In the last half of the 20th century in Canada it was mostly assumed that as an adult you had a driver’s license and that you most likely owned or had access to a car. I know, I didn’t get my license until I was 26 and that made me a very rare specimen indeed. Our cities, and especially our rural areas, are still primarily designed for motor vehicles. Malls continue to be built without designated pedestrian paths or bicycle lanes. Meanwhile, many older malls are abandoned and crumbling. Around here, it’s still assumed that everyone moves around by automobile.
Technology
information & communication technology
a simpler approach to content management
I was recently asked what I thought about content management systems (CMS); how content should be developed; whether generational differences should be considered; and how to keep content relevant. The best example of a CMS is the Web. There is relevant and irrelevant content. The relevant content is often found through referrals. This may be in terms of ratings, curation by a trusted party, or from a known source. Referrals can be pushed, through something like a subscription service, or pulled from knowledge networks when there is an immediate need for information. People with more diverse and deep knowledge networks get better information.
So what does a CMS have to do with it? Not much.
uber-proof your labour
Platform capitalism is beginning to define the economy for the second Gilded Age we seem to be entering. It requires 4 contributing factors, which when combined, create a perfect opportunity for the ‘uberization’ of almost any industry.
- A platform: a mobile application delivered through an oligopoly like iTunes or Google Play.
- A critical mass of users: upwardly mobile knowledge workers, especially those in Silicon Valley or the tech sector.
- Desperate service providers: people with no ability to organize due to weak or non-existing trade unions in their field, who see opportunities for better cash flow.
- Lack of regulations and oversight: bureaucracies that either cannot keep up with technology advances, or political leadership that condones poor working conditions in the name of progress.
Platform capitalism is not just affecting the taxi, cleaning, and hotel businesses. Many professions are getting ‘uberized’.
We are the media, now what?
One of the potential downsides of a network society is that deception, especially by those with power over the communications platforms, will become all-too-common. John Pilger takes a look at this, focusing much of the blame on professional journalists in War by media and the triumph of propaganda.
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
An update on jobs
Nesta, a UK-based innovation charity, recently looked at jobs and automation, in the article, Creativity versus Robots. I have summarized some of their findings, and added my own perspective, with an image showing how standardized work is decreasing while creative work is increasing in the job market. Overall, we are seeing an increasing percentage of creative jobs in the workforce. But this is not a zero-sum game, as many jobs are getting automated and disappearing. If nothing is done, there will be severe societal repercussions.
The Zeitgeist
The Zeitgeist (spirit of the age or spirit of the time) is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time.
What does the Internet of Everything mean to you?
“Cisco believes that many organizations are already experiencing the Internet of Things (IoT)—the networked connection of physical objects. The Internet of Everything is the next step in the evolution of smart objects—interconnected things in which the line between the physical object and digital information about that object is blurred. – Cisco on Slideshare
Here is how the Internet of Everything is viewed from multiple perspectives. What do you think?
My Top Tools 2014
Jane Hart compiles a list every year of the Top 10 Tools for learning. Voting closes on 21 September.
Here are my top tools this year, with last year’s position shown in brackets. I have also annotated these tools as to what part of my PKM practice they connect with: SEEK > SENSE > SHARE
If you want to foster change, stay out of training
In the mid 1990’s I served as a Training Development Officer working with tactical aviation (helicopters that support the Army). We had just purchased 100 helicopters plus a full motion combat simulator and my office was next to the simulator, which I watched as it was installed, tested, and used. My work also involved writing papers to justify the use of other simulators, such as cockpit procedure trainers and maintenance trainers. One of the papers I wrote examined how we needed to develop an integrated approach to specifying what type of simulation, or emulation, was most suitable for the training task. For example, teaching start-up and shut-down sequences does not require a full-motion simulator, as the actual task occurs while the aircraft is on the ground. It does require switches, gauges, and dials that act like the real things though. I suggested creating a decision support tool that looked at both physical and functional fidelity, and integrating this into the training system documentation. Without such a documented process, decisions to purchase +$25 million simulators would continue to made on a best-guess basis.
Owning our data
With the internet of everything (IoE), once everything is connected, where will our data reside? Who will own it and who will control it?
“In real life, things go wrong. With such a large network encompassing so many devices and objects (Cisco says there will be 50 billion by 2020) there’s a lot of complexity, and plenty of opportunity for errors and malfeasance. “We will live in a world where many things won’t work, and nobody will know how to fix them,” says Howard Rheingold, an Internet sociologist. Our successes in integrating many things successfully may lead to overreach and hubris, the report’s respondents say.” – Fast Coexist