mearso.com

Websites for Learners

Read fascinating article on a list apart by Amber Simmons where she challenges people who build websites, to build them with Narratives, Things to discover, Interactions and a meangingful Context. If that all sounds a bit vague, then read the article and it’ll all make sense. It struck me as a very practical list of things to aim for.

Mindmapping with Mindmeister

I’ve used mindmapping before, but have never really liked mind-mapping software, preferring the more direct route of felt pens on paper, but I read a tweet that raved about mindmeister and thought I’d give it a try. Really clever interface with all the polish of a desktop app. There’s a nice selection of the icons and images that are a key technique in making mindmaps, but it also show the limitation of software. It’s always going to be more personal to draw images that are relevant to oneself. On the other hand, an advantage of the software approach is the variety of formats that one can export to : the usual mind mapping software formats plus an rtf outline file and a variety of image formats. Oh, and here’s a great critique of mindmapping

It has all the usual social tools where you can share and collaborate on other people’s maps, as well as set up notifications of changes.The Tony Buzan book I’ve read on it claims it’s usefulness for all sorts of things from major projects to daily planning. I guess it all boils down to how committed you are to the whole process of mindmapping.

Showcases

Looking through this showcase of CSS sites it struck me that the familiar type of site featured is the design studio or personal blog. There are some beautiful and clever designs there, but it’d be great to see some more variety of different types of sites so people can see some examples of how people have dealt with the problems of bringing life and narrative to all kinds of sites.

Retrospectiva

Was sent a link to retrospectiva so I thought I’d have a look. Dead easy 10 minute install was a good start, with some decent instructions to follow. The scoring system is based on estimated hours rather than the points system that we currently use (badly), so that then gives you the opportunity to get the magic ‘percentage done’ so beloved of other project planning methods. I liked the fact that the extensions that came with it mean it was a cinch to set up a wiki,sprints and stories. Initially I found it confusing but worked out that the a sprint is made up of goals, which are in turn made up of stories. I liked the fact that a sprint is manually created, and so can be of variable length. Makes it possible to adjust to the work one commits to. Perhaps might be a little too tempting to make the sprints longer and longer. Also of interest to the project planners are the tickets which can be linked to milestones. I guess they might function like bug fixes and an ongoing support aspect of a project. There were some nice default feeds ready to be subscribed to and good group features for a pretty granular approach to users access. In all, switching is probably unnecessary for us right now, but if we ever needed and open source tool that we could develop ourselves this looks a really solid foundation to build on.