Tag: sketchnote

Categories
Technology

“All organizational systems fall on a spectrum from Calendar to To-Do List”

Graphic saying 'all organizational systems fall on a spectrum from calendar to to-do list,' with visual examples of several points along the spectrum.

Something I said to a coworker recently. Largely inspired by listening to Cortex, and I felt like giving it a slightly more visual treatment.

Categories
Portfolio

Personalization

Personalization. 1. Users are people, treat them like it. 2. Don't be creepy. 3. Be polite. Respect social norms. 4. Anticipate their needs.

Based on a reading from User Friendly.

Personalization. 1. Users are people, treat them like it. 2. Don't be creepy. 3. Be polite. Respect social norms. 4. Anticipate their needs.
Categories
Collection

TEDxMcMinnville

I recently had the opportunity to attend a TEDx event. I’m not a big TED Talk person, but I’ve watched or listened to a few, so it was interesting to see a few in-person.

I also used the opportunity to practice my sketchnoting – the ones I’ve done in the past were at my leisure, so I figured it’d be a bit different at a live event.

Which it was – it’s harder to go back and edit when you’re trying to keep up in real time, and it’s a different approach to thinking about what you’re putting down.

I’m not sharing all of my notes here – for a couple of the talks, the notes I got weren’t really interesting in any way, or were too messy to be worth sharing.

Still, I enjoyed the experience, and I’m glad I went.

(As of this writing, the videos from the event are still being edited, so I don’t have direct links; check the TEDxMcMinnville site for updates.)

School: purpose in learning, emporment to learn - becomes - scale from Apathy to Stress. Grades do not equal progress! Grades = pressure, pressure = focus, focus does not equal critical thinking. Good grades lead to secondary education acceptance, scholarship, jobs, which makes them stressful. “Just stop using grades altogether.” An assignment isn’t just a collection of points. Grades decided by conversation. From a gatekeeper to a coach, mentor. Experimentation, going out on a limb, and yes, failing spectacularly. But celebrates the failures and the learning. Equitable! Not just the “smart kids”, the ones who know how to game the system. “It makes me responsible for my grade.” “It’s not me versus the system.” “The world . . . cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” - Albert Einstein
“Start A Learning Revolution. Throw Out the Gradebook” – Matt Brisbin
Mentoring isn’t broken, it’s backwards. “Your voice is the most powerful tool you have, so use it when someone isn’t meeting your needs.” “How can I support your professional development?” From “MENTOR + mentee” to “mentor + MENTEE” The mentee owns their growth. The Egg Sandwich Principles: 1. Flip the narrative! 2. Find your unlikeliest - the person most un-like you. Learn new skills and perspectives! 3. Own your growth - figure out what type of support you need. A mentor’s job is not to reshape you or remake you, but to help your growth.
Mentoring: The Most Underutilized Secret to Success – Cinthia Manuel

I’ll add here that I misspelled Cinthia’s name in the written version, for which I apologize.

Predicting Heart Attacks 1/2 of the people who die of a heart attack have normal cholesterol levels. Age + gender + cholesterol + smoking = heart attack risk? No. Heart attacks are mostly caused by lifestyle. So DNA tests? Not helpful. But markers of inflammation are helpful. except: too variable day-to-day. Big idea: Use a more stable marker! From CRP to GPF. Exercise 30 minutes a day, and your GPF levels fall. Prevent premature death.
New Risk Factor for Heart Attacks and Strokes – David Farrell, Ph.D
Children oscillate between grief and joy. But adults try to be neat and tidy. Ambiguous Loss: Not death, but still a loss. Dementia, divorce, deportation, etc… No end, no conclusion, no resolve. So why grieve? Because we need to process. Suppressing your grief makes it bigger and less manageable. Don’t pull the emergency handle on tough emotion. Have a pity party! Acknowledge your difficult, complex emotions. Acknowledge the circumstances you’re living with. We don’t need to squash or ignore painful emotions. 1. Name your losses as they happen. Stop minimizing them! No “somebody has it worse than me.” 2. Ask for help! Decide how long you need to vent. Ask someone to… just listen. no fixing, no silver lining. Just listen. 3. Ask for more time. Embrace the ambiguity.
Embracing Ambiguity – Natalie Bowker
Service: * Tranquility * Zest for life * Longevity * Wellness * Happiness * Purpose * Health * Friendship Appeal not to altruism, but to self-interest.
Should Self-Interest Motivate Service? – Patrick Galvin
10 childhood traumas are linked to every major chronic illness. How to survive? “Resilience. Sheer perseverance.” Children who believe they can grow do better in life. Restorative approach: * Face the situation directly * Come up with a collaborative approach * Fix the damage to the relationship If a child doesn’t know how to behave, don’t punish. Teach. “People do well if they can.” Behavior is like any other life skill. We should teach it. Detention/suspension teaches kids they don’t belong. Resolving Conflicts: 1. What happened from your perspective? 2. Who was affected by it? Both parties have a share, and co-create in the solution.
Restorative Practices In Schools Have The Power To Transform Communities – Liz Knapp
“We are probably (statistically) extinct.” What is extinction? “What happens when a species dies.” - but - Can cloning bring a species back? A species fits a very specific space in an ecological puzzle. Take one out, and the puzzle rearranges to fill the space. Bringing in a clone? It has to make a new space for itself - making it a new species. The mind is an ecosystem of information. Information you forget isn’t gone, just… misplaced. But your brain can make a new space for it. Extinction isn’t a kind of death, but a kind of memory loss. Extinction is what happens when an ecosystem forgets a species. -but- no memory is a faithful reconstruction.
Extinction: Death And Memory – Leonard Finkelman, PhD
Is your work enabling the life you want, or interfering with it? Work is broken. Burnout, stress, wage stagnation… “The Life I Want” project - documenting an alternative way, making work work for you. Even if you love your work, other forces can break it. We need: employers empowering people; communities working together; governments… governing. 1. Employers: ask your employees what they need & want. Employees: ask for what you need! 2. We need community - not just at work, but outside of work, too. 3. Governments: proactively think through what we need to thrive. Healthcare, labor laws, infrastructure, “right to disconnect.” What is the community that you want? The world that you want?
The Life I Want – Christine Bader
Categories
Programming

Relational Databases

Inspired by a mix of Julia Evans and how much fun I had last time, I threw together another sketchnote on the basics of relational databases.

Relational Databases: How we store data! They model relations between things. Databases have tables, which have rows and columns. A column has one type of data, like CHAR, VARCHAR, and NVARCHAR for text, INT, BIGINT, FLOAT, and DOUBLE for numbers, BOOL for booleans, and DATETIME for dates and times. Columns can also be nullable, which basically means ‘optional.’ Having a single type of data per column allows databases to be very fast and efficient. Rows are the actual data in the database, and are also referred to as ‘records’ or ‘entries.’ Keys: a table has a column as its primary key. That means that each row has a unique value there, which you can use to identify the row. Kinda like a social security number, or your phone number - it’s uniquely yours! A foreign key is a value that is the primary key of another table. You can use it to reference a row in a different table.
(Obviously I’m skipping over a lot of detail, but as a very quick intro to what a relational database is, I think it works!)
Categories
Education Portfolio

Value-Sensitive Design

The first unit in our course on Advanced Design and Prototyping focused on Value-Sensitive Design, and a couple of the assignments we did as part of it were pretty fun.

The first was to do a sketchnote on the concept itself. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical of the concept of sketchnoting – I thought it would be fun, but I didn’t think it would actually be all that useful. In doing it, however, I found that it helped me to coalesce my thoughts a bit – though, admittedly, that may have more to do with the fact that it forced me to go through my typed notes again than the sketchnoting itself. Still, it was a fun way to do that bit of studying, so I think I’ll try to add it to my workflow in the future.

Presented with apologies for my terrible handwriting.

Another activity was to put together a presentation, going through some value-sensitive design processes and presenting our ‘findings.’ Of the available prompts, I chose the one that boiled down to “your team has just been hired to design a photo-sharing application; you’re in charge of the VSD portion. Go.”