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Showing posts from 2008

For a bit of perspective...

...just watch this video from Afghanistan.  Meant to post this ages ago, and it was subsequently widely reported, but important to keep this to the fore to highlight the plight of young women in Afghanistan simply trying to get to school.

Too easy to blame Facebook!

My eye was caught today by a BBC article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7473818.stm) which in part was blaming what they described as the "Facebook generation" for the recent loss of a sensitive document from a train, left by a careless MOD employee. The suggestion is that young people today are totally insensitive to the notion of secret or private information as they are in the habit of sharing and obtaining private information about pretty much everything from social networking sites. I have to say I find this a typically headline grabbing load of old nonsense. Just because people choose to share personal information on Bebo does not make for a society that is incapable of appreciating the importance of 'top secret' information, nor of being able to be responsible for keeping it that way! Someone made a mistake, end of story!

"Hey Baldy!"....you just have to laugh...

Came across this news story on the BBC website today and if it had been April 1st, I would have assumed it was a spoof! Bald teacher can't teach because he's bald! Now, I'm generally a fair-minded sort of soul, but try as I might I have been unable to locate any sympathy for the retired teacher who "claimed he was a victim of disability discrimination because he is bald"! Funnily enough, he lost the case as the judge decided baldness was no more of a disability than having a big nose or being short... Are you sure it's not April 1st???

It's an old person's game apparently!

So AOL - Time Warner have bought Bebo in an attempt to get in on the social neworking act. Not THAT much money(£417 million-ish) and I'm sure they know what they are doing! I'm quite sure they have done their sums and know what they are about - with 40 million subscribers there are lots of users out there and time will tell if they have backed the right horse. Will Bebo remain popular with notoriously fickly kids who wouldn't feel they have any particular brand loyalty if something cooler came along... Anyway, I heard an interesting statistic on BBC Five Live as I was driving home this evening - during an interview with a web analyst bloke from an organisation whose name I forget. He said that there are almost double the number of over 50s online as under 18s. This seemed a remarkable figure, and it certainly took me by surprise! There must definitely be an opportunity for someone to come up with that killer app for the silver surfers out there!

Kids talk mobiles

Interesting post on Rory Cellan-Jones’s blog . Rory was in a school filming for the BBC’s School Edition project. Rory clearly ‘gets it’! He talks about how the kids are “knowledgeable, articulate and very demanding of the technology” and that “While adults are dipping their toes into the mobile internet rather gingerly, children are taking the plunge”. And Rory also recognises that there are implications for this technology for the teachers; who, although the school currently bans mobile phones (without success) “they are even beginning to explore how mobile phones could be used in lessons – one class was using phones to film simple animations.” Good to see the BBC getting it and getting it right!

Where do i fit...

...in the big picture??? I was reading Stewart Mader's excellent blog on wikis and his post on where wikis fit in the overall scheme of things. This article linked to a blog by Erica Driver on some work the Forrester people have done on looking at Web 2.0, its core technologies, its applications and most importantly, what they let you do and what that means for people, business, life. I was particularly taken with the third concentric circle, Behavior Changes, and Erica's statement that " Not everyone is out there blogging and tagging; we've found that people fall into several buckets: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. " This came to me just as I was contemplating similar thoughts myself in respect of me. While I blog a little (very little and very badly!) and I tag a bit (a bit of delicious and some flikr) I'm not really sure I'm a fully fledged creator . I comment rarely on blogs, so probably not much of a critic eithe...

Identity + the right tools = UCC

I'm a little bit excited! I attended a workshop at presentation at work today on Unified Communication & Collaboration or UCC for short. The presentation was given by one of our partners, HP . An outline of HP's view of UCC from a corporate perspective can be found here . The essence of the technology is that it allows communication in any way (ie with any connected device), at any time and from anywhere. It incorporates technology such as Instant Messaging, VoIP, Videoconferencing, Email all bundled up into one. The actual technology that is being looked at is Micosoft's Office Communications Server with Microsoft's business-based instant messaging tool, Communicator. This is going to be great . We're going to try this out in schools, just a few, to see how they get on with it. We're going to start with teachers, but the pupils will follow close behind, and we're going to see what the schools come up with, how they feel they can use it and what benefit...

Wii, Wii, Wii, Wii all the way home!

Interesting post from Chris Brogan today. Chris writes about the future direction of online gaming, second life and the like, prompting the reader to contemplate where these technlogies may be heading in 2008 and urging us all to participate and organisations to get involved. It is interesting to see how someone more involved in the world of trade and commerce is thinking along the same lines as someone like Ewan MacIntosh is thinking in education with use of the Wii remote , and games consoles supporting creative writing . It seems to me that there are a lot of people who are excited by the technology, have explored a few possibilities but are not really sure where it is going. Perhaps that is what will be the big new thing in 2008. Not more new technology, though of course it's not going to stand still, but rather that someone, or some people, will come up with some really cracking ideas for REALLY effective use of this technology in a universally accepted way with outstanding...

Web 2.0? It's all very well...

...but what do you do when it breaks??? I've just come home from a hard day's labour, followed by a fun, friendly evening class, sat down with my laptop, logged on to Netvibes, to be met with...well, a message telling me how much better it's going to become! Which is no good to me right now, as I want to see what's going on in the world. All my carefully collected feeds and blogs, wikis and social networking connections are contained therein, and I can't get to them. Well, that's not strictly true, I could get at most, eventually, going through them one by one, tracking them down, logging on etc etc, but that's no good to me, that's not how I want things to present themselves to me. It was almost a panicky moment, which is ludicrous of course, but I hope I'm not alone in that. Makes me think about backups, plan B's etc. Maybe I should use i-Google after all. I'm sure it never goes down. Their server cloud model probably means this never...

Confused?...You will be!

People are scared of technology. Not all, but many. People feel they don't know what's going on, they don't know what they can and can't do and they don't know where it is all leading. We're always being told that things are getting simpler to use and easier to work with, but alongside that is that it is the feeling that it is getting easier to break the law, or that maybe the law doesn't apply online or.... It is little wonder people are confused when they go to a webpage such as the Times Online Technology and Web News section. Copyright is dead, but illegal downloaders will be banned and anyway you're using obsolete new technology so you might as well not bother! All part of the fun I guess!