason? Innovation.

Innovation from years of research and user testing created the invention that is the iPod. Turn it on. Spin the wheel to the music you want. Press play. Cutting through the noise we’re finally at a place on the web and with other technical solutions where the axiom, “Less is More” is becoming the norm; thankfully.

As Dr. Uh-Po Eric Tsou, VP of IBM’s Technology Collaboration Solution Group said, innovation

…is the insight, that when acted upon, creates value. It’s what makes you special.”

Yet I’m amazed at how few organizations take the time to understand the most complex network ever created – the human brain.

Life, we are told, is all about balance. Finding that balance between work and play; work and family; work and just about everything else.

Noticing a pattern here? There is no balance.

In fact, if you look at the work you do in a day, how much of your work involves being creative? My guess is that the answer is little to none.

Imagine going to the gym and only working one side of your body for months. You would be completely out of balance. You can see this imbalance in professional tennis players – especially the men. Their racket forearm is enormous, compared to the other hand that is only used to toss the tennis ball to serve.

We wouldn’t expect anyone to go to a gym to work on only one half of their body – that’s insane! So why doesn’t this analogy apply when we’re at work? We typically never engage in creative processes, and in many environments, doing so is seen as “slacking off” or “not putting in a full day’s work”. And yet, our brains are just like our bodies. If we fail to exercise both hemisphere’s by engaging in creative processes, we’ll fail to reach our true capacity – forcing innovation to take a back seat to catching up on emails.

Try something different in meetings that asks people to be creative rather than logical. Have more brainstorming sessions when faced with a difficult project to get different perspectives. Stop working for a while, check out an art gallery. Taking the time to focus on non-logical processes will in time, actually improve your capacity to make better decisions.

Information Architecture has been described as the

art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.

In other words, IA recognizes the need for a balance between the scientific methods that make everything easy to find, while simultaneously acknowledging the human factors that tend to throw such logical arguments out the window!

Innovation doesn’t come by telling people to put “part A” into “part B” for their whole career. So why are companies still functioning in this manner? The “logic” escapes me.

The benefit is that this “logic” has created an enormous industry of opportunity. As Mr. Spool points out:

As innovation is now the new black, experience design is the fabric of new insight. The work designers do is now the hot spot to be.

Seth Godin, author of the book, Small is the new Big,
has come out with another brilliant set of ideas in The Dip.

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? “Only losers quit!”, “If you work hard enough you can achieve anything in life!”, “Don’t complain, camp in the rain!”, “Don’t quit now, you’ll regret it the rest of your life!”.

Looking to the future, how much better would our choices be if we were prepared to walk away under specific, well-defined situations?

Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices that are available to you. If you realize you’re at a dead end compared with what you would be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it’s a smart one.

Failing, on the other hand, means that your dream is over. Failing happens when you give up, when there are no other options, or when you quit so often that you’ve used up all your time and resources.

It’s easy to wring your hands about becoming a failure. Quitting smart, though, is a great way to avoid failing.

The Dip is about recognizing that time when working on a new project, initiative, or idea when things start to get painful. Those who are most successful are those who can lean in to this down time and forge ahead, regardless.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chances you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.

Then there’s the uniquely human characteristic of ego that can get in the way of our making the choice of what to quit and what to pursue, seemingly impossible at times:

One reason people feel really good after they quit a dead-end project is that they discover that hurting one’s pride is not fatal. You work up the courage to quit, bracing yourself for the sound of your ego being ripped to shreds – and then everything is okay.

If pride is the only thing keeping you from quitting, if there’s no Dip to get through, you’re likely wasting an enormous amount of time and money defending something that will heal pretty quickly.

Contrary to what most of society tells you, quitting is not the end of the world; however if can be the start of something brilliant and even more exciting!

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience, talks about how Google is working to ensure all its users get access to fast, relevant results, at Google Press Day in Paris on June 19, 2007.

I remember the week I started, the search engine had 30 million pages in it. If you compare that to today with the tens of billions of pages that comprise the Google Search Engine now, we have grown by more than a factor of a thousand in eight short years in terms of information…in the early days of the internet we could actually organize them in a list…by hand. But as the web exploded, search became an important and necessary tool to in order to actually find information.

Marissa covers the “pillars” of Google’s approach to search including: Comprehensiveness, Relevance, Latency, and User Experience.

A few of these topics include: Universal Search; The importance of plain language when improving search results; Providing specific search results for each region in the world; capturing all content, regardless of the medium in one search group.

Marissa answers questions at the end of the presentation about Google bombs, the consistently high ranking of Wikipedia, as well as the importance of tagging to improve upon search.

Patrick Dubroy, in this article from Boxes and Arrows, discusses how the development of a common platform to build a “vendor neutral” Information Management tool would make the issue of findability less of a challenge for organizations:

In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman explains that when we use a tool – like a drill, a car, or a computer application – we have a mental model in mind of how the tool works, and how it will react to our actions. This mental model guides how we use the tool. With so many different applications to manage our data, we have to keep track of several different data models, and it’s easy to get confused. For instance, when I’m browsing my photos, I might see a photo that I want to send to a friend. In both Picasa and iPhoto, I can click a button that allows me to email the photo to them. But I can’t do the same thing with a song in iTunes, or a bookmark in Firefox.

I think the critical point Patrick outlines in this article is:

While the amount of information that the average person deals with has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, file systems have hardly changed at all.

This really speaks to the issue of findability in the information age. We’re bombarded with data of all sorts in both our personal and professional lives. True findability will happen when everyone within an organization, and the tools they use every day, are integrated:

In the same way the user interfaces are much more consistent because applications all use the same toolkits, then having a common information management framework that other applications can build upon will go a long way towards a more consistent set of interactions.

Patrick goes on to point out five key requirements to the creation of such a solution:

1. Be a useful and usable framework. This should go without saying, but it’s important to keep in mind that this framework can only help solve our information management problems if it is useful, and it is attractive for developers to build upon
2. Extensible for new kinds of data. If the system is not built to be extensible, we will soon find ourselves right where we are now: doing today’s job with yesterday’s tools.
3. Comprehensive search capability. This one should speak for itself. With the overwhelming amounts of information that we have to deal with, advanced search capability is an indispensable feature.
4. All data on equal footing. Several of the problems I identified stem from the fact that in current systems, certain types of data are not first-class.
5. Flexible organizational features. You should be able to organize your data in whatever way works best for you.

I think we’re on the verge of vendors realizing the need for such a tool. One that doesn’t care if you’re using Microsoft or Apple, Safari or IE, Word or WordPerfect. The web is becoming easier to use. Web standards and an understanding of the end user have gone a long way in improving all web services.

That said, there is still no tool that can easily integrate all of the data we use in our personal and professional lives that simply doesn’t care what technology we prefer to use.

Findability will remain a central issue for organizations for years to come. I’d like to help create a tool that makes this less of a challenge so people can spend more of their time creating solutions, and less time looking for the most relevant strategic document.

If others are interested in forming a discussion group around such a tool, drop me a note.

This article from uiGarden was written by Timo Veikkola. Mr. Veikkola is a senior futures specialist within Nokia.

Hs job involves observing human behavior and lifestyles in order to identify signals and new trends. His observations inform and influence Nokia’s design team.

Now I’ll admit that I’m biased towards this kind of an approach. With a background in Psychology and working with some of the leading minds in the fields of Speech/Language Pathology, Neurology, and Physiotherapy, along with Vice-Chairing Ottawa’s Human Factors Group last year, I obviously feel rather strongly about a “people centric design” methodology.

That said, what I found heartening in this article by Mr. Veikkola was the emphasis on how listening too and applying experiences from a variety of disciplines in an organization can add to the greatest value in the creation of new ideas.

People are generally able to intuitively deduce a favored direction based on their past experiences and competencies, their education, work experiences, interests, lifestyles, media influences etc. A collection of thoughts and information, together with intuitive common sense thinking can be the most basic tool needed in [conceptualizing] brilliant ideas or directions.

However knowing your end users is only part of the equation in creating better solutions. A desire to better understand the environment in which your clients work or play will also have a large influence on your design choices.

I can still recall a story a professor told me back in my days at the University of Waterloo that speaks to this need to understand the end user’s environment.

He was talking about the change in communities from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s to today based on the architecture of homes. Back in the earlier days the focus of a home was the front porch. Neighborhoods were very tight, socially. Everyone knew each other and would feel comfortable asking their neighbors to watch their children as they ran to the store for milk.

So what changed?

If you look at homes in North America, the focal point is now the garage. It’s the one piece of architecture that stands out in most homes. We come home, drive into our garage and walk into our house. We don’t spend nearly as much time outside. More importantly, we rarely see our neighbors and if we do, it’s a polite wave as we click on the automatic garage door opener and coast slowly into the garage – shutting out the neighborhood entirely.

If your organization took the time to observe the needs of the end and their environment, creating solutions according to such observations, better ideas would naturally evolve from your team.

People Centric Design, the placing of the behaviors, attitudes and values at the center of the design process, is at its best when used done through the co-operation of many creative and intellectual individuals. The content and knowledge, especially from other countries offers a significant forum in finding unique solutions. Trends on a macro level are global yet there are the local manifestations that need to be captured as well. Through these building blocks we can construct from trend directions, ethnographic explorations and inherent and observed local manifestations new innovative concepts that direct us to new experiences.

Shawn Simister was kind enough to share this artlice with me this morning about the Elements of Collaboration.

The entire structure is laid out like the periodic table of elements. The lower the number, the higher the popularity. The table is broken into categories of: People, Productivity Software, Collaborative Software, and Methods.

Clicking on one of the elements takes you to a page describing each in more detail.

The aim of “Elements of Collaboration” is to give an overview about current collaboration techniques and technology and to show how better collaboration can lead to improved workflows and higher productivity.

Thank you to Mindquarry for sharing with the global community.

Click on the image below to see a 1600 pixel poster: