Morgan and I are back from Austin, Texas, after a great SXSW conference. We learned much and you’ll start to see changes to some of our materials and applications in the coming months as we employ these new ideas in our work. However, if you want to get a sense of what we saw, I’ve got my sketchnotes posted and Morgan has posted his photostream.

Regarding the sketchnotes, I only started doing this at last year’s conference, when the battery life and wi-fi were repeatedly failing due to overuse (they were far better this year) and because it seemed like fun. This year, I sketched every session I attended and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Even then, I’m just following in someone else’s footsteps and we ended up meeting a number of the heavies in visual note-taking. One specifically asked the question if sketching helped to absorb information better (with the expectation of a Yes answer). I disappointed her slightly, in that I’d have to say it does after you’ve done it for a while, I think.

As I’m sketching, I found that I end up almost never looking up, always listening and furiously sketching, so I would grab phrases, words, etc. and hold them in short-term memory as I had time to assemble them into the visual. I already know that writing (for me) does help with memory, but it doesn’t have to be so visual to achieve that end. I do find it’s a lot more challenging and fun to sketchnote and have continued after returning.

All that said, as Morgan and I stood talking with Amber Case (@caseorganic) after the “What we can learn from kids with homemade flamethrowers” session (yes, a serious discussion on genres and memes), I was inexplicably able to recall detailed information about Tim Hwang’s session from last year on the timing of Internet memes. So, maybe it’s true. Maybe it does help.

Either way — check out our experience.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmckelvey/sets/72157623646818068/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15940983@N02/sets/72157623651754774/show/with/4446121734/

Tags: austin, conference, flickr, interactive, photostream, sketchnotes, stream, sxsw, texas

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