Category Archives: Events

Celebrate your creativity

World Creativity and Innovation Week is the perfect opportunity to dedicate yourself to exploring new ideas with other creatives from around the world. From April 15-21, more than 46 countries will celebrate creativity and innovation through a variety of events. Here are some ideas for celebrating this week:

  • Attend a creative workshop or event.
  • Visit a museum or art exhibit.
  • Watch a movie or TED talk about creativity.
  • Create something new and put it out in the world, like a blog theme or a poem.
  • Grab your camera and go on a photowalk.
  • “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Check out this 1991 lecture by John Cleese on making your life more creative.

World Usability Day 2011

Whether designing a website, a document, or an application, professional writers have to think about who will use the final product and how they will use it. Is the website easy to navigate? Is an instruction manual readable? Is the interface intuitive? Usability is a key part of the design process, and it is honored each year during World Usability Day.

World Usability Day (WUD) was started in 2005 to ensure that services and products important to life are easy to access and simple to use. This year’s event takes place on November 10 and the theme is Education: Designing for Social Change. Events will focus on how Design Education will help develop products and services that will impact social change.

Programs will examine all products and services used for teaching how usable design impacts the world, whether it’s close at hand (organizations), surrounding us (particular cultures/communities) or from a global view. . . how does something designed in China, Scotland, India or the United States, for example, have impact on other nations around the world? WUD will explore and celebrate Design Education – designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world; and examining the concept of cultures and how culture impacts usability.

Last year, more than 40,000 people in 44 countries participated in World Usability Day. Here are some ways you can get involved this year:

How do you make things easier through usability and user-centered design?

30 days of writing — NaNoWriMo 2011

Have you ever thought about writing a novel but been scared away by the time and effort involved? Now’s the time to put aside your doubts and silence your inner editor because National Novel Writing Month kicks off on Tuesday.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a novel-writing program where the goal is to write 50,000 words (about a 175-page novel) from November 1 to November 30. With the time limitation, writers are forced to simply write. No procrastinating, no editing, just writing.

If writing a novel doesn’t appeal to you, there are still benefits to using the event to fuel your own writing projects. Use the month of energy and excitement about writing to find the motivation to finish (or start) your dissertation, write that short story you have in mind, or polish those pieces you want to submit. Challenge yourself to blog every single day or create your own 30-day writing event. Use the month to try a style of writing that you may not have a chance to do in your professional job.

You can join NaNoWriMo at any time during November, and while it’s nice to ‘win’ by writing 50,000 words, it’s more about participating in a frenzied celebration of writing. Get ready for 30 days and nights of literary abandon!

Write for Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month and this year’s theme is “Our History is our Strength.” The Writing Women Back Into History project is a great way for writers to get involved and celebrate. 1000memories has partnered with the National Women’s History Project and the Internet Archive to remember the contributions of women in history—those whose lives shaped and were shaped by history.

You can join the project by writing about the significant women in your life—describing their lives, sharing photos, and writing stories in their memory. All women who are named will be added to the Internet Archive to ensure that they will be remembered in the future. For more information, visit the project’s site.

Grammar time

I hope you have your dancing shoes (or at least your editor’s hat) on, because it’s time for National Grammar Day. Every year on March 4, Grammar Day celebrates language with music, games, and contests. Here are some ways you can join in the fun:

How are you celebrating National Grammar Day?

Communicate for World Usability Day

When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you read, write, or share? Maybe it’s an email, or a newspaper article. Or it might be a text message, a tweet, or a wall post. Tomorrow, on November 11, people across the world will celebrate these and other designs, products, and services that make our lives easier. It’s World Usability Day, and this year’s theme is communication.

People need to connect with each other. We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning. — Article 4, World Usability Day Charter

Advertising, storytelling, style guides—World Usability Day 2010 celebrates all the tools that improve and encourage communication in our daily lives. To get involved, share your experience and find an event near you.

National Novel Writing Month + Scrivener

Every writer knows that writing comes with a fair amount of procrastination. There’s always something else that one can be doing other than writing…watching a movie, hanging out with friends, even cleaning. It’s the “I can do it later” excuse that National Novel Writing Month confronts head on.

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. The goal is to write 50,000 words (about a 175-page novel) from November 1 to November 30. With the time limitation, writers are forced to simply write. No procrastinating, no editing, just writing.

It’s a challenge to put aside your doubts and to silence your inner editor, but it’s a great way to try a style of writing that you may not have a chance to do in your professional jobs. It’s also a worldwide writing event. So even if it’s two in the morning and you’re starting at your computer screen because you feel like you’ve run out of words, there’s some comfort in knowing that others are out there experiencing the same thing.

To help you focus on your writing, Scrivener is offering a special trial edition. The word processor and project management tool helps you outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing, and compose pieces of your text in isolation or in context. It’s available for both Mac OS and Windows, plus the 30-day trial period has been extended to December 7, with options to buy at a discount post-NaNoWriMo.

If writing a novel doesn’t appeal to you, there are still benefits to using the event to fuel your own writing projects. Use the month of energy and excitement about writing to find the motivation to finish your dissertation, write that short story you’ve got in mind, or start a new blog.

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, but you can join at any time during the month, and while it’s nice to “win” by writing 50,000 words, any amount of writing is better than never starting. Who’s in?

Most Wanted: Freedom to read

Holden Caulfield. Atticus Finch. Harry Potter. Imagine never being able to meet the teenage rebel, ethical lawyer, or boy wizard because the books they come from are deemed unacceptable.

The freedom to read is what Banned Books Week is all about. From September 25 to October 2, the American Library Association is celebrating this freedom by calling attention to the harms of censorship with the help of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and readers like you.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

There will be a Banned Books Week Read-Out! in Chicago today, as well as events across the country in local libraries and bookstores. Not able to attend? Curl up with one of the banned and challenged books, or check out The New York Times’s 10 ways you can celebrate the freedom to read.

Punctuate your day

A panda walks into a cafe…

2003 was a good year for punctuation lovers. It was the year Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was released. It was also the year Jeff Rubin founded National Punctuation Day to celebrate the importance of proper punctuation.

“Successful people have good communication skills, and that includes knowing how to write properly,” says Rubin. “Punctuation counts. A misplaced comma can alter the meaning of a message.”

Today marks the seventh annual National Punctuation Day. Here are some ways you can celebrate:

How will you be celebrating your favorite punctuation mark?

Re: Humanities – call for papers

Re: Humanities is an undergraduate symposium on digital media that will be held November 11-12, 2010, at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. The symposium is currently seeking papers and proposals from student researchers.

rehumanities

Suggested topics include:

  • The ways digital archives enable creative engagement and innovative research
  • The use of pop media (blogs, YouTube, social networking, etc.) to facilitate presentation, analysis, and study
  • The use of digital research tools in the humanities

This is a great opportunity for undergrad students to develop and present their own projects. Submissions are due by June 14. Visit the Re: Humanities site for more information.