Back in March, Anthony and I blogged about Mendeley (“men-del-lay”), a free research paper sharing and managing software developed by seasoned researchers, graduate students, and open source developers from various academic institutions. When it caught our attention, it was available as beta 0.6. My initial impression was somewhere between lukewarm to curious in seeing how their long-term vision gets realized.

Now in its beta 0.9 version, Mendeley has impressed me with further implementing their design and development goals. This time I also learned that the amazing team based in London work with the former founding engineers of Skype and Last.fm’s former chairman.

Simply put, it r.o.c.k.s and here’s why I think so.

So what did others talk about?

Again, thank you everyone for participating in the group activity last Wednesday. Critter team is happily overloaded with great ideas for improvement.

The 5-minute speeches about possible learning scenarios are now uploaded on Critter.

We encourage you to view and comment on Critter, but the unedited clips are also available here.

At the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, researchers and kids work together to design new tech tools for children. The RA being interviewed has it right: kids are experts at being kids, so who better to ask for ideas? Where better to go for observing and understanding the needs for redesign?

This video reminded me of how important it is to challenge the power dynamics of any organizational situation in order to promote innovation and free thinking.

My favorite part? It's at 1:40 when a child says,

We work with the National Park Service a lot. Some of the games on their websites are sort of cheesy, so we help to fix them up and stuff.