It's not attention deficit - it's evolution!

My colleagues accept the fact that I'm nearly always attached to some sort of digital prosthetic device - whether it's a laptop, a smartphone, or whatever I'm currently experimenting with. I take these tools with me to meetings to take notes, to check/verify information on the fly, and even to communicate with others in the meetings via backchannels.

We are changing as participants, and it's only natural that our previously-segmented digital participation (which used to occupy discrete, concentrated moments) is now merging with our physical participation. So why is there so much resistance from educators, who should be celebrating this as an revolution in thought and participation?

This morning two colleagues discussed their boredom and disengagement in meetings and presentations with me. The first revealed that he sometimes fiddles away with calculus to keep his mind active during meetings, and the second shared that she needs to keep her fingers busy in order to stimulate her mind. Both of these people are high-functioning, high-achieving professionals, but to the 'untrained eye' their 'fidgety proclivities' might look like the kinds of problems that are frequently narrowly defined as 'low attention spans' in children. In fact, one of my colleagues shared that she entered a meeting last week and was specifically instructed to close her laptop - presumably so she could focus on the meeting.

I have never been so stimulated and engaged in a 'passive' presentation as when I observed Julie Lindsay at Learning 2.008, and it was primarily because she not only trusted her participants, but because she activated a moderated back channel - and gave her audience something to do while listening. The challenge of 21st century learning - and meeting - is not how to banish tools that are becoming '2nd nature' to users, but how to capitalize on them, and to focus use so that we're working with technology instead of against it.

Social Notworking - Digital Refugees

The recent troubles over at Twitter have created a mass of confusion in what previously looked like a self-organizing social networking system.  As in the real world, it takes time to settle into a new neighborhood and to discover how you fit into a community.  However, Twitter's lack of ability to scale to its ever-expanding user base has resulted in an explosion of digital refugees who are now wandering through cyberspace in search of new homes.  

Recent networks d' jour have included Plurk, which offers a new graphic spin on microblogging; identi.ca, which is gaining popularity due to its open source origins, and Ping has also entered the arena as a solution to centralize users' updates from a single location.  On the flipside, FriendFeed is there to collect everything that you've been doing on multiple blogs, and to tie it all up in a neat little... mess.  Of course, aggregating feeds is nothing new, and aside from standard RSS readers, other sites like Suprglu and Multiply  have been doing this for quite a while, but adoption rates seem to be sluggish.

Therefore, we have tools to take a single message and to amplify it and reproduce it so that it colonize a series of locations across the web, and we also have tools to distill our scattered thoughts into a single point of convergence.  We have the ability to broadcast a virtual presence to many sites, however, we are still lacking tools to maintain our connections and conversations within these communities.  

We can discover past contacts within emergent social networking communities, but then we can just as easily lose them as they migrate due to the push-pull factors that exist within physical cities.  We've taken a physically global community that is already transient, and we've created a hyper-global layer on top of it, where people exist in and shift between virtual spaces. 

As we move towards increased choice (and let's face it, we've been ramping up to this for centuries - this is not a new phenomenon), how are we going to identify and select the best options as individuals?  There is always the potential for engineers to write new scripts so that we can simplify complex networking choices, but is it more logical to just simplify and take calculated risks to begin with?  

Time-shifting Communication

The intention of this post is to use a new 'scheduled post' feature in Blogger to demonstrate the possibilities of time-shifting communication. For example, I can prepare my post now, but then five hours later it will appear online and give me the appearance of being scholarly and nerdy, when, in fact, at the time this is being posted I'm actually at a rooftop BBQ on Taipa island... and I'm nowhere near a computer.

It's about time that we saw more active implementation of time-shifting (or at least time-delaying) features in our communication platforms. When I have that insomnia-induced brainwave at 1am, I don't really want to reveal to my colleagues that I'm not in the middle of a healthy cycle of sleep, do I?

So developers, developers, developers... please bring on time-shifting features in our email and blogging clients. If I am capable of doing things ahead of time, then why shouldn't I get the benefit of a 'phantom presence' after the fact?

The Renaissance "Man" in I.T.?

Computerworld recently published Hot Skills, Cold Skills as part of a 'special report' on predictions for the I.T. industry in 2010.  Specifically, author Stacy Collett claims:

The IT worker of 2010 won't be a technology guru but rather a 'versatilist.'

Essentially, the article predicts that "more rounded" skills, particularly those which center on acquiring and managing business, are going feature more prominently as the industry matures.

Social Networking Blues

Here's another article in the current wave of not particularly insightful but interesting nonetheless articles on social networking: Facebook, MySpace Reveal Hidden Messages.

The thing that bothers me about this kind of journalism is that it's once again stating the obvious,  i.e. if you constantly change your Facebook/MySpace status then you're probably doing some attention-seeking.  Do we really need a journalist to point this out to us?

People do all sorts of things to get attention:  they dress and style themselves, they surround themselves with 'defining' possessions like cell phones and cars, and if you watch truly gifted networkers at a mixer, then they don't hesitate to approach someone new out of the blue with some sort of an "opener."  Chatty people chat.  Twitterers tweet.  Status updaters update their status.  So what.

I think it's fairly obvious that we're exposing ourselves emotionally over social networks - this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The only thing I'm really worried about is whether more advanced data analysis is going to scour my online emotional trail one day to create some sort of semantic-emotional graph.  A potential employer might not need to analyze my biological DNA if they have access to the emotional 'strands' that I've left online as behavioral fingerprints.

Useless Tech Tips 101

I've noticed that some of the 'tech tips' web shows have recently started offering micromanagement tips for personal computing. One example (that I will not link to) is a popular 'daily' show where the hosts introduce methods to 'control' browsers, such as 'how to make your browser display over 40 open tabs on the screen at once'. However, it may be time to adopt the time-honored approach of "use the telescope, not the microscope" and to step back and look at some of the overarching principals of personal/time management, instead of learning how to juggle so many balls at once.

One of my friends wrote to me yesterday claiming that she was trying to get her email inbox "under 1000", so I humbly refer you to a useful site that offers some excellent advice on adopting principals and strategies that might help you avoid getting into these 'mass tangles' to begin with. Prevention is usually better than the cure.

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Enablement in the Workplace

"Enablement means giving employees the wherewithal—organizational structure, information technology, and other resources that lead to confident decision-making—to do their jobs well. According to an online survey and interviews conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for a study commissioned by Microsoft, 87 percent of respondents rate enablement as important to employees’ sense of pride and confidence in their work."

Download the study here