An online notebook
Great talk from Sharon O’Dea:
By moving information and services online, successful companies enable their staff to work from any location, and almost any device, so that work becomes what you do, not where you go. In this session, learn how the digital workplace supports more flexible working, reduces costs – and makes employees happier and healthier.
http://vimeo.com/intranatverk/sharon-odea
Apparently, not everyone has a smartphone! News to me.
Anyway, the Dumb Store is potentially very exciting, I think. Apps for ‘dumb’ phones – ie those that have limited ability to access the internet and the web.
They can be interacted with by sending SMS messages or making voice calls.
The SMS option is most interesting as it turns your message into a command line of sorts. So, for the Google Maps directions app, you text something like:
dir High Street, Peterborough to Letsbe Avenue, Dundee
and you then get a text back with the directions. Neato!
Apps are written in Ruby, apparently. Still, a potential step forward for making web services more accessible to folk without the latest mobile kit!
Today my new online course, successful digital engagement, kicks off over at School of Digital.
I’m excited, and nervous. I’ve not done something like this before. I’m pretty sure it should work, from my experience working at Learning Pool and all the reading I’ve done recently about online education.
It ought to work because it is focused on a small, well managed community of learners; gives them space to explore, talk and reflect; focuses on learners’ specific needs; and provides one to one mentoring as well as general training across the whole group. The one thing it misses is the enthusiasm that emerges from being in the same room – but hopefully the flexibility makes up for that.
We’ve got 10 paying customers on the course, which is good going for the first of its kind. I’m going to be learning as much as anyone else on this particular course.
My initial feeling on the first day is good. I get the content and can see how it all slots together. Key will be maintaining the interest and enthusiasm of the learners.
What next though? I will definitely be running successful digital engagement again – what what other topics would work well for this format?
Reading some of the coverage of Instagram’s change in their terms of service, you’d have thought a murder had been committed. Or maybe that the world was about to end.
A few years down what might once have been called the Web 2.0 road, well funded companies are finding that they have built their networks, grown their user bases, and now shareholders are looking for some return on their investment. We should not, therefore, be surprised that the rules are changing, that the digital ground we’ve been standing on is shifting beneath our feet.
Nothing at the end of the day is free. Somewhere down the line, somebody is paying – whether it is you with a subscription, a VC’s investment money or an advertiser taking advantage of your online data.
The cloud brings with it incredible advantages – access to your digital assets wherever you are, no matter what device you are using. The ability to share with others, to collaborate with them, to enable people to remix your work and share it on.
Thanks to the cloud – and whatever it was called before it was the cloud – we are all writers, photographers film makers, publishers, producers, networkers, community organisers. It gives us access to unimaginably large groups of people who will have an interest in what we are doing, and the tools to spark a conversation with all those people.
It also has its downsides though. As ever, there’s a tradeoff. Sometimes that tradeoff will be worthwhile. Lots of Instagram users obviously thought that it wasn’t – and that’s fine. Services and products will live and die as a result of how they manage their service, and balance the needs of the users and the needs of their balance sheet.
What’s important I think, to consider, is that part of the shift towards cloud, with all the advantages mentioned above, also is putting control over our cultural assets into the hands of corporations whose only mission is to generate a profit. Amazon is not your local library. Apple isn’t the British Museum.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this – I’m not making a political or economic point here. But if all your books aren’t in fact your own, and in fact are merely rented from Amazon on your Kindle; or those music tracks you thought were yours can be taken away from you without you being in control – then that’s a worrying thing and everyone need to approach this carefully.
Likewise with your social media content. If you don’t want your photos popping up in adverts for pile cream, then don’t put them on Instagram (or indeed probably anywhere on the internet).
So what to do? I think just be aware. When people say to you, “use this site, it’s free!”, remember that it isn’t. If you store content you created yourself online, make sure you have a copy of your own. If any of your content matters so much to you that you don’t want anyone re-using it in ways you can’t control, don’t put it on the internet.
In effect, don’t trust anyone, particularly tech startup companies, or indeed giant corporations. They won’t be around forever and they won’t always keep their word. Most of the time that’s fine, and the trade-off between control and convenience works out for everyone.
But we all have content, assets, that matter to us – and don’t entrust those to anyone you don’t know, no matter how slick their user interface.