This is the second post of the series on Visual Expression (Also see The Power of Visual Expression)

Back in March, at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, yes this was the conference with the now infamous interview of Mark Zukerberg by Lacey Peterson, where twitter helped, well you know…..

Also checkout this graphical recording of the interview by Marilyn Martin if you missed it, click the image to see a full size view.

Now back to my point. At SXSWi, I picked up some information on Dan Roam’s new book “On the back of a Napkin”. For those of you who are not familiar with Dan, he is an author, speaker and thought leader in the field of visual thinking. In his recent book, Dan explains how simple drawings can express ideas that can be universally understood. Dan believes that anyone with a pen and a piece of paper (Dan likes to use napkins as he believes they are less intimidating) can convey the most complex business ideas, as well as communicate better with customers, vendors, and employees.

In his book, and in the video of his workshop below, Dan draws on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries in the field of vision science, to lay out simple tools to take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. In his workshop, Dan relates a simple example which takes us back to the days of elementary school. As kindergarteners we all knew how to draw and visually express ourselves. This is something I discovered to be true when I visited Westwood Elementary school a while back. Children at that age show no inhibition towards putting what they are thinking onto paper. But Dan points out, if you visit that same kindergarten class ten years later, hardly anyone will say that they can draw or use visual images to describe a problem. Something in the education process happens to push us away from visually expressing our ideas, even though it is so fundamental to how we think.

Here’s a video of Dan Roam’s workshop, from a visit he did to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters, this event took place on May 27, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

The video is about 55 minutes, but I think it is worth taking the time to watch. In the workshop, Dan lays out our 6 visual pathways:

• What
• Where
• How
• When
• Why
• How Much.

Dan shares simple techniques to enable anyone to visually express even the most complex of ideas, but don’t just take my word for it. Here is a video interview by the Wall Street Journal of Tim Armstrong an Advertising Executive at Google. In the interview Tim explains how he uses a simple pen and paper as a visual tool to explain their advertising model, rather than a complex Power Point slide deck. His methods are exactly what Dan preaches in his book and workshops.

Dan’s techniques along with a pen, your writing surface of choice, and Qipit to easily save and share those ideas, make for a powerful combination. What do you think?

~ Conrad

This is the first part of a series of posts on Visual Expression. (Also see Dan Roam’s Technique’s to Visually Express your Ideas)

Through out my life I have always been a visual thinker. Concepts seemed to solidify when I could see them, whether it was in an illustration, graph, chart or video animation, for me visualization is the quickest way to learn. Professionally my career has taken me to Asia, Europe and Africa, far from my roots in Texas, and when faced with language and cultural barriers my universal translator has always been a pen and a whiteboard, flipchart or a piece of paper, along with some visual expression of a concept, problem or question. People universally, seem to understand pictures and illustrations, charts and graphs, maps, timelines and flowcharts.

Visual thinking is so fundamental to how we think, that when the tools of visual expression are used can understand what our ancestors where trying to express over 32,000 years ago. This illustration is from a cave in Lascaux, France and is among the oldest known drawings in the world.

You can clearly see a bull running in a herd, and then you can imagine the animals that existed and how fundamental they must have been in the life of early man.

This got me thinking, if I was to express my life today what would a visual expression of my environment look like, there weren’t any cave walls close by so I used a writing surface more familiar, called a whiteboard.

The visual expression of my environment shows a computer, my mobile phone, buildings, construction, and a herd of cars (aka traffic). Of course the caveman was a much better artist than me. Please share a visual expression of your environment. We will store them here for future generations to ponder.

Check back next week for part two.

~ Conrad

Recently the Dumb Little Man blog made a back to school post, which included Qipit! The post got me thinking how close we are for school to be back in session. As I live in downtown Austin, home to well over 100,000 College Students (not including faculty), back to school means everything downtown gets more; more cars, more people, more everything! So in the spirit of reducing the need for students to leave the dorms, apartments or libraries, I thought I would share a few more online services.

First things first, pick the best professors. There is nothing worse than getting a professor who doesn’t inspire you to learn, or one who you can’t even understand. Checkout PickaProf to see who everyone thinks is the best. There is even a PickaProf facebook application.

Online Books

Rather than buying paper books and having to go to the store, get your books online. Read them on your computer, and print the pages you need.

Questia is the world’s first and largest online library of books and journal articles. It even includes textbooks. Yes there is $14.95 per month fee, but it is much more complete than Google Books, this is much cheaper than purchasing your textbooks.

Google books is Google’s answer to Questia, it is free, but it is not as complete. Not sure why they just didn’t do a deal with Questia, but that have to do something with all that money.

Online Study Guides

Pink Monkey and Spark Notes offer free online study guides, book notes, book reviews, online chapter summaries, and analysis for literature.

Get Organized and Stay Productive

DailyLit manages your class reading schedule by sending you regular installments of your latest reading by email (on your PC, mobile, etc.). Helps keep you on track, so you don’t have to cram.

Remember the Milk is an easy to use online to-do-list for all of those activities and projects students always have.

Drop.io is a very simple way to share files online with other students. It is really quick and easy and does not require others to sign-up, nice!

Timebridge is a tool that helps you coordinate meeting times with others for those projects you get assigned. This tool makes it easy, rather than playing middle man with 4 or 5 others.

Online Reference Resources

BBC Languages offers resources in multiple languages including Spanish, Mandarin, English, French, German and more – resources include MP3 downloads, tutorials, and testing.

Ninjawords is a free online dictionary that emulates three ninja characteristics – they’re smart, they’re accurate, and they’re really fast. Plus it is just cool use the word ninja in a blog post!

Refdesk is a great all around reference resource. Interested in learning the value of a dollar in Mongolia, how to make soap by hand, what happened on this date 20 years ago, which are the top 100 US newspapers, and the definition of “omniscient” – it’s all here.

Wikipedia is the mother of all encyclopedia Wikis. It is a great place to start your research. Just don’t copy what it says, because your professor certainly uses it too! He may have even written or contributed to the article.

Other Lists

Here are a couple more links to some of the better comprehensive student resource lists I have stumbled upon over the years.

100 Insanely Useful Web Tools You Never Knew You Needed

Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students

And of course, Qipit has a facebook application called Qipit NoteShare, specifically designed for helping students share class notes. If you have more student friendly services to add, please share the knowledge.

~ Conrad

After seeing Batman The Dark Knight I couldn’t resist doing a quick review of one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. My twist is I used Qipit to show how you can go “old school” in a new way and use your handwriting to make a post even more personal. I just cut and pasted the pictures right on my paper, then used my camera to take a quick picture. The other cool thing, is you can write anywhere, even when you are unplugged. Let me know what you thought of the movie and if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it! ~ Conrad

Most mobile phones today are equipped with two ways to send the pictures you take with your camera phone to an email address: Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) also known as picture messaging and Mobile Email.

MMS is an evolution of Short Messaging Service (SMS) or text messages, that allows for the sending of multimedia attachments, such as images, audio, video and rich text. MMS is typically pre-configured on your mobile phone, and is what most people use to send pictures to email address. Most carriers market MMS as Picture Messaging, but they are both referring to the same thing. One problem many people do not realize is that most wireless carriers limit the size of picture messages sent over the their wireless network. This process of reducing the image size is called MMS resizing.

Some mobile operators give an option to turn off MMS resizing but most, especially in the U.S., do not. So even if you have a two, three or five mega-pixel camera phone, if you are sending your pictures using picture messaging, then you are probably not getting the maximum image resolution out of the images from your camera phone. Although not a requirement, the current standard recommended size of an MMS for wireless carriers is to not exceed 300 kb. This is due primarily to network limitations at the WAP gateway. Another common restriction for MMS is that only one image can be sent at a time. You will need to check your handset manual or call your wireless carrier to see if you can turn off MMS resizing. My experience with the major carriers here in the U.S. is that you cannot turn it off, and for the most part when you call, and ask about MMS or picture message resizing they do not know what you are talking about.

These MMS limitations take away from the quality of your pictures, your qipits, and limit you from creating a multi-page qipit on the fly. After all you paid extra for those increased mega pixels on your camera phone, and if you are sending the picture or scanning something, it is probably important to you. So you need a solution.

As an alternative, I suggest that you use Mobile Email to send your pictures and to create your qipits. Mobile Email is just what it sounds like, it is an extension of your PC-based Internet email, on your mobile device.

The advantages of sending your pictures using Mobile Email include:

• Full Size Images (The size of the images are not reduced or “resized”)

• Send more than one at a time (You can attach multiple images in a single message)

• Saving Money (It typically costs less, since you are charged only for the actual data sent, not by the message).

Of course, all of these advantages do not come without a little work on your end. Most mobile phones require some configuration to connect to your email account and some carriers charge for this capability. You cannot use the preset WAP or other browser-based email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. to send attachments, so these will not work. You will need to configure your POP3 or IMAP settings. It is very similar to setting up your email client on your PC such as Outlook.

Once you are setup, you will save money, time and get the most out of your camera phone. If you have configured mobile email on your phone, please share your experience as each carrier and handset is a little different.

~ Conrad