What started as a fun way to make Christmas presents has grown into something more interesting; over the past couple months I’ve been making lots and lots of very small terrariums inside of lightbulbs. I’ve experimented with different types of lightbulbs (some are easier to open and empty than others); different positioning angles (the metal part of the bulb needs to be relatively high to preserve balance); different substrates (small rocks are easier to work with than sand); different mosses (too much sheet moss leads to mold); and different types of tillandsia (they’re all working well).

To learn more about what I’m talking about, see this blog post, “How to Make a Tiny Terrarium in a Light Bulb,” that I wrote for the fantastic blog The Hipster Home. It describes how to get started with basic terrarium/light bulb endeavors.

In the past week my terrariums have started moving in a new direction because of a cat. While eating dinner with friends at their house, we kept leaping up to move their terrarium (I gave them this one) away from the inquisitive paws of their highly active teenager cat. I realized that building terrariums with a loose substrate, like what I wrote about in the Hipster Home post, was pretty risky. They are just too fragile.

So I started experimenting with ways to retain the organic feel of a terrarium while constructing it in a way that would be more stable. Many failed experiments with polyester resin later, I figured it out.

What looks like water in these terrariums is actually resin. You can pick these up and shake them and they’ll stay intact. The tillandsia that I “rooted” in the resin is still doing well.

I realized that terrariums that are essentially all one piece can be safely shipped. I started an Etsy store thinking that maybe I could start funding this kind of weird hobby.

My next experiments will focus on resin; what is the right temperature for it to cure properly? How long should I wait after pouring the resin before I can water the plants? Will the tillandsia continue to grow happily despite being stuck in plastic?

I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath for my findings, so I’ll be sure to report back. Also, I’ll be tracking my terrarium project over at Tiny Terra.

The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

I’m now a character in the game “Familiar Faces” by Lumosity. You can find me hanging out on level 6.

Users don’t tend to ask for large-scale site overhauls; massive changes mean having to learn a new UI, and that’s rarely something that folks get excited about. Massive changes also tend to feel unnecessary (it worked before, why fix it?) and arbitrary (why did this thing change and that other thing didn’t?) How, then, to explain to users why changes were necessary, why you made the changes you did, and how to effectively use the new UI?

(Twitter didn’t do a great job of explaining why it made a small but significant change last week, and users staged a minor revolt.)

The Google AdWords team made a smart decision to make a video about changes to the AdWords administrative interface. Team members describe how they collected user feedback to inform changes to the interface, and how these changes make the user experience better. The video makes the interface changes feel necessary (they significantly improve site performance) and human (real people put lots of thought into how to make this better, and the new features represent their best efforts).

In the future, “games are going to be one possible dimension of your personality.”

Via fora.tv

The unpleasant set of experiences that commonly comprise air travel these days include: being charged an additional fee to check a bag; sitting on the floor near wherever you can find a power outlet; and having to separate out liquids into a separate bag. These are commonplace annoyances that for various reasons weren’t part of air travel just a few years ago.

Yet, even though the experience of flying has changed in fundamental ways, luggage, an essential part of this experience, hasn’t evolved much.

That’s why I’m psyched about ZÜCA luggage, which I just found out about. “With a built-in seat (seriously) and removable packing pouches that stack like drawers, this patented new concept in travel is like nothing else.”

I like the luggage but what I like even more is the spirit of it—the thoughtful understanding of the realities of travel and the creative rebuilding of a commoditized product.

There’s a lot of talk of jobs getting chopped and savings being slashed. In the interest of spreading positivity, let’s focus on chopping and slashing vegetables, instead!

My awesome product designer friend Jeff Beene (nerveaction.com) and his business partner Chris Raia (christopherraia.net) have designed a new line of kitchen tools that I’m swooning over.

I do seem to spend a sizable chunk of my time dismembering vegetables, and the Cut & Prep System looks like it will make that process faster, safer, and more pleasurable. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any thoughtful design?

Found in today’s nytimes.com, a compelling proposal for a ballot re-design.

Amaztype uses the amazon.com API to pull search results for a given keyword, then returns results in the shape of the search term. My name returns a lot of different editions of Julie of the Wolves.

(Another great find from Kristin.)

Wordle has been making the rounds lately but I’ve just gotten in to mess around with it — and it’s fabulous.

Here is a Wordle rendering of all of my del.icio.us tags:

Sure, it’s just a tag cloud. But, because the final layout is so well done and the creation interface is so thoughtfully put together, the data can be manipulated and understood in a way that wouldn’t be possible with traditional tag clouds.