There had to be a better way to word this

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Changing Educational Paradigms

LOVE this presentation by Sir Ken Robinson. The animation from RSA adds a lot to the words. I wish I could get my notebooks to look that good. Enjoy!

Simple Milk Jug Job Aid

We go through a gallon of milk a day at our house. We keep extra gallons in the basement fridge and only one at a time in the kitchen. All too often we're on the last gallon of milk and don't know it until it's too late. A Sharpie marker and just-in-time learning approach to the rescue.

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Kids Reading Stories

Discovered a wonderful site for kids, especially those learning to read, call Smories. It's a page full of children reading children's stories directly in to the camera. And I love the story of how the idea was born:

We got the idea for smories.com during an extremely long journey in a very dirty Land Rover from the Kalahari desert in Botswana to Cape Town in South Africa... (read the rest of the story here)

Here's one of my favorite stories, Stone Soup.

The Importance of WHY

Wonderful TED video, Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action, that explains the importance of WHY.

9 Helpful Resources Learned at Rise of Social Commerence

I met many cool people and gained several insights from Altimeter's Rise of Social Commerce conference. Here's the list of 9 helpful (or at least very interesting) resources I learned about from the speakers and sidebar conversations:

1. Homophily - "Birds of a feather flock together." Sinan Aral gave a fascinating presentation about how to maximize word-of-mouth influence and social contagion through online networks. He's written several papers on the subject.
2. Air Force Counter Blogging Flow Chart - Charlene Li presented this in her Open Leadership presentation. Looking forward to reading her newest book by the same title.
3. Personalized Cards by Hallmark - Add your own photos and message, tell them where to send this real paper card, and they'll stamp and mail it on any date you want. Can't wait to try it.
4. ModCloth - indie, retro, vintage apparel.
5. diapers.com and soap.com - trying to be the Zappos of household basics. Free shipping and easy shopping, but how do they compare on pricing? I did a quick test by Red Lasering items in my bathroom and comparing them to prices on soap.com. Most were also like Zappos (where you can't pay more online), but a few items that had ecoupons were cheaper, and a few more were equal in pricing. Easy navigation and well designed, but know your prices or just embrace the convenience and be willingly pay more.
6. Polyvore - creative community where anyone can be a stylists. The sight allows you to create your own fashion trends. "Clip + Create + Shop + Share = Polyvore"
7. Tree of Tenere - how the loneliest tree in the world survive for 300 years.
8. Making Meals and Memories - Le Crueset's engaging program to encourage customers to share the fun memories associated with their cookware. Love the viral maps at the end of each story.
9. shopkick - a location-based program that drives traffic to retailers and can't be faked like GPS programs. I just downloaded the app and am headed to Best Buy to collect some kickbucks.

If you attended or watched any of it on ustream, what resources and takeaways did learn?

BEAUTY: Natural vs Man-made

This summer I had an amazing opportunity to to attend the Gemological Institute of America's Diamond Grading Lab followed by 4 days of hiking in southern Utah. I was truly surprised to discover that the two experience had a strong similarity between them. In both, I spend a lot of time viewing nature's beauty, and in both situations, nature's beauty had been enhanced by man.

With diamonds, that's obvious. These crystals take millions of years to form and are eye-catching in their own right, but it's when man cuts and polishes them that they become truly stunning.

Hiking in Zion National Park and then in Bryce Canyon National Park, I made the same observation. The rock formations took millions of years to form and are gorgeous all on their own, but it's man's efforts that cut in trails and create access to to these places that allow us to view them. These switchbacks were created by man:


While the revisions man made to the parks are more about accessibility and to and even larger extent preservation, both are examples of man taking something that is beautiful in it's own right and enhancing it. The challenge for any designer, whether working from scratch or improving on nature, is when to stop because there is a point of diminishing returns where edits start to detract beauty instead of enhance it. And, of course, not everyone agrees to what is actually adding beauty versus subtracting from it. Here's a quote from Lyndon Johnson that was posted at Bryce Canyon on the subject:

What examples of you seen of man enhancing nature? What examples have you seen of enhancements gone wrong?