2020 Vision

As we are at the end of our class, it is time to examine how Web 2.0 technologies will continue to change our expectations, how we communicate, how we share information and how the workplace will adapt.  In looking forward just six years, I came across this Internet of Things video post from How Things Work.  The video discusses that by 202050 billion objects will be connected to the Internet, 7.6 billion people will be on earth and 6.6 objects per person will be connected to the internet.  No doubt this level of connection to the devices that shape our world will affect our homes, businesses and classrooms.  But how?  I anticipate that the trend towards increasingly personalized realities and more project based work will continue as a result of being increasingly connected. 

This infographic from Cisco demonstrates the types of new data we can obtain from being increasingly connected to each other, to data, to machines and more.

Collaborative achievements

New collaborative technologies like google documents and their private counterparts in SharePoint make it easier to gain input from colleagues.  And technologies like Skype and various social media platforms give us greater freedom to remotely attend meetings and therefore work wherever and whenever best suits us.  This increasing connection and communication is breaking down previous silos and flattening hierarchies across the globe.  Forbes’ Jacob Morgan discusses, “These new technologies are also allowing simple actions to have big impacts, for example the CEO of a company “liking” or commenting on an idea that an employee might post publicly inside of the company.  These same employees now have a voice within their organizations and have the ability to become leaders without having to be managers.”

Increasing personalization

I expect our environments will continue to become more personalized.  By way of illustration, while I listen to personalized playlists through Spotify now, six years from now it seems likely that my phone will read the weather and my schedule to determine my playlist and then automatically play it in my car/home.  The increasing acceptance, or even expectation, of more personalized environments translates in the workplace by making it easier to work remotely and have increased latitude in the types of hours we choose to work.  The previously mentioned Forbes article goes on to assert that “The idea of “connecting to work” is become more prevalent within organizations as they are starting to allow for more flexible work environments.  With an internet connection you can now access everything you need to get your job done.  The notion of having to work 9-5 and commuting to an office is dead.”  Furthermore, even our news comes to us in more and more personalized formats from RSS feeds we specifically curate for our interests and Google news sites where we can choose the types of stories that are “front page” for us.

Decline of the Renaissance man

Additionally, I anticipate that individuals will have to become more specialized.  I see that trend now and have worked to become more of a specialist than generalist as a result.  The Daily Princetonian columnist Barbara Zhan agrees and recently wrote “Today, the growing population, the Internet and more widespread education have accelerated the rate of advancement in any field exponentially. This in turn makes merely having a workable basis of knowledge in any field much harder. For example, any research chemist nowadays must have extensive training in lab techniques and technology that didn’t exist a hundred years ago, not just theoretical knowledge. A historian has access to more and more documents through electronic means, increasing the detail of his knowledge and thus narrowing his field of study. There is no such thing as a polymath in the modern age; the closest cousin would be a dilettante or a dabbler — a “jack of all trades, but a master of none.”

[Side-bar: long term, perhaps companies and services like Automated Insights which translates data into sentences and paragraphs will make my job obsolete].

Technologies to help us organize information

In 2010, Cisco asserted that by the end of 2011, 20 typical households generated more internet traffic than the entire internet in 2008.  With the internet at our fingertips there is no dearth of information.  What there is is difficulty in harnessing all of it and picking through that which matters to us.  Tools like Flickr, Diigo, social bookmarking and others help us organize our own data and information, but also help us sift through to find what we need.

Additional projections:

·         Big data privacy concerns will likely grow in importance,

·         Protected cloud file sharing will become easier and better adapted for our smartphones and tablets,

·         Wireless connectivity from smartphones with printers will also become simpler,

·         Skype style meetings will become more prevalent

·         We will communicate more with our colleagues via internal social networks like SharePoint Community sites

·         Remote working situations will become more common; increased blurring of lines between work and home life

·         As is espoused in connectivism, I anticipate that documents/work products will become increasingly more collaborative and the result of teams instead of individuals

·         Teaching internet safety will continue to become increasingly important

·         Documents will become less static and incorporate more multimedia and imagery

Though there are and will continue to be great technologies available, technology in and of itself is not the answer.  Bill Gates stated “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” I think my best hope is to be an active learner as new technologies replace the old and more and more options become available.  I postulate that the ability to adapt to changing circumstance and suffer through the discomfort of change will be critical to success in 2020. 

Blum, J. (2012, January 26). 10 Tech Trends Defining the Future of Small Business.Entrepreneur.

Morgan, J. (2013, June 20). Five Trends Shaping The Future Of Work. Forbes.

Zahn, B. (2014, January 7). The decline of the Renaissance man. Daily Princetonian.

Fun with Pixlr

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs" - Ansel Adams

The power of images to help tell stories and communicate information is largely undisputed. And not since Picnic went off grid before jumping over to google hangouts have I been so excited about a free online photo editor.  Pixlr is a great resource for editing photos and online images.  The site utilizes adobe flash and allows the user to touchup, resize, overlay, add filters and otherwise tweak your photo to use on your blog, resume, professional or personal project, news articles or website.  The chief downside of Pixlr is the upload capabilities as you will need to save the image to your hard drive to tweak it using the software.  However, the app options for Pixlr are great, there is a limited option free version and the full version is just 99 cents.

A 2012 Mashable article discusses Pixlr and notes that the software has about 20% of the functions you'd find in photoshop. For a relative photo novice like me, who wants a step up from Instagram filterns, but without photoshop knowledge, this is just right.

And now, I'll share with you my latest Pixlr "masterpiece" :P.

Paperless Cube

My cubical office environment is not paperless, though we are getting closer.  Many take iPads or laptops to meetings instead of noteboooks and most of us take our laptops home (as opposed to a briefing book for the evening or something).  Many meetings are conducted with the help of PowerPoint in part so that colleagues that are not physically in the office or at another location can easily follow along.  We are utilizing a program similar to google documents to share work in a protected way, though this has some limitations as we cannot share these inter-departmentally at present.  For the most part, I utilize our printer when I need to proof a document or share a draft PPT without setting up a laptop.  I do think that continuing down the paperless trajectory encourages us to share information utilizing more graphics and multimedia.  We recently had an awards event where each team sent in a video (since the teams were located all over the world) and I was so impressed with the AV capabilities of our scientists.  The videos incorporated music, animated graphics and footage in an almost seamless manner.  It was much more interesting than listening to someone discuss the accomplishment.  The challenge of the paperless office is that we do all need to then become savvier with Web 2.0 tools and creating content that is engaging.  I have some work to do on that front, but the tools we've learned here are helping.

I think "paperwork" can now safely be substituted with "email" here.
Image from Fighting Monsters Wordpress site

Image from the Fighting Monsters Wordpress site:

Collaborative Conversations

It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. —Charles Darwin

Though Darwin was not discussing Web 2.0 technologies, the point that collaboration is a powerful indicator of success is very relevant to this discussion.  In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Tools for Classrooms, author Will Richardson argues that modern teaching should be a conversation, not a lecture.  The text goes on to discuss that the integration of Web 2.0 tools has led a shift towards collaboration and conversation and away from lecture as the go-to education tool.  When thinking about this shift through the lens of employee communications in the corporate environment, it seems that the same principles can apply.  Rather than looking at employee communications as a one-way street, we need to continue to develop more tools that engage employees and encourage conversation.  The Web 2.0 tools are just as applicable in this space as in education.  When there are hot button industry issues, a relevant change in government regulations or a need to explain quarterly earnings, I hope we can begin to encourage conversations and questions more and decrease the PowerPoint lectures.  One way I could affect this change is to provide conversation starters to executives instead of full remarks. Rather than remarks followed by questions, a new format could be for the executive to make a few statements relevant to the issue (key points) and then take questions/comments before moving on to the next segment, followed by questions/comments again.  This would admittedly be less formal, but may also encourage increased transparency and developing collaborative solutions as a company.  Helpful technologies include video conferencing, collaboration sites within SharePoint, and real-time document sharing.  We could also provide a wrap up blog post with space for comments as opposed to the follow-up email.

Richardson, Will. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2010. Print.

Has Web 2.0 resulted in a less educated public?

“The broadcast and digital media has become the most important source of educating the public as to the issues of our time. I say educating specifically because as I see it the purpose of including the press in the First Amendment was the understanding of our founding Fathers that in order to maintain this new type of government they had invented, there was an overarching need for an informed public.” – Mike Spindell

George Orwell once said "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."  But what happens when there aren’t enough truth-tellers?  The rise of Web 2.0 technologies has resulted in momentous reductions in news staff around the world.  How does has this affected the public at-large?

Freedom of the press was considered so essential to an informed electorate capable of responsible governance that our founding fathers expressly mentioned in the First Amendment.  A blog post from Mike Spindell in October 2013 builds on that protection by stating “many have declared it essential as a bulwark against tyranny.”  So what then happens when the free press is solely dependent upon advertisers or government support?

As Web 2.0 technologies have blossomed, trained journalists at traditional news outlets have been nearly continuously culled.   And readers have become accustomed to receiving news for free.  The membership of Investigative Reporters and Editors fell more than 30 percent just from 2003-2009.  American Journalism Review reported in a piece from September 2010 that as of September 2010, applications for Pulitzers were down more than 40 percent in some investigative categories, this drop was reflected across journalistic competitions.  The result is fledgling, underpaid journalists without time to fact check or chase down independent leads.

So, can blogs fill the gap?  Jessica Palmer digs into this question in a piece from 2009.  Palmer laments that though there are many good science blogs, we (science bloggers) don’t have access to skilled staff or fact-checkers and that the problems of inaccuracies, over-generalizations and misrepresentations are prevalent in popular science journalism everywhere now as generalist writers have to cover the sports beat, the crime beat, the science beat, the government beat etc.

A Washington Post article from Jeff Bezos shoes a Newspaper Association of America graph demonstrating the slide of print revenues from 2003 to 2012.

An article from The Atlantic’s Alexis C. Madrigal, shows in graph form the decline in writing on Wall Street from 2002 – 2011.  Though the rise of internet reporting and cuts in staff cannot be entirely responsible, I would argue that the decline in staff and average attention spans play a significant role.

Graph from The Remarkable Decline in the Wall Street Journal’s Long-Form Journalism, The Atlantic, April 17,2013

Today’s blogs aren’t a replacement for traditional journalism; they’re a complement to it. And while science blogs (or Twitter, or wikis, or any of a number of other interactive media) may eventually “fill the void” left by the regrettable decline of traditional science journalism, to do so credibly, they’re going to have to evolve into something better adapted to the task. –Jessica Palmer

What do you think?  Is there a path forward for truthful, investigative reporting? Has the dearth of journalists harmed our government?  Our ability to interpret complex scientific data?  Other results?

Connectivism for business

In continuing the conversation on Skype, it's been a great tool to connect with co-workers and share information on processes.  This week, my colleague and I had a Skype meeting instead of the normal call to check in.  It was much easier to share information when we could chat and share our screens.  It was also quicker than my colleague having to take several screen shots to show me the new way to pull a report and create supporting graphics.  I will use Skype for meetings again as a way to more quickly and accurately share information and connect with colleagues I don't get to see on a regular basis.  Through increasing meaningful virtual connections, I expect a more efficient sharing of information and learning from my colleagues.

Is connectivism actionable today?

The wikispaces blog here discusses the learning theory, connectivism, which considers knowledge and learning as a formation of connections and the ability to share knowledge with others is more critical that what we, as individuals, can know.  The wiki raises an important question asking if introverts are at a disadvantage under the connectivism theory as they are less likely to work to make an abundance of connects (but would likely take in what is shared and make meaningful connections with a relatively small group).  I also question connectivism's lack of "oversight" and worry that the big picture will become lost in the network of intricate, piece meal knowledge sharing.

I agree that making knowledge connections are critical and that learning to navigate networks to gain information is more important than ever.  In the end, connectivism as a theory is valuable to consider, but need additional work to allow for some of the aforementioned weaknesses.