In college one of the first things I did was get my free e-mail account. I was ‘jh006b’: not very personal, but the sixth one with my initials, and the “b” were all the folks in my class of 1996.

My best friend was starting school in another state. I soon asked “Do they have e-mail?” “I don’t know,” he said.

No cell phones back then in our pockets. I rarely called him out of inconvenience and cost.

So we wrote letters on our computers; printed them out, and sent them via the U.S. Mail.

I treasure these letters now since he kept them all. But until the ultimate year of our college experience did we begin really communicating by e-mail. I am not sure we ever talked via the UNIX chat program, either, although I kept up with others through Internet Relay Chat. For me, this was a revolutionary time.

So, sitting at the table after dinner tonight I began to think about the silliness of sitting down and writing him a letter. “My gosh, I’d write it tonight, Saturday; I’d have to wait until Monday to send it, and he’d get it maybe Wednesday or Thursday. Friday at the latest. That’s a delay of nearly a week!”

Come on. You know it too. The idea of someone having to wait days to get your letter or note is borderline ridiculous. Why we still do so much by mail, frankly, is a surprise too. That said, I think there’s something special about getting a customized note or letter. When someone writes a thank you card, etc., and sends it, it has formality and specialness attached. But the wait factor? I’m so impatient.

Mr. Greenspun writes this month on How the Web and Weblog have changed writing, which I recommend as a read.

Consider this:

Several days I ago I had a bad case of the hiccups and instantly let at least 50 people know about it over the Internet using Twitter. Some nice soul who follows me, whom I don’t even know, gave me a great suggestion.

If you’re on Facebook, and have, say, 100 followers, bam! In seconds all 100 people are alerted to whatever you post. Similar types of publishing and instantaneously delivery are already at play, of course, using blogs, RSS, and through mass e-mailings.

If you’re rich enough in this country, you can carry around with you the combined wealth of knowledge (and opinion) of Wolfram|Alpha and Google in your pocket via a “smart” (read: sophisticated) phone. You can send what I am calling “alerts” (i.e., e-mails, tweets, short messages in text, audio, or video) around the globe to others connected via the Internet. Thousands, possibly millions at a time.

The ultimate question for educators is: what does this do for us? How are we going to use this advancement in communications? It’s something I think about probably every day in some way. It provides benefits, for sure, but also challenges.

The thing that gets me is that my friend and I don’t have the same high-quality communications today our letters used to bring us. I rarely call him out of convenience (he lives 3 hours offset from me in California), and e-mails are many times not substantial. His last message to me was this:

Just saw star trek again. I love the ending.

I loved he could get that to me on his way out of the theatre. But the quality of that message (the quality of the English, the depth of thought, the profundity of the idea) is hardly enticing. The question I am dealing with is the trade-offs between:

• length & substantiality
• frequency & consistency.

Is communication better if it’s well-thought out, researched, fully-stated, and well-crafted? Or if it’s quick, short and to the point, and comes in regular “bursts” or updates?

Twitter and blogs especially have the capacity for short and quick. E-mails are a mixed bag (with experts citing short and concise e-mails among the best), and newspapers are finding that lengthy, substantial communications aren’t being particularly valued in today’s society.

One very basic question to start: should reading and writing, as an instructional method in school, be focused on the first, or the second quality of communication? And if you think the short and frequent variety of communication is where you’re headed, here’s some more to chew on: How can schools accommodate this? What has to change?

Scott McLeod this morning tweeted to a resource that provides tips for bloggers in the form of 21 mistakes.

Some of them are lightweight, and one in particular, #12: too many ads, was laughable, considering the ads seen here (half-size) are right next to the 21 “don’t do it” tips.

Some I really liked.

• Giving up too early,
• Great Posts, Terrible Titles
• Being useful,
• Not defining a topic.

What’s interesting is I follow several blogs that don’t have a topic. One is a blog called “Happy Notes” where the guy just blogs about everything he has a comment on. But he’s in the know about some interesting things, so often is links to the web take me to interesting places.

Sometimes, the person is “interesting enough” to generate their own focus.

In our effort to blog at work, some of these tips might help some of our blogging teachers. The tip about the titles, especially. It’s a good thing Tweets don’t need titles… that’d be a lot of work.

Tonight I started surfing around. It all started from a Tweet. I ended up over here, evidently an interesting discussion that piqued my interest and delayed my tiredness and demand for sleep.

I was once accused of being a perfectionist, and I didn’t much like it. Of course, I’m not perfect. But I’m a critical sort, and that criticism can turn into self-criticism. And folks see that as perfectionism. Okay, maybe a little is true.

Today I worked on a new Promethean Flipchart using ActivInspire, their newest software package. I like the Promethean platform, but finding good-quality, well-designed training materials (for teaching with the damned thing) is hard to find. So, invent your own.

I think a critical piece at succeeding with this–using the same platform to teach what you are teaching–is that good instructional design be at play. That means that we use the best-quality examples, and those should be of a high design quality (aesthetic design). Aside from qualities of beauty, aesthetic design maximizes the impact of the message.

I design things all the time, but lately I seem to have fallen into a rut. Without the creation of something new, the rutness comes in. Recent projects have allowed me to focus on video and even a little video compositing using 3D. But I’ve not nearly enough developed in that medium as my experience has given me in print and Web design.

The big project of late that most are seeing is this website and the presentation handouts: I’m using a mild yellow backdrop with a white border. There are other elements, like some of the colors in the blog; the blue text in the PDFs, and the brown text here. While this design was aesthetically motivated, there were other reasons for making some of these decisions.

So, when it came to this new flipchart, immediately I had a few goals pop into my head. These are not profound, thoughtful things I spent days contemplating. These came to me, a la minute…

• No Arial. Use a high quality typeface, but something other teachers will have. I load all my computers with high quality fonts. I chose Optima. All our teachers will have that with OS X.
• Consistency. I wanted “branding” for these. All the instructional flipcharts should look/feel the same. This means using the same orange color for title fonts, text sizes, etc.
• Tools. I don’t like opening flipcharts, oblivious to what I’m supposed to do on a page that doesn’t read like a PowerPoint. I really like when authors put “big” versions of the tools on the page.
• Interactivity. I want cool things to demonstrate concepts and make learning discoverable. These will take the most time and thought: this is where good instructional design plays the most crucial role.
• Opening/Closing Slides. I want the opening slide to clearly identify the intent and what level of training it is. It should be like seeing the familiar introduction to your favorite sitcom. The closing slide should use a design element to discreetly end the experience, and include author information (i.e., e-mail or web URLs).
• Notes. Embeddable notes inside the flipchart not only help someone who downloads my work, but helps ME remember what I was thinking. The new browser in ActivInspire makes this easy while you teach.
• Best in Class. Teachers aren’t likely to take the basics and invent something better. They can, sure, I’m not cutting down teachers. But I have far more time to think about a creative, elegant, well-designed solution than they do. Our examples deserve to set the “gold” standard in what to shoot for.

Underlying everything is this basic assumption:

The knowledge required for creating good flipcharts for use in the classroom (insert PPTs, Keynotes, SMART notebooks) hinges upon an understanding of how to use a variety of digital tools to get a variety of your audience engaged.

This is critical. So many teachers use PPT to put up “notes.” Stuff to copy down and memorize.

Some folks forget some of the best methods they know when they make the experience more digital. Some never knew. Others find it difficult to translate their tested method into a digital, flat format.

Sorry for the ramble… I just have some passion for this topic and want to make it a personal focus to learn more about it.

Tonight I discovered a project around manipulative mini-computer blocks called siftables. This project was born out of the MIT media lab and was created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi.

Watch the video to see how they work. Wow.

It seems some serious art is being produced on… an iPhone.

An app for iPhone/iPod Touch called Brushes lets you paint with light. The $5 program was used to paint the latest edition of the New Yorker cover .

See the process in action via You Tube: