To the drawing board

As a thought experiment, I imagined I was in charge of designing a new, better information management system. How would I organize things? What would I include? What would I change? The way we handle information is crucial for how we learn, and perhaps a better system would help people retain information and learn new things more quickly.

My design specs:

After checking out some organizational tools, I considered their key elements that could inform my own design. If I were to construct a visual information system, it would have to include these features:

Large volume of information: It's important to include the flexibility of systems like Jira and EndNote, which can handle as much information as you care to throw at them. This is the Achilles' heel of MindMeister and Comapping. I would love to see a visual information system that could somehow include tons of bookmarks and links without becoming chaotic.

Icons / graphics: The plain interface of EndNote makes me yawn...I love the punchy visuals and colorful graphics, like the ones at 37signals (see image further above).

Visual layout / structure: Long lists and endless spreadsheets tend to make information blur together, and as the paper about visual mapping (Kim, first post) demonstrates, people learn more when they can organize in a more visual way.

Collapse / expand: I was pleased to see that the mind maps allow you to expand and collapse their information. This feature is useful in Jira as well. To keep from being overwhelmed by information, it would be nice to allow users to selectively view chunks of data at a time.

My sketches:

If I were to make the ideal visual organizing system, what would it look like? Here are some different ideas I was thinking about...

I'm not planning to make a fully-functional information system, but it's useful to think about what design principles make such tools easy to use. And actually, it would be nice to incorporate some of these elements into my presentation on Wednesday, to make the information more memorable for my audience.

Evaluating some new tools

I was pleased that we went over concept mapping in class, getting some practice with mind maps and checking out some new websites (comapping.com, mindmeister.com). I thought I'd look a bit deeper at these sources, along with some other information management websites that are starting to become popular in schools and workplaces. A few impressions:

37signals: Love the visual nature of this website, home of small-business solutions Backpack, Highrise, and other "make work easier" systems. 37signals has specific tools and interfaces for different types of data: people / important contacts have a system, tasks / projects have a system, and so on. I liked seeing all the different methods of handling information. Like 37signals, my ideal system would incorporate many different tools to allow for robust, versatile data management.

Jira: I used this task management system during my summer internship at Linden Lab. They've taken advantage of Jira to make an enormous task system, well-organized and indexable by identification number, title, category, or asignee. Jira can accommodate a massive amount of information (there must be thousands of tasks in Linden's development category alone). Scalability is very important, and I admire that Jira can be used by a single person wanting to store their daily to-do list, or by a large company like Linden trying to manage the entire realm of Second Life.

Comapping: I watched the introductory video and cruised through some sample maps from Comapping. Favorite feature: Comapping allows lots of file types, including pictures, links, and text. This would be very useful for an integrative system, rather than limiting someone to purely text. Main concern: the maps have a tendency to become unwieldy and confusing as they expand, which harms their scalability.

Google Wave: New collaborative conversation tool from Google. I watched a chunk of their long introductory presentation, which described the features of the new system, and ways it can encourage collaborative work. I like the simple interface and real-time updates, and I think the ability to allow multiple contributors could add a new, interesting dimension to the system I'm imagining.
MindMeister: We used this website in class to construct big idea webs. I love the concept of organizing ideas visually in space, instead of just a boring drop-down list. Like Comapping, however, MindMeister tends to generate large, confusing maps, and it's difficult to jump cleanly from one place to the other. I also found it limiting that these maps (as far as I can tell) only include text inputs.

Wikis / Blogs / Google Docs: I considered a handful of other websites that were designed for one purpose (like word processing or journaling) and can be appropriated for other purposes of information management: for example, someone might use Google Docs to store a list of important links, or start a blog with lists of key resources for a paper. These flexible websites allow for a wide variety of different uses, but it would be nice if I could develop something with more affordances for specific information needs, like bookmarks, sources, contacts, etc. I'm picturing the specific tools of 37signals with the versatility of Google Docs and the scalability of Jira (sound impossible yet?).

EndNote: I've been using this program to store resources for my honors thesis. Its design is barebones and simple: big spreadsheet-style assortment of items, organized by title, author, year of publication, etc. The program conveniently formats your sources for you, according to the formatting convention you choose. Perfect example of a program designed to handle one type of information. Now if only I could expand it to include other types of information (links, videos...) and present the information in a more appealing way.

Thoughts on Health Education

I've been browsing through articles and research papers in my search for a project topic. I'm starting to gravitate towards studies about psychological health, especially in children. When it comes to education, "underprivileged" refers to more than just socioeconomic disadvantage; learning disabilities, preexisting health conditions, psychological distress, and a host of other factors can impact a student's ability to learn. All else being equal, a student who struggles with a psychological disorder will have a more difficult time in the classroom than his healthy classmate. I'm curious whether web technology can be used to alleviate some of these differences, making education more accessible to the marginalized and underprivileged.

I was intrigued to see the article about web-based avian flu education. As it turns out, applying web technology to health initiatives (especially for children) is more complicated than I realized. How do you set up a post-test that accurately measures understanding? How do you measure attitude change? What about behavior change? If a study changes someone's knowledge and attitude, but doesn't change their behavior, was it successful? It was discouraging to see that no behavior changes were noticed after the avian flu study, but I wonder if we can still take advantage of the web's unique capabilities to make strides in children's health.

One of the valuable aspects of web technology is the sense of control people derive from using web applications. People use the web to organize their mail, communicate with friends, manage their tasks, and keep their lives in order. Web technology can instill a sense of self-agency, and if this feeling could be harnessed, it could have a noticeable impact on health. I've started some cursory readings about depression and stress, both obstacles that can take a toll on education, and it seems that self-efficacy has a profound effect on the degree to which people experience stress. In fact, a feeling of control can have a positive effect on a variety of chronic illnesses. So it seems that an important aspect in health is the ability to control what happens to your body, or at least to perceive that they can.

So web technology has perhaps a unique ability to shape health education. Adjusting a sense of control, and consequently adjusting stress and attitudes, can be particularly relevant with psychological conditions that impact learning, like ADHD, depression, mental illness, and certain learning disabilities. My next step is to keep investigating: one of my favorite parts about reading relevant research papers is that they almost always offer a whole new set of sources to check out. In the References section of the avian flu paper, I circled 19 sources to check out, some about health, some about web tech, some about the role of humor in education.

Which reminds me: I'm intrigued by the science of laughter and humor, and its possible role in health and learning. I think laughter is perhaps underutilized in education, and since I've always had an interest in cartoons and humor, it seems like an avenue I could explore further. So as these disparate factors are coming into focus -- child psychology, web technology, humor, and visual learning from last week -- I'm hoping a fruitful project will begin to come together.

Visual research

I've been thinking about our big challenge for the quarter: tackle an important educational need, and produce two digital artifacts to encapsulate what we learn and invent. I'm intrigued by this year's theme of developing web technology for the underprivileged, and I'm curious to see what kind of issues my classmates choose to address. I've been inspired by brainstorms from CS 147: Human-Computer Interaction, in which students are currently coming up with ideas for a mobile application. Seeing last year's 391X projects in class gave me an even broader sense of what kind of work can be done.

Here are a few topics I've been thinking over:

• Visual / kinesthetic education for kids with learning disabilities
• Attracting girls to math and science
• Health education and management for people with chronic illnesses
• Sensory therapy for childhood depression
• Encouraging young people to get more exercise to enhance cognition

So I want to do some reading about these issues and get a feel for what's out there. But here's my first obstacle: every time I undertake a new project, I find myself a bit daunted by the prospect of organizing all my resources, and I find the current organizational tools rather unsatisfactory. Truth be told, I've always wanted a more "visual" way to undertake research...so I was pleasantly surprised to find this article in the list of recommended Google Scholar documents:

Kim, P. and C. Olaciregui (2008). "The effects of a concept map-based information display in an electronic portfolio system on information processing and retention in a fifth-grade science class covering the Earth’s atmosphere " British Journal of Educational Technology 39(4): 700-714.


I'm fascinated by concept maps and visual representations, like the one used in the study (above), and I found this paper especially relevant as I'm embarking on a big information-based project. What if we could build concept maps for bookmarks and sources, and track our research efforts visually? I wish there were a better way to capture and display important materials, and so far I haven't been able to find one.

Personally, I've been floundering along with a Frankenstein's monster of organization systems: I have a collection of folders on my hard drive for pdfs and images, a pile of bookmarks in my browser, a text file with notes and "stuff to look up," an EndNote library for academic sources, and a half-finished Google doc with some of my favorite links. Basically, it's all scattered, and I wish there were a visually juicy way to pull it all together.

Most bookmarking systems follow the folder-based convention, essentially the same as the system used in the study's control group...which turned out to be less effective for learning than the visually rich alternative. Firefox claims to have the most advanced bookmark organizing tool, but it still follows the traditional nested-folder design (see image below), and it doesn't offer anything in terms of conceptual mapping. Delicious (bottom) is a cool concept, but visually boring and not as customizable as I would like.


Interestingly, the web offers a number of intriguing new "mind mapping" tools and diagram-building programs, such as MindJet and MindMeister pictured below.


But these mapping methods currently don't translate to bookmarks, which remain lackluster and rather old-school. It's something to think about. Maybe research needs a makeover...