http://www.spaaze.com

The basics

Like many Web 2.0 applications, Spaaze is one individual’s approach to information management and knowledge creation:

“I wanted to solve a problem I face on a day to day basis. If I have to take a quick note during a meeting or brainstorming, or have to write down a todo for a project, I usually open TextEdit and save a simple *.txt to my desktop. Also while surfing the web, and finding stuff I want to check out later (like a 1h video which I don’t have the time to watch in the office) I simply drag a link to it on my desktop. The problem with this is, that the desktop becomes cluttered, and the information is never where I need it, having one computer in the office, one at home and a notebook. To store this information in the web helps to have it available everywhere, and there are many web services available which help you to do so. But I was not happy with having my information scattered around multiple web applications (some todos here, some bookmarks there). Why wasn’t there a service which allowed me to keep all the stuff in one place? Which brings us to Spaaze. Spaaze is an information management web application which tries to do things a little bit different. While most other application try to bring structure to your data, Spaaze is more like real life. Everybody likes to sort things differently, has different aesthetic demands. Spaaze doesn’t force your thoughts into a specific structure, but let you decide how to arrange and group them. Spaaze is like an infinite desktop in the web. ”

Using a strongly visual metaphor of a corkboard to which items are ‘pinned’, Spaaze allows collection, note-taking and grouping of any kind of digital ‘bits’:

Note the visual metaphor..a pinboard

Knowledge networking

Digital knowledge lends itself to be fragmented – links, notes, clips from articles, and more – the challenge is to organise these fragments into a new arrangement. Idea boards (commonly used in creative industries) provide a blank organising space. While knowledge networking enables us to link easily, it also poses the challenge of organising and managing all of our interlinked pieces.

What is great

Spaaze can be shared and published: as with many online applications, what is personal and private can be turned into a collaborative activity.

Pedagogic Challenge

Students rarely share either finished work or work-in-progress. The pedagogic challenge of organisers such as Spaaze is to make a safe environment where shared work builds towards better learning outcomes rather than inhibiting people.

One scenario for using this tool

Sharing creativity

Design students working in a fully online unit are organised into groups to produce a team-based website. Because of the importance of assessing both the final product and the process used to create it, students must utilise Spaaze as a place to provide links to example sites that they will draw upon for aesthetics, notes written about their inclusions on the board, and any other material which will be collaboratively shared to assist in the design process. At the end of the assignment, the Spaaze board is shared with the teacher who assesses the site and the board together. Students also write reflective assessments of the value of the board, assisting the teacher to refine their use of it in subsequent units.

Spaaze:

• is either private or shareable;
• provides excellent visual grouping – the spaaze board can be much larger than the screen and can be navigated easily; and
• contains rich resources for adding links and documents or images, as well as notes which comment on them.

Alternatives

Rememble may have similar uses, and has the advantage of arraying items on a timeline; on the other hand, this temporal organisation is also a structural limit. Its use may be better suited to private reflective timelines (see also xtimeline). Squareleaf was reviewed by participants in the knl blogshop; one concluded that it was limited by the lack of export and sharing