Alan Levine, in his CogDogBlog (which I find a must-read), once again nails it with what I was thinking as well but couldn’t quite squeeze through my pinhole of a blogger brain!
I had the same experience as he did with my Google personalized homepage last week. “Hey! Tabs! Cool! What happens if I click….”
And so I have gone on and built my own personal portal with RSS and other tools on their own little tab universes. I love it. Alan’s recent entry summarized my own sense of delight and exploration and creating fun in this techy world in which I operate most of the time. In fact, since my undergraduate days in education, I have kept these words around, taped above desks, written in the fronts of journals, on my screensaver — dulces et utiles (To instruct while delighting) I have always tried to make this my creed. Alan’s post mirrors that sentiment as well. His words of advice:
But maybe think about this in the work that you do, be it graphics, teaching, writing web pages, positing blogs, writing lessons etc… how droll is it to stick to the same old same old? Why not feed the exploratory need? (I think we all have it to some degree, it has just been squashed out of us by the end of adolescence, for those unlike me who have completed the process…). Sneak a little note in a flickr image. Write an obscure link that does not directly say where it goes… yes, create your own tiny rabbit holes.
I want to try to keep that in mind with projects at work. With the building out of a Luminis portal at school and all kinds
of talk of tabs and channels, this was a good personal exercise with that type of environment. I have to consider how to add those tiny “rabbit holes” in the portal. I also have to contend with the fact that it is certainly not as easy to use as Google’s. At least, not yet.