Technology

information & communication technology

metrics, thy name is vanity

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About a year ago I deleted Google Analytics from this website. I no longer know where visitors come from, what they find interesting, or what they click on. This has liberated my thinking and I believe has made my writing a bit better. I always wrote for myself but I would regularly peek at my statistics. Was my viewership going up? What did people read? How did they get there? What search terms were people using? — Who cares?

There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference. For instance, I put out the word on social media about my social learning workshop: on LinkedIn it had 79 likes and 4,630 views. One of my tweets received 22 link clicks and 5,611 views. But only one metric mattered: registrations. That number was 1. If I kept looking at how often these were shared on social media I might think there was interest in taking my workshop, especially since feedback from participants has been very good. But by focusing on the only real metric, it is obvious that the audience for this workshop is not there. As a result, it is offered less frequently, and is now part of my overall services to companies and organizations.

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our future is networked and feminine

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TIMN is an explanatory model of how human societies have organized: first in Tribes, later with Institutions added (T+I), and in our current society where Markets dominate (T+I+M). As we enter an era where the Network form (T+I+M+N) gains dominance, most of the previous organizational forms will evolve to adapt to the new form. The Network form puts into question our current market dominated forms, including our institutions and our families. Consider that the nuclear family is no longer the dominant Tribal form in many developed countries. Fewer people have faith in our existing institutions and our capitalist markets are seen as inadequate in distributing wealth. One example is the move to establish a universal basic income in many countries because our markets are unable to effectively distribute wealth.

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professional learner’s toolkit

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Jane Hart describes a Modern Professional Learner’s Toolkit as having several components: resources, networks, devices, etc. I have used Jane’s framework to look at my own practice.

Browser & Search Engine: I use three browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and two search engines (StartPage & DuckDuckGo). Each browser has different security and privacy settings, depending on what type of resource I need to access. For example, some sites will not give you access if you use an Ad Blocker. On Chrome I have no extensions, and only use it to access LinkedIn and Google services, which I know track me. On Firefox I have several privacy tools.

Trusted Web Resources: CBC News provides me with a Canadian perspective while The Guardian and BBC give me different ones. I also read Spiegel in English. I ensure online security by using a password manager: 1Password.

Curation Tools: My aggregator of choice is Feedly and I keep social bookmarks in Diigo. Long reads go to Pocket.

Course Platforms: I have not taken a formal course for a very long time.

Social Networks: My preferred conversational and sharing network is Twitter. I am using LinkedIn more frequently but have stopped posting to its Pulse platform and keep all my posts on my blog. I left Facebook many years ago.

Personal Information System: My blog is my main personal information system, hence this post. Other sense-making and reflection is done offline, with handwritten notes or text files kept in an active folder.

Blogging Tool: This blog is built on WordPress open source software, designed and hosted by Tantramar Interactive.

Preferred Office Suite: I use the Apple iWork suite: Keynote especially.

Communication & Collaboration: Zoom for meetings and video conferencing is my preferred platform and I have a Pro account which is well worth the $15/month price. I am also active in communities of practice hosted on Slack and SocialCast.

Smart Device: I have one iPhone, and not even the latest. The most used app is the camera.

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adapting to life in perpetual beta

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Twenty years ago I was finishing my Master’s thesis on learning in the information technology workplace. A significant part of my research relied on the work of Marshall McLuhan, especially his laws of media. My job at the time was the development of all training related to a fleet of helicopters employed in tactical aviation: from pilots, to technicians, and including flight simulation and computer based training. The web was a new thing in 1997. But I was convinced, based on my readings of McLuhan and many others, that it would create an epochal shift in how we work and learn. I decided that understanding this shift would become my professional focus.

I retired from the military in 1998 and took a position as project manager at The Centre for Learning Technologies, a now closed external department of Mount Allison University, here in Sackville. This is why we live in such a remote place. Later I was in charge of professional services for an e-learning company. In 2003 I started my consulting practice and soon after, this blog.

Over the past +14 years I have always had a challenge describing what I do for a living. Today I came across an article on the future of work, by Deloitte. The image included with the article pretty well describes my professional focus for the past twenty years.

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thinking about facebook

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This is a follow up on my post about the convenience of platforms like Facebook, which dominates online social networking. That one company has such global influence should be of concern to all of us. Our social networks define us, as Christakis & Fowler clearly showed in their 2011 book, Connected.

“Most of us are already aware of the direct effect we have on our friends and family; our actions can make them happy or sad, healthy or sick, even rich or poor. But we rarely consider that everything we think, feel, do, or say can spread far beyond the people we know. Conversely, our friends and family serve as conduits for us to be influenced by hundreds or even thousands of other people. In a kind of social chain reaction, we can be deeply affected by events we do not witness that happen to people we do not know. It is as if we can feel the pulse of the social world around us and respond to its persistent rhythms. As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.” —Connected

This is not the same situation as when companies once dominated TV advertising, as today even ad-driven Google has less influence on us than Facebook does.

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top tools 2017

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Jane Hart compiles a list every year of the Top 100 Tools for learning. This is the 11th year!

Voting closes on 22 September 2017.

Here are my top tools this year, with the past five years shown below. It’s interesting to note that my preferred tools have not changed that much over the years.

Please add yours!

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“people are for caring”

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Christian Madsbjerg concludes in his book, Sensemaking: “What are people for? Algorithms can do many things, but they will never actually give a damn. People are for caring.”

How can we understand the complexity of human networks, especially when they are massaged by algorithms that drive our social media? Empathy can put us in other people’s shoes. We can try to understand their perspective. Empathy is a requisite perspective for the network era. Empathy means engaging with others. The ability to connect with a diversity of people is the human potential of the internet: but it takes effort.

B.J May shared his story on ‘How 26 Tweets Broke My Filter Bubble’, which enabled him to see the world beyond a workplace that he described as, “All men, all heterosexual, all white”. He decided to follow Marco Rogers’ advice to use “Twitter as a way to understand viewpoints that diverge from your own”. At the end of this experiment, which turned into a permanent practice, May concluded that you can learn when your mind is open, but it can hurt.

“Every one of my opinions on the issues at hand had been challenged, and most had shifted or matured in some way. More importantly, however, was this: The exercise had taught me how to approach a contrary opinion with patience and respect, with curiosity and an intent to learn, with kindness and humanity.” —B.J. May

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more than mere digital transformation

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Is the automation of what has traditionally been human work inevitable?

I know what you’re thinking – there’s some things that robots can do well, but there’s a lot of things that they can’t, and it will be a long, long time before they can match or outperform humans in these tasks. Construction, food preparation, agriculture, mining, manufacturing… while many of these jobs can be automated, my job absolutely cannot be taken by a robot. I’m safe.

Sorry, but that argument is deeply flawed. Thanks to accounting conventions and tax laws dating back centuries, a robot doesn’t need to be better – or more efficient – than a human being at a task to make a business more profitable. It just needs to be 34% as good, or 11% as good, depending on that business’s accounting and amortization policies. —Hatcher Blog

It seems that our bookkeeping systems, developed hundreds of years ago, are the main culprit in edging out human labour in favour of technological capital. John Sharp, Partner at Hatcher, thinks part of the solution is a guaranteed universal income. I agree that this is part of it, but we also need to radically change our education and training systems. This cannot come soon enough, as 43% of senior executives see the “robotic automation of processes” as a high priority over the next two years. As difficult as it has been to earn a decent wage, in spite of rising productivity for the past several decades, it seems it will get even tougher.

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soft skills are permanent skills

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Are soft skills the new hard skills? I asked this question six years ago. I would now suggest that hard skills are really temporary skills. They come and go according to the economy and the state of technology. Today, we need very few people who know how to shoe a horse. Soft skills are permanent ones. In a recent New York Times article the company LinkedIn had identified a number of currently in-demand skills.

HARD SKILLS
Cloud Computing Expertise
Data Mining and Statistical Analysis
Smartphone App Development
Data Storage Engineering and Management
User Interface Design
Network Security Expertise

SOFT SKILLS
Communication
Curiosity
Adaptability
Teamwork
Empathy
Time Management
Open-Mindedness

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owning your data

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I was recently interviewed for an article in Forbes magazine and asked what I thought about ‘The Cloud’. There was a typographical error in my response, so here it is corrected.

I cannot see why any organization would put all of its data online. The Cloud is just a different term for someone else’s computer, which you do not control. It may make sense to have some data in The Cloud to improve flexibility and accessibility, but as we see everyday, these systems break or get hacked. Own your critical data.

For the past ten years I have advocated owning your data. This means having access to what you post online and the ability to move it if you need to. For example, this website is built on WordPress software and is hosted with a third-party. The database and files can be transferred, even though it’s a bit complicated. WordPress is open source (OS).

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