LEGO: Serious Play

Team Building often has very little to do with building, and much more to do with establishing pecking orders based on the ability of individual team members to assert themselves, and not on their ability to offer valuable contributions. Beyond all the usual lip-service of management seminars, LEGO Serious Play claims seminar attendees will find themselves “…building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios, which deepens understanding, sharpens insight, and socially “bonds” together the group who “plays” together.” Using LEGO for team building really appeals to me, and I would love to attend one of these seminars. If anyone has attended please leave a comment! The site can be found under http://www.seriousplay.com/.

Syndication 2.0: Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes makes it possible to apply a host of filtering and sorting functions to a variety of information souces. If for example, you want to receive news about Science from multiple RSS feeds, you can create a simple “pipe” to aggregate your news items into one individual feed. If you only want news tagged with “Europe” or “media” or a combination of both, you can determine this as part of the feed as well. In fact, the pipes can become almost as compley and specific as you like, ensuring you only get content you really want. Aggregating feeds into pipes is an awesome next step in the world of syndicated, dynamic content. Check out the Website under http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/.

Crowdsourcing: Predictify.com

Whilst attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was quite astounded to see how effective a service like Twitter could be for getting answers to random questions fast. Of course, a certain critical mass of followers is required for it to work, but it actually works quite well. Taking this basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Predictify.com is a site dedicated to “crowdsourcing”, or asking the many to predict answers to particular questions. You can even earn a little money by participating, and you can include witty comments on why you predicted a certain result, all displayed in a nice scatter-graph at the end. I personally think this is a “wicked cool” idea as they say, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this approach in future in our private lives and in the enterprise.

Edufire: Online Language Tuition

Today I gave my first Edufire session. Incredible service and set up for tutors and students of languages alike.  The Website itself is very intuitive and sports pretty much every major community tool you may want to use. Within minutes my profile was up and running, and a day or two later (today actually!) I’d completed my first session. The online video conferencing tool is a lot easier to use than most tools I’ve encountered in the enterprise, and the Web 2.0 functionality is reminiscent of similar communities like Facebook. Check it out under: http://edufire.com/.

LibriVox: Talking Books for Everyone

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. If you would you like to record chapters of books in the public domain, Librivox offers the opportunity to volunteer. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice.

“The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch

I woke up early to watch an inspiring video suggested as a breakfast session by a good colleague this morning, and was not disappointed. “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a pioneer in the area of virtual reality, follows a tradition at some American universities to offer leading professors the opportunity to give an hour speech as if it was going to be their last lecture. An incredible Tigger-like individual, the twist with Randy’s speech is that it will be his last lecture.

Also, if you would like to learn programming in a fun, intuitive way, take a look at the Alice environment Randy talks about at www.alice.org.

Music: LearnLicks, WholeNote and MXTabs

Still on the topic of music and composition, LearnLicks.com is a free community for musicians hosting thousands of educational music lessons. Alternately, Wholenote.com offers an awesome integrated MIDI-player environment to actually play through the tablature on the screen, and includes a nicely organised set of lessons for beginner through to ridiculous. For a good new tabs site, you may also be interested in mxtabs.net/.