Mindmaps: The Connections Between Us

Augment Reality is coming to a headset near you...

The news from google is that they are creating augmented reality goggles.  While the development is secret, they are likely to use the same Android software that powers Android smartphones and tablets. Equipped with GPS, motion sensors, a camera and audio inputs and outputs they will be quite the fashion statement. But I would be surprised if they are the only ones with an augmented reality device in the works. AR is the next big frontier in technology.  This is the connected age and the internet is coming out of the box and into our accessories. 

Now to be fair, taking the internet out of the box of the computer is not a new idea and many others have been working on prototypes of wearable technology for a few decades or more.

So what is augmented reality?  If you are looking at what we affectionately call the "real" world, AND you are also seeing an overlay of information that is not technically there, but is for you, that is augmented reality.  Every point on earth has an "address," it can be specified by it's longitude, latitude, and altitude. Information that is "dropped" at a specific addresse can be made visible by anyone with a device that enables them to access the information.    Some examples of what this might look like will help. 

You are a doctor and you are doing a knee replacement.  You have a MRI scan of the leg.  But you are not not looking at it on a film or even on a computer. You are looking at the leg but you have a small projector in your glasses that places the MRI image over the leg of your patient.  Before you make the cut, you can virtually see inside the body like superman. 

You are a member of a firefighting team and when you look at the fire line, you can see the wind direction and speed as swirling colored arrows spinning around giving you valuable information of the future path of the fire.  An transparent email floats in the air with a map and directions from the team caption. 

You are going home to grandmothers for thanksgiving and you are driving. Your specially equipped sunglasses are projecting a path on road in front of your car. You  The virtually signs posted on the side of the road tell you how far and long your travel will be with images of you grandmother cooking the turkey. 

You see young students outside on the playground running around like crazy kids, but they are not seeing a playground.  They are running in and out of the way of huge prehistoric dinasours searching for the ten things that don't belong in this time period. 

While glasses will make use of our nature way of seeing, we can also see augmentations through the lense of a cell phone. But you don't just want to read about augmented reality.. you want to see it and Pattie Maes talks about it as a "6th sense" in this TED talk. 

Augmented reality can bring experiential location-based learning to students by taking advantage of existing places while projecting complex learning enviornments.  But students will need to have strong problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, and good navigational skills. They will need brains that have designed for higher order skills.  Too bad teachers are currently helping students to shape brains that help students rememeber factual information, select among four choices, and drawing perfectly round circles. If only our real, or augmented worlds, needed these skills, we have the next generation of experts ready to excell. If this is the not the case, we should retool and work on firing and wiring brains for kids that will serve their needs in the connected age. 

Now if what you want to ditch school and become a pool shark, or a digital artist, there is an AR application for you!

Teaching with Google+ Hangouts (with extras)

 Google Tools for Online  Synchronous Classes!

Google+ "Hangout" provides a effective meeting place for teaching synchronous "online" classes.  The visual presense of the students helps all of us develop a sense of community as we build our knowledge collaboratively. But, until recently,  it was missing a way to keep track of group ideas.  We used other tools, such as etherpads or google docs, which let all user modify and see changes as they are added to the document in "real" time. These interactive writing technologies are game-changers for collaboration. The use of these tools opens up channel of communication as everyone has the ability use the written mode to augment what is being heard in the verbal channel. This multichannel interaction also helps keeps multitasking students focused on the learning goal-- hopefully decreasing the pairing of classtime with facebook scanning. But finding a video, text and auditory channel that works well has been a challenge. 

So when I went to teach this week, I was very happy to see Google+ Hangouts had extras.  And knowing the Google owns the etherpad technology, I was pretty sure it would be something like an etherpad.  I was impressed.  There is file-sharing, whiteboard and notepads (google docs).  The notes open up  and are saved in your google document folder.  This full word-processing environment that can be exported to word or other formats and any document can be added to the Hangout. 

So in Google Hangout, you can open up any document or show anyting on the screen.  I have added a screencast (made with JING- also free) to illustate the environment and talk a bit about how we use it to support learning online. 

How to start a Hangout... 

 

 

The second screencasts shows you around the interface and the tools that you can use. 

 

With any beta version of applications, there have been some small problems but mostly it has worked well.  I have had up to 10 students in class  at the same time with minimal sound problems.  It has a noise concellation feature that reduces echoes. 

There is a feature we discovered during the screencast that did not make it in the demo.  If you click on the name of the notepad or sketchpad on the left, it opens up in the center space which was what did in the video.  But if you push the arrow, it opens up in the browser.  This makes it possible to have the notes open on one part of the screen as you use the window as a sketchpad or powerpoint projector. 

My wish list if any Google designers make it this way, is to make it possible for people to write in different colors and then have the option to selectively change the text to a single color.  This would be great for seeing who contributed which ideas (as in etherpads)  and for reviewing and commenting on text at a later point (the only left reason to use MSWord rather than google docs).   What would make it better would be a way to integrate it with google sites (wiki-web sites).  It would be great to be creating a web environment collaboratively. It has to be coming as it seems as if Google is working on finding the right integration of tools. 

What I liked best about the environment is that it was NOT teacher-centered.  There is moderator who gets to decide who gets to talk.  No handraising or other markers of control. And while only one person can screen share at a time, when a new person starts, it ends the last person--similar to the verbal challenge. We have years of experience in the art of turn taking.  I find that Google+ Hangout is shaping up as the right kind of tool for a meeting of learning circles-- a place where everyone leads and everyone listens.  

 

Google + Social Networking

I have been using a number of new tools  the in the last few months, but the one I am most excited about is google+ .  I hope it will become a valuable tool for online teaching.  Here is what it look likes: 

This unclutterd look is what one expects from Google.  When they introduced the Google Wave (see Dec 10 blog) -it crashed because it was even more cluttered then facebook.    Goolge+ is social networking with a clean, clear and intuitive appearance that is consistent with the way Google Search first appeared. Dropping  people in circles was straightforward and the representation was pleasing as the faces fell into a circle formation.  

With Google+, I could understand the site within a very short time.  The markers for what is public and private made sense both in writing and reading messages in the stream.  Messages  can be sent to everyone or to one or more circles.  They are marked as public or limited, and if limited, a click on "limited"  shows who, exactly,  the message was shared with.  Messages format themselves with pictures, videos, links and location easily inserted. (Despite years of facebooking, I still couldn't tell you who sees what and which things are found on my profile, home, walls or messages. The metaphors don't work for me.)

The four icons at the top of the site (house, picture, person and circles) are easy to decifer into  home, photos, profile and circles. When I selected  the photos, I found my  picasso albums had migrated  to google+ without any effort on my part.  While the social networking is not all that different from Facebook, it feels clean and sleek--no ads, no things blinking and or screaming for attention.  My circles are clear,  and I can tell who sees the messages. If I click on a name, the number of circles I have place them in show up so I know where they are in my social network.

GROUP VIDEO CONFERENCING -- for free!

What makes Google+ unique in the crowded social networking field is the hangout feature.  You can video conference with up to nine people.  That will make my teaching much easier-- but only for the small group meetings. Our hangout test seemed to work well although I have only had this one session--(connecting from Taiwan while I was travelin)g.  I am looking forward to using this feature for learning circles meetings in my online classes.  

Margaret Riel  -  Jul 24, 2011 (edited)  -  Hangout-  Limited 

Margaret Riel hung out with 8 people.

 

If you are not overwhelmed by reading things from people you know, you can use  "sparks" to connect to whatever people out there are talking about.  If you type "newsweek," you well get more than you might want to read about the current cover pictures of Bachmann. Or "stock market" will give you everyone's thinking about why the market is jumping up and down. 

One thing I like is that it is easy to open Google+.   +Margaret sites on the top left of my gmail.  So I am more likely to shift over without waiting for that email message from facebook or linked that reminds me that the social world is steaming by without me.  I think that google+ might slowly pull people away from the more chaotic, ad covered, facebook world (well maybe only people like me...my kids are not bothered by clutter).  And maybe with circles, it will be easier to manage the spheres of contacts. However, I have to feel sympathetic with those  who ask-- who needs another way to connect to friends... I am personally overwhelmed by email alone and I find myself longing for a less connected space and time.

 

 
Google reported 10 million users signed up in the first two weeks in July.  I am not sure how many there now.  And I was hard to sign up as you had to be invited.  I guess that is part of creating the buzz. Everyone wanted to be invited. 

Data Visualization--The Role of Feedback in Learning

In this post... I ask you to watch a video, think about some gaming for health and put these two systems together to think about what is missing in schooling. 

Watching Rosling's video reminded me of the Al Gore being elevated on a forklift to dramatically  illustrate the speed at which the climate dimensions are shifting.  These displays are very effective at helping us learn.  Take a few minutes...watch the video and come back...

 

Did you see the same optimistic trend as he did--countries coming closer together?  Seems to me that they were much closer in the past.  But the medium is the message here. What other information could you visualize? What about our personal data, our trends?  What effect does rapid feedback have on learning? What if you could see a graph of your learning in real time?  Hold that thought while I give you the second data point. 

Every morning I look forward to waking up my mind and body with Wii fit and/or Wii Sports.  It is my virtual cup of coffee-the surge that propels me forward to face the work of the day.  Why do I persist at this--(now almost  2 years of almost daily play)?  Even more perplexing to me, why do I enjoy it?  I don't really enjoy a workout at the gym in the same way (And  while I often manage to visit the gym 4x a week, I can count on one hand the times I have worked out first thing in the morning).  I think that biofeedback and advancing levels are responsible for this strangely addictive pattern.  I want to get better.  I want to see the line graph of my performance go up.  I can know I can get faster, more accurate, more agile, more balanced.  And I want to see one graph go down...my age.  If the Wii tells me I am in my 20's, it makes the day more fun, and it I tells me I am  older... well I know I might be younger tomorrow which makes me grin.  

So what am I learning?  The WiiFit, and sports in general, are a form of mindful exercise.  It is not just running or jumping or lifting, it is setting a mental AND physical goal and trying to reach it.  And, once you reach it, wanting to advance to  the next level.

So now let's put these two displays together for school learning.  Suppose there are some virtual, floating bubbles or dynamic graphs in the room and they bounce around as the students do their work.  As a student reads, his or her fluency and accuracy lines move and vibrate.   When the student responds well to comprehension questions the  bubble floats up.  This is not an extrinsic reward...

 a gold star... that teachers give for compliant  behavior or being good at something.  It is the visualization of the effort and performance. It is a subtle but important difference.  The student, not the teacher,  has the power to change the display. It would make learning into a game.   You can get mad at the computer (and I sometimes do when the computer doesn't play fair (smile).  But ultimately, one comes to accept that that progress is determined by play.  And games are designed so you will make it to the next level-- by embedding the skills you need for advancement in the current level.  Game designers know that you have to do this or people will stop playing.  They understand and exploit the addictive behaviors.  Teachers need to become game designers. 

We have the technology and we are close to being able to make systems that are smart enough to be able to be use by learners to evaluate themselves.  Schools could  places where we can see and feel what we learn.  Skills can be mastered and students can have some say in when they are ready for the next level of changes.  And as they understand the technology, they can make the games and that is when they will really master the content. 

 
Meanwhile... I am moving my hips to select the numbers that when added and subtracted in the right way will add up to exactly 15-- and trying to be quick about it. 

 

Two movies, and a Rally (or two)

I am going to contrast an unlikely pair of movies...Social Network and Waiting for Superman, and then use them to reflect on my participation in the largest gathering of people I have ever joined-- The Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) in Washington, DC on October 30, 2010.

THE MOVIES 

Social Network is a cautionary tale of privilege, revenge, greed and malice. It is a fictionalized tale
shadowing the real life of Mark Zuckerberg.  Zuckerberg is portrayed as an arrogant Harvard student with minimal social graces.  In an act of revenge against women, Zuckerberg hacks into Harvard servers and creates the sexist “facemash“ which almost gets him suspended.  As others recognized his programming skill, they try to partner with him to create a new product-- a visual listing of university contacts.   All of the people who crossed Mark's path in the movie were double crossed in his search for fame and wealth.   The movie tale is one of free enterprise coupled with unbridled greed where one person climbs to the top stomping on all who helped him.   The irony in the movie account is that the creator of the most powerful social networking tool Facebook, seems unable to friend anyone.  Putting aside the issue of truth (or truthiness) of the movie account, I use it here to raise the fears that some have of unregulated capitalism.  When one is driven by greed and wealth, what are the checks and balances that prevent these individuals from stealing, using, and abusing people as they get ahead?  What is the damage to society that these fast lanes to the top cause? 

Waiting for Superman provides a view into a different sector of society.  Here we see heart-grabbing stories of the working poor rather than the carefree lives of privileged programmers.  This is story of life's lotteries and those who lose out ---right from the beginning.   Some schools with "quality" teachers can jumpstart kids to success.  Other schools, the movie asserts are fatally damaged by TnT--tenure and teacher unions.  The analysis of education in the movie is so simplistic that it strains reality.  There is no discussion of how some teachers get to be talented and others are hopelessly incompetent holding on to jobs because they cannot be fired.  The internal mechanics of quality education is a black box, unexplored by the movie.   But for the sake of argument, I am going to accept the truthiness of the premise: A very limited number of schools have achieved high success with children from poverty, and for many hundreds of concerned parents, their only hope for their children is to win the education lottery. If they don't, then everyone loses. In this case, government is the both the promise and problem, but one is left with the sense of why is that if we know how to create some successful schools, there are not more of them?  Why doesn’t government deliver?

So I am going to use the Social network story to represent unbridled greed of capitalism and the damage that is done to the social fabric, and  Waiting for Superman to point to government ineptitude and the crime of wasting both human capital and of taxpayers' money. 

AND NOW THE RALLY (or two)

The Rally to Keep Fear Alive, was the ironic challenge to Rally to restore sanity held at the same time and lead by the persona of Stephan Colbert. Fear-- promoted by the exaggeration of problems we face-- has been driving people to extreme actions.   The more one group sells fear, the more uneasy we all get.  The attack on the America by Al Queada was the beginning of a shift to life in a state of constant fear.  We attacked another country because we were afraid of weapons that were not there.    And now we find ourselves in a place where government no longer works because our two party system is paralyzed by opposing fears. 

Polarized Fears

Half of Americans fears the greed and destruction to our environment, and social well-being which they see caused by a new breed of robber barons. These mavericks like Mark Zuckerberg in the film, take from others and leave a trail of destruction as they pursue wealth at all costs. The fear is that these corporate giants focus on amassing wealth and power by siphoning off resources in massive bonuses rather then investing in jobs, put collective safety at risk by taking less costly options, and find move operations offshore to avoid paying their share of taxes.  

The other half fears the government. They see the government like the schools  portrayed in the movie—not accomplishing what we expect. When government solves problems, the solutions are viewed as flawed and expensive marked with inefficiencies.   They fear that solutions that are designed to work for everyone, will work for no one. Government is seen as the enemy of the economy. If these services were privatized, they would work better for those who could pay for them.

Each side seeks to "keep fear alive" with statements like...  we will have death squads or a depression, our environment is on the edge of disaster or government regulations are destroying the economy, -- we can't decide if we will implode or explode.  

And that brings us to the second face of the Rally—The Rally to Restore Sanity—lead by the host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans filled our capitol's mall with an urgent plea.  We need to restore sanity.  For hundreds of years we have been able to work in a two party system.  We have put our trust in compromise.  When intelligent people with different perspectives come together and work to minimize fear, we are able to find compromises that can move us forward.  We know how to solve problems by listening, weighing and then working at a solution that recognizes the differences.  We need to create moderate civil discourse moving the extremists to the their corners where they serve a role. In the center respectful people with different ideas, a will to compromise, and a belief in a two-party system need to come together to solve problems without demonizing the problem solvers.  No party should be the party of “no.”  We need to be the people of one great nation who value diversity and believe in sane, open, honest dialogue around issues with the goal of solving problems.

TECHNOLOGY?

And now...technology...how does that figure in this post?  It is media technology that is at the heart of our new world.  We are connected in ways that make half-truths circle around us creating fires of fears.  An unidentified  person in India says Obama's trip cost millions of dollars and within hours some broadcasters spread this exaggeration as if it was the truth, fanning outrage.  An airplane creates an unusual tail and hours of broadcast time is focused on ferreting out the truth about this mysterious secret missile.  Almost everyone is Hitler. This form of media is, as Jon Stewart, said  “hurting America.”  We have moved from exploring different perspectives to simply promoting malicious statements or fanning fears.  This past election was not about how to make American great; it was about how to disrupt and destroy people. The role of media is crucial in setting public discourse.  I end with a quote from Stewart’s message at the rally using humor to help us think about the role of the media:

"The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems and bring them into focus illumining issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything we hear nothing. "

 

 

Help for mail overload...coming soon

I don't know about you, but I am downing in email.  I have to unsubscribe to things that keep starting up each day and I just can't get to things that I would like to read.  And I waste time trying to figure out which I need to read immediately.

Google wave was a bust but google magic is turning into gmail priority mail and I hope this will be as good as those who have used it say it is. Should be here in the next week or so.   So watch your gmail account for this new option.

Check out tech crunch for a longer story...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/gmail-priority-inbox/

Wealth and Happiness

Let's assume that being wealthy means being able to buy whatever you want without concern.  Are you wealthy?Well there are two ways to fix that.  One is to figure out how to get more money and the other is to think hard about what you really want.  If your wants are modest, you can be wealthy without much income. So here is a great video to help you think about consumerism...

The Story of Stuff  (www.storyofstuff.com/)

And the "tech" part of this message is this way of presenting information.  The moving graphics tell the story in a way that powerpoint couldn't manage.  The talking Annie Leonard makes it clear that this is her collection of research and her point of view.  And it reminds us of the power of storytelling. (For Cadre 13 at Pepperdine,  this is an example of a type of product you might create). 

Once you have really thought about stuff that you might not want (or at least need)... take a look at this article that just appeared in the New York Time which my friend  Bill Penuel sent to me. 

                                    "But Will It Make You Happy?": http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/08consume.html

If we want less, want what is important, then it is possible to be one of the richest persons in the world with only a modest income. And the best way to get even wealthier,  is to give what you have to help others find their comfortable level of wealth.  For example, you could help my friend Chris with   nickels for Nepal

"Again, for the first time" -- How is technology affecting the way we think?

Mind, Brain and Technology

Matt Richtel wrote a front page story in the New York Times today on tech gadgets and how the use of them might be changing the minds of the next generation.

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

The heart of this newspaper article is -- How does the choice to attend to a virtual reality through the use of networked gadgets change the way we think?  What are the benefits and risks of choosing one form of experiences over another? What are the consequences of our choices? The article implies that people who are plugged in are zoned out and that virtual living is ruining family life. 

Choice, interest, motivation and emotions structure cognition...

People vary  in the choice of experiences they attend to,  the degree of metacognitive work they choose to do on those experiences and their emotional investment. So how and why do we choose some experiences over others? The intellectual and emotional energy we invest in in reflecting on our choices help make our minds unique.   The younger the child, has less control, but as we grow we gain more and more control and these choices will determine both the arenas and degree of expertise we develop across our lifetimes.

What we know about the brain is that it gets good at doing the things we choose to do with it.  It is a self-regulating system. 

Piaget describes cognition as a balancing act between assimilation (again) and accommodation (for the first time).  We experience reality in the framework of what we know but that framework changes with every new instance.  New experiences are understood by using a schema, a set of meaning-giving experiences that we have linked.  If there is no match at all, there is not likely to be much understanding. That bit of reality will go over our heads--missing our mental processing.  Where there is a match, the next part of processing is to understand how this experience is different from those in the past.  This is where the mental schema is changed.

So the mind shapes experiences, and the experiences shape mind.  And the goal is some sort of balance.  If the experience is very similar, there is not much need for schema adjustment.   But if the fit is rough, then more work is required to adjust the schemes so that the next match is a better one. 

Those around us, and those we find through networking help us make our choices.

Parallel Processing vs Multi-tasking

Can we attend to more than one context, set of stimuli or task?  Clearly it makes a difference what the task is and how well we need to attend to it.  These are the choices we make each day. 

But now that we watch the brain working  scanning technology, we can gather evidence to support claims that we have the mental capacity to do more than one thing at a time.   In  Science (April, 2010) -- Etienne Koechlin of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France reports his new findings from  scanning the brain while giving people problems to solve.  He reports that our executive function in the brain can divide a task that would normally take place in one lobe across the two lobes and have the halves of our brains work concurrently if it is important enough for us to do this. So we have mental capacity to use each half of our brain to solve two similar and mentally complex puzzles at the same time.

So our two sided brain allows us to do two tasks at the same time-- parallel processing but we would need a different brain structure to do more than two tasks. 

Neural and Social Networks are our technology for organizing our problem solving

What remains across studies is what we do with our brains is both shaped by and SHAPES our brain.  If we keep trying to do something that is hard for us, our brains finds a way to help us.  So it comes back to our choices.  If we invest the energy to repeatedly try new tasks in new social configurations, it is possible that our brains will find new ways to operate or share operations with forces and tools that reside outside our minds.

Parents (and teachers) can only choose for children for so long.  They can enforce rules.  You cannot read that book for more than 6 hours at a time, you cannot only watch television until homework is done, you can play video games that have a seal of approval, and you can't talk with strangers in chat rooms.  But eventually each person gets to make these choices for themselves.  Maybe schools should be places where we come to terms with the sort of brains we want to have and the sort of communities we want to belong to.  Maybe we should be helping students understand the self regulatory aspects of thinking and learning, or reflection and community identity.  Maybe if we spend more time in school helping students  try on new identities and work people in different communities in our complex world,exploring the type of the problems that these people face, students will understand how learning shapes identity.

We can and should think about how technology use if affecting the mind. And we have a responsibility to help students think for themselves.  And parents and educators should be more aware that that when they control what  students  do with their minds, they are influencing the structure of their brains.  It is fine to raise the issue of what choices  students and adult are and should be making with respect to technology in their free time. However, I wonder if  kids today might have the right in the near future to mount a class action suit against schools with policies that have them spending so many hours  learning meaningless content for superficial gains on simple tests. 

What should we choose to learn, with whom, and why? These are critically important questions that shape the future.

Teacher Leadership with Technology

I recently wrote a paper with my colleague Hank Becker, on teacher leadership with technology that was a chapter in The Handbook on IT in primary and secondary Education (Download 08 Riel Becker teacher leadership tech ).  I am currently at the Florida Educational Technology Conference in Orlando and I have a presentation on learning to lead with a focus on the role of action research and adaptive expertise which is largely based on that paper. The main premise is that there is a pyramid path to expertise. A pyramid because the group of teachers who are seen as leaders gets smaller as more characteristics of leadership are added.  At the base, teacher leaders are those who know how to learn from practice. They are not just teaching but they are actively learning from their teaching. One effective way to do this is through action research which leads to adaptive expertise. At the second level, they share what they learn with others locally but not just telling but in a way that helps others develop new skills. To do this well, they need to be able to develop "service leadership" skills. The effective leaders are not the ones with the plans that everyone else "should" follow but rather the person who can foster great groups that together change their practice in effective and innovative ways using evidence to guide them. Teacher leaders can operate locally but they can also extend their reach over distances and across time. Over distances they can play leadership roles in conferences and professional communities. Over time they can create conceptual artifacts (papers, videos, blogs, books, or podcasts) that share their wisdom with teachers who will follow their intellectual footsteps. I am also attaching the powerpoint slides for the talk (Download Riel-FETC-2009-teacher leadership).

What's New with Google

I am happy to report that Google Chrome is finally out for the MAC....and I am happy with it.  I have only been using it for a few days and there still some connections missing (diigo bar), but I know that these will come along.

Here are a few fun facts from us on the Google Chrome for Mac team:

• 73,804 lines of Mac-specific code written
• 29 developer builds
• 1,177 Mac-specific bugs fixed
• 12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Mac code base, 48 external code contributors
• 64 Mac Minis doing continuous builds and tests
• 8,760 cups of soft drinks and coffee consumed
• 4,380 frosted mini-wheats eaten

On the other hand, or fingers (smile), Google Wave is also available.  And I was so excited about this application (see previous blog)  that I am surprised that I do not find it more useful.  I think that the problem is that it is too busy -- hard to look at with all of these tiny pictures that I don't recognized.  Sure they are people I know, but the people I know don't look exactly like that.  I think I would want names on the list and pictures when I open a wave.  I just find it too busy.  What Google is known for is clean smooth lines.  They put up a search engine that is lovely in its simplicity.  The Facebook-like clutter  of wave doesn't match with my notion of Google-neat.  I would like to see something more on the line of etherpad.com (one of my all time favorite applications).  When etherpad said they were working with Google Wave and that etherpad would disappear by March of 2010, there was a collective outcry.  They responded and for the time, we still have etherpad.

I hope the etherpad crew will bring the look and feel of etherpad to google wave.  I thing that Etherpad is a better instantiation of what I expected from Google wave.  If you need an invite to google wave, I am happy to send you one. And hopefully the interface willchange....                                                      

My Advice to Google...think Coke Classic rather than New Coke