Friday, April 3, 2009

Stories of Co-Design

Students and teachers alike, can learn plenty from the way today's technology leaders work collaboratively in designing solutions to our communications problems.

If you're like me, you've likely discovered that initiatives undertaken with peer support, that are developed with the cooperation of supervisory staff, tend to be the most successful. Similar ideas, pursued by lone individuals, struggle in contention for attention and funding.

In The Story of Co-Design, the potential of collaborative problem solving is engaged in order to meet the needs of the inhabitants of Panda Island. The metaphor can work for identifying the needs of a school community, a provincial ministry of education, or a network of users on the World Wide Web.


The Story of Co-Design from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

If you think you have a great idea, take heed of today's technology leaders, and engage others in collaborative planning & development:

1] Facebook Connect is allowing bloggers on various platforms, to build community by leveraging existing community of Facebook.

2] G-Mail now has a Twitter widget that allows users to access tweets alongside their inboxes.

3] TweetDeck, my choice for accessing Twitter feeds, is now working with Facebook, to refine an interface that allows cross-posting to both sites.

4] Twitter encourages developers to mash-up feeds in the deployment of a wide range of tools.

5] Beyond embedding Google's search technology in the address bar, Firefox engages developers on many levels to add value to their web browser through plugins.

With TechCrunch reporting that Google is in Talks to Acquire Twitter, I'm just happy to know that they're on good speaking terms. Besides the fact that our future communications habits may well depend on how nicely they play together, we can learn a lot by the way today's technology leaders work in co-designing our future.

Photo Credit: Jason Nicholls
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