Connecting some dots

Catching up with my TED talks, I found Tom Wujec's short talk very interesting. In summary, he identified three areas of the brain as being crucial to good information design: one to stimulate visual recogntion, a second for spatial perception and another for establishing an emotional connection. Trying to touch on each of these is likely to be a key aspect of good educational design in SL.

This maybe follows on from Erica Driver's blog to the effect that her brain recalls information in 3D, based on her experience with ThinkBalm's very nice Data Garden (a good place to see the benefits and challenges of 3D for business)

Of course, knowledge is also about integration and that leads us to the second coming of the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. I am dubious that I will have any more success than last year in keeping up but this year I will try to motivate myself by looking more intently for parallels with what I am doing inworld rather than trying to network with others.

When it comes to making connections, my thoughts turn to inworld mindmaps. Although I remain committed to StoryMachine for the moment, two more have come to my attention, one called Ideaographer (simple in a good way) and one from ace scripter Salazhar Stenvaag while on SLED Esme Qunhua mentions yet another, Conceptualiser.

The saga of getting StoryMachine to output to TiddlyWiki is not quite solved yet but an interesting adjunct has arisen from belatedly finding a scrolling web browser that works inworld. Not perfect (hyperlinks don't work) but a useful advance nonetheless.