From a T-F perspective, these entries caught my eye:

BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. I actually have been using this phrase for a while now at my work because we have been experimenting with checking out iPads to faculty and students and my take on the results is that they are truly “personal” computers and don’t share well with others. We need to expect to bring our own devices, customized as we want, to all kinds of locations and get the cloud based services we are using.

Social Media in the Olympics: I am a HUGE Olympics fan (yes, I braved the crowds in Atlanta!) and with the IOC now allowing athletes to use social media during the event, we are primed to see the Games in all kinds of new ways and at new levels of access.

Online Living in Print and Your Public Story: This is fascinating to me. We archive our lives online and on our phones at this point. The only hard copy pictures I get are from older relatives who still print all of their photos. But, there is also (according to the JWT) a growing appreciation for physical objects like stationery and personal postcards from digital photos. This takes it one more step with services like Social Memories that can pull out your digital archives from Facebook and put them into a book format and IBM’s Museum of Me that builds a virtual museum from your Facebook activity. Or, get more professional and use about.me (Check out my about.me profile!)or Storyvite to pull from all of the different sources and create a collated record of your online professional life.

Split Personality Smartphones: I have had this conversation with folks at work several times. While I don’t carry two devices, I do know people who do – one for work and one for personal. This prediction, that kinda mirrors what Apple tries to do with Spaces

Check out the whole thing. What grabs your attention?

As they say, your life flashes before your eyes and I see that I have been some places (or at least I only upload photos of places i have been). Give it a shot if you take shots. I might have to revisit my Project 365 set and give that a whirl as well.

Star Wars Flowchart

I did drill down to the original source, which is an online school site but I wasn’t thrilled about giving them a linkback so I went with the original site I saw.

I have found myself staring at the bookshelf in my office and I noticed something: many of the books are focused on visual thinking or presentation. Books like Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte are among the ones I look at most often. I guess that is not a surprise but I am seeing a rise in the tweetosphere and edusphere about visual thinking and I am thinking about how I can improve my own visual thinking.

I have been reading Vizability (albeit very slowly) at the suggestion of Rachel Smith at the NMC aka @ninmah who does amazing visual captures of meetings and talks and generously shares not only her work but how she does it as well.

Then, Nancy White (@nancywhite and one of the authors of Digital Habitats – which has another blog post just waiting to be written about it) also recently shared a link to a book called Sketching at Work. I look forward to checking it out.

All of this to say, I am SUCH a visual thinker. I doodle during meetings and like to work out my plans by drawing them:

I spent a good part of the start of a very large course management system project drawing a flowchart and planning how to put all of the pieces together using a huge roll of paper, sticky notes and index cards. Wish I had taken a picture of that!

I love the “big picture” diagrams at the start of any technical presentation (and miss them when they are not given). When asked about scheduling a meeting or something like that, I see a calendar in my head. If I could be surrounded by whiteboards, I would. I want to draw my plans and I think flowcharts are awesome! However, I do recall that I was terrible at the spatial relations tests where they presented a flat cutout pattern and you had to pick what it would look like when folded in a cube. Could. Not. Do. That.

And, I really cannot draw very well so, while I can aspire to take notes like Rachel, I will stick to my circles and arrows and paragraphs to explain what each one is for the time being. But, it does speak for how I do like to think and I want to try to continue to build on my visual thinking skills.

How do you think?

Presenting my faves for the end of 2009 and the end of the first decade of the 2000s (naughties? noughties? oughts? aughts? What did we call them?)

DJ Earworm – United States of Pop 2009

NPR All Songs Considered Best Music of 2009
I always find new music via NPR’s All Songs Considered

Lifehacker’s Most Popular Hive Five Topics of 2009
Crowdsourcing has grown in popularity, easy and usefulness. And why not? It usually works!

Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2009 (highs and lows)
Since this is my guilty pleasure reading at the gym, I felt that I must put it in here

The Top 10 Everything of 2009  and the Best Movies, TV, Books and Theater of the Decade from Time Magazine
well, they said everything…

Top 10 Internet Moments of the Decade from ABC News

And, for good measure, I just had to use the “My Year in Status” application in Facebook to build a status collage for 2009.

I also had to go visit Wordle and do something there with my blog posts from 2009. And, here it is.

I just found these flowcharts from Eating the Road blog. They just might help with those life decisions like what cereal to eat or what fast food to choose or what is the truth?

What other flowcharts are out there?

50 Great Voices: Help Us Choose : NPR

And, on the day that I did my voting, here is the way the cookie crumbled:

This is the third year that T-F has participated and I am happy to do so, as always. This year’s topic is Climate Change and it is something that has been on my mind a good deal in the past few years. I have some close friends who have made very radical changes in their lifestyle over the past two years as they work to become as sustainable as possible in the expectation of the changes they expect in the world after Peak Oil. I admire them, yes. I emulate some of their choices, yes. Can I do everything they are doing like sell their house, farm most of their own food, make their own bath soaps, etc? Well, I probably could given enough time and training but will I? Probably not.

And climate change is a direct result of our lifestyle choices, it does seem so this is something that I do struggle with. Especially given my current employment. It is directly driven by computer technology and directly draws on natural resources for energy and, given my current location and energy source, directly impacting climate change. So, I try to find ways to help reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible in other aspects of my life since my career feeds into it. This is where the carbon calculators like the ones you find at Earth Lab, the Nature Conservancy Carbon Footprint Calculator (see my results below) and the United State Environmental Protection Agency Household Emissions Calculator

I feel like we do a pretty good job as a household of being as low impact as possible while keeping a fairly modern, technologicaly lifestyle. But, I know I could do more, especially with hot water and lighting.

As much as I learn from my more activist friends, I also learn from the social network I have created within Twitter and other sites where I engage. Participating in Earth Hour last March was inspiring as is writing this post today. I really did like watching the earth go dark for an hour in a wave around the globe. It was fascinating to be a part of it as well as just absorb it. If we can pour the energy that folks had just sharing what they were doing during that hour via photos, tweets and video.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by AJ Wms

The increased use of technology to promote action, while also using energy and producing carbon dioxide, does allow us to feel much more aware and connected with others who feel the same way and to empower us to feel that our actions are not being done in a vacuum. I feel like that is very important as the issue of climate change is certainly not going to be solved by one country or one organization but by all of us and one way we can feel involved is to take part in these global actions, which is made so much more easy by today’s technologies. Can anybody say conundrum?

Want more global community actions to connect and be involved? Try these or share something else in the comments:

International Day of Climate Action (October 24)

Join TckTckTck: Global Citizens for Climate Action alliance of faith groups, organizations, trade unions and individuals.