I made a smoothie for breakfast (banana, blueberries, yogurt) and didn’t tell anyone on Twitter.

On the other hand, I started Tweetdeck (my default Twitter client) not long after finishing that smoothie.  One of the handy features of Tweetdeck is that you can create columns to suit your interest.  For example, I have a “favorites” column.  If I want to remember to follow up something in a tweet, I mark it as a favorite.  That way I know I can find it again in the favorites column.

All that as a preview to one item added to the Favorites column.  Fittingly, it was Kathy Sierra’s retweet of someone else (retweets are one way your connect to other people’s networks).  That someone was another person well worth following–Julie Dirksen, who in turn was linking to Lennart Nacke’s blog, The Acagamic.

On December 1st, Nacke began an “Advent calendar” of posts “with my favorite presentation slides about games, user experience, game design, emotion, affective and entertainment computing, etc.” Some examples of what he’s talking about:

• What’s in a game? (Using game design decisions to create engagement in applications)
• Designing a game changer (applying game concepts to…accounting?)
• Gaming it (what user experience designers can learn from game designers)

Julie Dirksen is no slouch, either, when it comes to sharing good examples–as in her November post, Start seeing games: 10 examples of games that overlap with life.  I’m a big believer in the inductive approach.  I think most people learn more easily when they start with specific examples and work toward general concepts.  A range of selections, like those provided by Nacke and Dirksen, can be booster rockets for more creative thinking.