http://wridea.com/
The basics
Wridea is “Idea management service and collection of brainstorming tools…a web service first to avoid ideas being forgotten, then to organize and improve those ideas by giving you the opportunity to share your ideas with friends and necessary tools to improve your ideas by yourself and individually.”
Wridea is relatively simple to use. The focus is on text, organised into categories which can then be arranged in a tree-like structure as well. Friends can be invited to view or participate in the idea generation and editing process. The basic interface looks like this:
The idea entry page in Wridea
What is intriguing
The visual display of a brainstorm of ideas, on a screen, can be a powerful cognitive aid for people who are stuck between the ‘start’ of a writing project and the ‘end’ of it. Too much focus on the finished product can prevent people from thinking through their ideas and then organising them. As soon as material is placed in digital form, it becomes malleable and moveable, thereby encouraging people to ‘work with’ their ideas before they move to a finished state.
Pedagogic Challenge
One challenge is to think about organising students to work together on idea generation. It could be that a site like Wridea, which makes open and explicit the idea generating process (and tags each entry to its creator), will aid individual students to work together, by enabling that collaboration to occur without the difficulty of organising co-present meetings. While obviously applicable to students studying fully online, Wridea is a good example also of the challenge to integrate these tools into more traditional campus-based learning encounters. Thus, students could conduct a group discussion all together in a classroom, then be tasked, prior to the next week’s class, of adding ideas to a Wridea site for that tutorial group and coming to the next discussion with a selected list of the ideas they think are most important. Thus digital creativity, via a site like Wridea, becomes integrated into classrooms, even though the technology is used (as it is most effectively designed for) outside of class and with individuals working alone. This sort of ‘networked individualism’, in which one works alone, but also in company, is the power of web 2.0: it is also a challenge for educators who think in terms of class = group; away from class = individual.
Why this tool is not ‘top 10′
Wridea is relatively limited in its brainstorming tools. Only one exists, at the moment at least, which involves a ‘rain’ of words and categories down the screen which could help a user to review and reflect on the work they have done. The lack of export features, as well as the text-only limitation, also make it less than fully usable. However, it is simple and straightforward and, therefore, has a very low cognitive load to start using it. The colour-coded categories can also assist in using another kind of ‘cue’ for idea organisation, though this feature does not appear to work as well as it might. Ultimately, Wridea is still work in progress… for that reason, and because of the lack of export, it does not fully meet the needs for effective creative knowledge networking.
Alternatives
The unexplored tool, Wikicards, could well be a much better one, though its focus is on systematic categorisation rather than the more free-form exploration of ideas found in Wridea. Dabbleboard is a visual idea generator – an online whiteboard.
