Posts By Aaron E. Silvers

Follow Your Arrow

Sometimes I find myself listening to country because NPR tells me to. Sometimes I up and move across the country for a new job because my spirit animal tells me to. It’s happened before. Most times my spirit animal sounds like Pantera’s “Walk.” Occasionally it sounds like Digital Underground’s “Doowutchyalike.” This year it sounded likeRead… Read more »

xAPI Design is ADL’s Next Big Thing

For the last year, almost a hundred people internationally have contributed to the specification for Experience API™. Lots of people talked about it, but these guys put it into being. I care about Experience API as a lightweight but heavy-duty technology that helps people respond to some of the low-hanging fruit that our greater communityRead… Read more »

What I Learned Before My Summer Vacation

If anyone ever tells you you’re too old to skateboard, maybe you should listen to them. Then again… that’s not exactly what I would do.. or what I did. So, on April 26, 2013, I hit a milestone on an epic journey that began almost five years before, with all the thinking that went intoRead… Read more »

How Unconferences Work

Over the past year with two gatherings for Up to All of Us, we’ve continued to make the time in each excursion to build a common language we can all speak which helps set the expectations that we’re here to make ideas better and shared… not to cut them down. One can argue a lotRead… Read more »

It Starts With Love

I’m sitting on my couch with my girls, watching Super Hero Squad, enjoying much needed cuddles while my thoughts drift to a replay of last weekend, an hour+ outside of Austin, Texas. It’s barely a week since Up to All of Us and a number of tweets, pictures and blog posts have been shared aboutRead… Read more »

I, Baristo

I spent a Wednesday afternoon at the Intelligentsia RoastingWorks facility enjoying a birthday present I gave to myself: a class offering Barista training. Intelligentsia is one of a few highly renown coffee roasters in the US and their facility — particularly their test kitchen — is the proving ground for many of the people pouringRead… Read more »

Reflections on 2012

So we get it out-of-the-way, here is the executive summary of things I did instead of just talk about doing these things in 2012: I helped lead the charge on moving “Project Tin Can” into a full-on specification called Experience API with a whole bunch of people. I founded a new community (and a retreat)Read… Read more »

The Turn

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But ofRead… Read more »

On Experience Design

My good friend Chad Udell (@visualrinse) reminded me in the comments that I spoke earlier this summer, right after mLearnCon, about some thoughts on Experience Design. With the DevLearn Junto coming up and a bunch of workshops related to designing experiences using the Experience API, this might give anyone casually interested some background on whereRead… Read more »

Catching Up

It’s been a busy few months since my last post here. iFest happened. So did BIF-8. In the midst of that, there’s been a lot of travel and writing. This post will attempt to consolidate things that have been going on and are still to come this year. Writing I just got done with aRead… Read more »