JamesEd.com » web2.0

IBM back on my mind.

James — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:31:32 +0000

My father worked for IBM so this company was a part of my life for many years.

But I always thought of IBM as this big faceless company that made mainframe computers.

Yes I know they had been a big player in personal computing but that never stuck with me, and not them either.

Then I happened upon this whole new face of IBM, the idea of social business.

Cool.

And the 60 second videos say it all!

And what was the revelation for IBM over the last 10 years? Really the same one we are all facing and for the most part in a corporate context doing very poorly, speaking to people as people and not objects.

It’s no longer a BtoB or BtoC relationship. It’s PtoP.
People to people isn’t about file sharing. It means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. A company that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company acts as a Social Business.

I love the way IBM has framed the idea of a social business because as I think about radio or education the rules also apply.

IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a Social Business:

A Social Business is engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.

A Social Business is transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.

A Social Business is nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities.

This is a little piece worth reading and keeping on your desk the next time you are asked where are we going in this industry.

How I manage my social media

James — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:53:23 +0000

The greatest problem I face is how to manage all the social media I use and I don’t use that much!

But if you have a couple of Twitter accounts, a Facebook page and maybe a Linkdin account how do you post and follow them all in an easy efficient way?

I think most people abandon social media tools or opt into just one simply because the management of multiple tools is too time consuming.

And if you are going from a desktop to a smartphone things can get worse!

If you have not been introduced to Hootesuite then you need to give it a look!

www.hootsuite.com

I mention it ONLY because it makes posting updates pretty easy and painless.

HootSuite saves me a lot of time in the office and on the phone.

So easy why did I wait so long to load the service?

What do students really want.

James — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:55:29 +0000

You may be asking why have my last couple of posts been very pointedly about education?

The obvious answer is that I spend a portion of my day in the classroom, at the university level, and deal 1st hand with the education realities of the day.

I am also part of a group of educators that is int he process of fundamentally redesigning what we teach and more important HOW.

Which is a logical lead in to the question of what is is that students want from their education?

I am getting ready to teach a convergent media practicum where we are going to set up a morning information portal at Zayed University. The working title is “Good Morning ZU“, why reinvent a wheel that is working well!

What we are going to do is combine video/audio/text all that may be housed in autonomous web2.0 services and put them in one place.

What I would really like to see is this project find a home on the students BlackBerry or iPhone and bypass the computer/blog delivery totally. We are not there just yet.

But what I am surprised about is how slow the group is to pick up the tech tools and use them!

The reality I am seeing is that we are talking web2.0 and that takes us to facebook and twitter BUT when we look at the other more detailed content creating options the youth uptake is stalled.

So, my question to the youth of today is very simply what do you really want when it comes to web2.0, education, practical activity… what do you want?

death by email

James — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:45:52 +0000

I love the way Hugh MacLeod gets right to the point!

Technology is great,don’t get me wrong, BUT we are failing in a epic way to manage the use of it in a manner that is healthy!

And the classic example of our failure to manage and live with technology is email!

We have lost control of out time and the reality of interactions, on a personal and professional level!

We are living in a crisis of expectations, unreasonable expectations.

Email, by design, is fast, immediate and rich in volume.

But what is happening is we are being forced, by technology, to be hyper connected to issues instead of taking time away to think and ponder a response.

Email gives the illusion of immediacy and to not answer as fast as a message is received seems to indicate some level of inferiority or disregard yet a fast response may be fraught with error and short sightedness.

Our communication technology is new and we need to re-educate ourselves, schools, industry and society in general about how to use these tools for their greatest advantage.

It is great to learn, apply, use technology on the fly BUT at some point we need to reflect and rethink the communication process and that point is now.

It is a PREZI world now

James — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:01:52 +0000

How many of you have gone from an overhead projector to PowerPoint, maybe Keynote, and are now feeling pretty comfortable?

Most of us have been using some variation of the slide projector/asetate presentation format all our lives.

But you know what? We now live in a whiteboard era. Can you imagine using a chalkboard?

Yet we still use the pimped up slide method of presentation.

Today I removed PowerPoint from my toolbar!

I am a PREZI convert. Check out this demo!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I filled a whiteboard with ideas for a new journalism course called SMART-journalism and now I am elaborating it in PREZI to present, here is where I have gotten to.

The point is simple, why present in snapshots when you can do it as you think on a canvas of the whole?

Journalists need retraining, sort of!

James — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:12:04 +0000

Today more than ever journalists need to be retrained on how to connect their stories to their multiple audiences.

The problem faced by journalists today is very simply that their occupation is transforming and they do not know how to transform along with it.

When we academics talk about the changes taking place to journalism we love to use the word converging!

I hate to break it to those academics but the convergence had happened and we are already on to the next thing!

One academic I spoke to today suggested that there are different understandings of convergence, no there is not!

Convergence as the 1st hit on a Google search suggests is a simple and I might add dated concept!

Search Results

Technological convergence – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to Media convergence?: Convergence of media occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all of them, …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence – Cached – Similar

In 1990 YES convergence was easily a newspapers website with audio, video and links on it.

Today we have a whole new journalism emerging because technology has advanced in a way that was never expected, control and creation have been very broadly moved from the hands of the few, the controller’s, to the hands of the many, the consumers.

And then along came WEB2.0, the whole convergent model was then thrown into the wind!

But there are plenty of academics and media organizations who are holding onto the old school convergent model much like a security blanket.

I would suggest the reason we see journalists and journalism organizations holding onto the old ideas of convergence, remember I am suggesting we already converged and have moved on, is because they are unsure what this means for them.

We hear a lot about citizen journalism, which is not convergence but a means of communicating information among the mass audience.

We read a lot about WEB2.0 and which is also not journalism but a delivery system for conversations and stories.

So where are we if convergence has come and gone?

We are in a new place, a place that sees the simultaneous existence of old media (with their converged offering), citizen journalism with everyone telling a story and what I am calling the iJournalist.

So where are we today then?

We are in a place where the writing, research, editing and presentation skills of journalism are as important as ever.

We are in a place where the variety of sources available to the journalist have changed and now include the immediate interaction of the public on the ground, the citizen journalist.

We are in a place where speed is important and deadlines have gone from being in hours to literally in minutes.

We are in a place where editing and production takes place during an event and the story is posted before, during and after that event.

We are in a place where there are multiple and simultaneous delivery systems that may but often do not reside in a single place although they can and often are collected.

We are in a place where journalism takes place using a smart form and is consumed using that same phone.

So what does this mean for journalism and where does the retraining fit in?

Journalists need to be trained for speed.

Journalists need to be trained on the new art of sourceology.

Journalists and editors need to be able to communicate fast and efficiently and both might today find themselves in the field.

Journalists need to understand the different delivery systems for their stories.

Journalists need to understand the new configuration needed for stories and the fact that this will influence the audience.

Journalists need to understand that their audience is no longer static but dynamic.

Journalists need to understand that their work is being consumed,in many cases from a phone!

I believe what we are about to witness is the resurgence of journalism as a career!

And for those who are not part of the 4th screen generation, wed to paper, it is time for a bit of retraining!

changethis.com

James — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:57:50 +0000

For the last 2 years, maybe 3, I have been telling business people, teachers, students, parents, friends,cleaners, burger flippers ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN about changethis.com!

I met a COO of an education group and was surprised he had never seen or used the site, go figure!

This site, from my perspective is the supplemental reading I wish I had had when I was going to school.

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.

And the best part about this service is it is free.

And what makes ChangeThis even more interesting is that it typically gives you the best parts of books without having to sift through the filler.