SpicyNodes Support

SpicyNodes will work on mobile devices, starting with iOS

SpicyNodes — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:17:01 +0000

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they are stopping development of Flash Player for browsers on mobile devices.

The good news for the SpicyNodes community is that our team has been working on a mobile version of SpicyNodes since early 2010! As a proof of concept, we created the popular WikiNodes app for the iPad, which browses Wikipedia using SpicyNodes.

The tablet is an awesome platform for nodes. It is very intuitive to touch and move nodes with your fingertips. The Apple iPad is the most common tablet (over 25 million shipped as of summer 2011).

Your nodemaps will continue to work on desktop and laptop computers, but looking forward, our focus will be handheld devices. Plus, on the iPad, we are able to offer new, slick visual styles, and you will be able to put more complex html content in your nodes. Stay tuned!

SpicyNodes wins AASL award for teaching and learning

SpicyNodes — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 18:24:24 +0000

Last weekend, SpicyNodes received a “Best Websites for Teaching and Learning” from American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Here’s a three minute acceptance speech from the conference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvPuDzsodas

See AASL list of 25 ‘Best Websites for Teaching and Learning,’ and their press release.

Encyclopedia meets nodes… and falls in love: Introducing WikiNodes

SpicyNodes — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:23:33 +0000

What would happen if an encyclopedia could be browsed with a finger tip, typing and swiping from node to node? “WikiNodes” is a new app for the Apple iPad that lets you read Wikipedia articles as nodes. Here’s a 30 second demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdiXXxMnqJQ

Version 1.0 is now available in the app store. It’s free for a limited time. We have a ton of new features and bug fixes planned. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear what you think. You can leave feedback here, send feedback via our online feedback form at idea.org, or send comments from within the app.

See WikiNodes at the Apple app store >

SpicyNodes for commerce

SpicyNodes — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 14:33:14 +0000

SpicyNodes is a great way to browse all kinds of things, including online marketplaces. The following is a prototype from our labs of how SpicyNodes could be used on an iPad to browse an online auction service.

We make prototypes to test different kinds of user interfaces, and experiment with how they might be useful. Like the product browser? We’re working on a version of SpicyNodes for the iPad which developers can use to add this kind of functionality to handheld apps. Stay tuned.

Sneak peek: SpicyNodes Touch (Jan 2011)

SpicyNodes — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 15:33:27 +0000

Nodes want to be touched. We continue working to bring you “SpicyNodes Touch” running on the Apple iPad. Your same nodemaps that work on the web will work on a tablet. Here’s a preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNV06QDX4c0

Information displayed in the centered node is full HTML5 — meaning it can be any web content. It takes around 5 seconds for web content to load within the node. No need to menus and navigation, just link a bunch of nodes together.

Disappearing user accounts

SpicyNodes — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:30:53 +0000

We’ve been alerted to a problem affecting a small number of members who created accounts yesterday and today who have lost accounts. In most cases, the nodemap still exists, but users can not log in anymore. We are investigating. If you have lost an account, please contact us, Be sure to include your email address, and if you remember it, the user name you had used.

Give your hippocampus some spice

SpicyNodes — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:54:39 +0000

When web users control how they learn, they learn more.

How well we learn depends on a brain network that is centered on our hippocampus, and several brain networks is connects to, finds University of Illinois psychology professor Neal Cohen in a recently published a study in the journal Nature:

“Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we’re beginning to understand why… Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you’re actively exploring the world.”

Neal and his post-doc, Joel Voss, looked at learning and memory in the context of online control of visual exploration. They knew that when we have control over what we do, we are better at learning and perceiveing the world. This is why successful ‘active learning’ educational practice emphasizes individual’s control over learning. It’s the same reason that it is easier to learn a route if you are driving than if you are a passenger in a car, on on the web, it’s hard to follow if someone else is controlling the mouse.

The study focused on activity in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, located in the brain’s medial temporal lobes, near the ears. The researchers compared how much people could learn if they controlled a movable window on the screen which revealed different pieces of information, vs. having subjects watch a pre-recorded trace of a window on the screen. This is analogous to the difference between your users moving from node to node in SpicyNodes vs. passively watching a video or presentation.

The researchers found that the key ingredient in learning is “volitional control” and that people remember best when they control the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of exploratory behaviors — such as being able to choose a node and click from node to node.

The key ingredient in the ability of volitional control to improve memory performance was that the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of exploratory behaviors were controlled completely by the individual.

The active learning which SpicyNodes makes possible for your audience is consistent with how the mind works.

Social networks on the map

SpicyNodes — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:06:03 +0000

What does the world look like on the Facebook social graph? Paul Butler, at intern at Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, created the map below based on a sample of about ten million pairs of friends, which he plotted on a blank map with arcs between them.

Paul says:

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well.

Also this past week, Vincenzo Cosenza updated his map (see Google translation to English) of the most popular social network in various countries:

These are both amazing views of how the Internet connects us.

We want to see SpicyNodes used to visualize social networks on a personal level, so that you can see different clusters of your friends, and browse the social graph to see who else is connected.

Recently on the blogs

SpicyNodes — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 01:02:36 +0000

The Center for Academic Technology, at the University of the District of Columbia, writes about tools that enable pedagogical innovation to improve the educational experience of students, and recently wrote about SpicyNodes:

SpicyNodes is a neat visual communication tool which represents information in nodes… kinda like how the human brain stores the info… The web can certainly put you on information overload, and if anything, SpicyNodes keeps you within Miller’s Magic #7 rule… SpicyNodes helps chunk content not only for yourself, but students as well.

Jamae Ann Sabangan (above) is an undergraduate senior at the University of Guam with a double major in English and Secondary Education. In her blog, Applications of Technology, she recently wrote about 8 tech tools, giving SpicyNodes a “4/5″ rating, noting:

SpicyNodes is an alternative presentation tool for Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation program. This tool is especially applicable to text-oriented presentations with very few images. .. this tool is helpful in making connections between points and ideas.

Maggie Hos-McGrane is an IT teacher in Switzerland. She’s been teaching for 29 years, 23 of them in international schools.She recently wrote about digital storytelling, and noted the value of SpicyNodes for student presentations, noting that, “Some teachers have chosen Prezi, some have chosen SpicyNodes and one is going to let her students decide which tool they want to use.”

And last month, Jim at digitalgoonies.com raved about SpicyNodes:

I really like the way the text scrolls within a balloon- that allows for longer summaries and explanations to be added. Adding the pictures was great too! There are quite a few styles to choose from so you’ll have to explore to see them all.

Thanks to UDC, Jamae, Maggie and Jim for sharing your thoughts about SpicyNodes!

Browsing career paths

SpicyNodes — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 05:07:19 +0000

Newsweek/Beast shows how careers of education and work life can be represented by the metaphor of a tree and its branches. The tree is great. What would it have been like as a nodemap? What would be the home node? What would the branches be?

Go to to the tree >>

via Information Aesthetics.