The future of mobile phones is perhaps… not a mobile phone at all, but rather a contextually aware and active mobile magic wand. It’s not about skins anymore. Not even about features, open source, multi-touch or iPhoney. It’s about who is going to make the device interact with your environment as well capturing it in context. It’s a wand, I tell you. You know what, it’s going to talk with the clouds rather than with native applications. It might or might not link with the global brain.
But what I know for sure, it’s going to combine cloud computing, augmented reality and the internet of things in a meaningful way.
The industrial revolution brought people the ability to manage something they had for the first time: free time. Rather than finding ways to use it productively, people found ways to sink themselves in an intellectual stupor, where the TV acted as a cognitive heat-sink.
Incredible 15 minutes by Clay Shirky on where our time is wasted and where it can be regenerated: TV.
To rephrase Clay Shirky, people in media are the last ones to ask the question, where people find the time to contribute to projects like Wikipedia. No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus media has been masking for 50 years.
In US alone, people watch television around 200 billion hours. That accounts for 2000 Wikipedia projects.
I haven’t watched TV for 2 years. What a feeling to wake up from dormancy.
In Finland, we have something called the TV permit. It is a permission to consume what you see on public television for a relatively high fee.
With recent development in Finland where people are increasingly fleeing from the duty to pay the permit, the solution is not more content, but more interaction. I was thinking, if this permission to consume could be turned around to a permission to produce. A citizen would get their own TV channel (videocasts, mobile blogs), their own radio channel (podcasts), their own news paper (blogs) and means to tap into the collective action of untapped productive potential of millions of fins and billions of citizens of the spaceship earth (social networking) for a small fee. That’s the direction where nationally funded media should head. I don’t know if there is anyone listening.
I make this statement in an interview with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who is a director at Finnish National Broadcasting Company. He listens, but I have to say that the gears are turning slowly:
I like to state, that the future of education is the history of education. Bruce Sterling writes in his visionary book entitled Shaping Things, that “the future composts today“. When looking at the models of the current, you will see them in a mutated form in the future. Therefore, much of change is incremental in the core. What is hard, is to articulate what the direction would be. Studying the future is the study of multiple futures. What we can do for a certain, is to shape the future through our actions today.
Researching the history of the future is the same as researching the history of the past: you can only interpret it by looking at and sensing the signs you find in the current. Researcher of the future extrapolates weak or strong signals of today. Researcher of the past goes through archives and ruins today. In other words, both are studied by researching the now.
When formulating any meaningful paths of the future of education, we have to research the now, understand the past and see what patterns might recur in the future. George Siemens does a very good job with this in his talk about a World Without Courses. Got the link from Eric Davidove, check it out.
I just finished a blogging spree at Elisa ICT Forum 2008. The main theme of the event was Green IT and many of the talks featured future trends. We must be crazy, but we managed to blog every single presentation. In the end of the day, all of the posts along with photos were online. Truly real-time, once again. Most of them are in finnish, but there are two posts in english, too. You may see them here.
I’ve now done this blogging thing at several different events and this was the first time I was able to capture each single one as a blog post. It keeps you easily awake for the rest of the day, but the speed you need to crunch words doesn’t really leave much time for reflection, just enough to form coherent sentences. Therefore, it was more of a reportage, than opinionated commentary. I believe if I had just a speed writer along with me, I could easily capture ideas and reflect them in real-time.
We also featured a video blog kiosk, where people were able to try video blogging for the first time with simple equipment you can pick up at a local store. Truly, it was a lot of fun.
Many people often come to me and thank me for a great presentation. It might be that I’m a good speaker and that the content is interesting, but I believe that a lot of it has to do with the style on how I use my slides. I’m confident that even uninteresting content can be presented in an interesting way and language barriers or poor speaking skills can be complemented with great presentation design.
When I say presentation design, I’m talking about the approach on how you create your slides to complement (rather than overload) your story, how simplicity is applied and how metaphors or visuals are used to support your message. You might also consider the flow of your presentation, when you throw jokes, when you go into details, when you ask the audience a question, how you develop the story, when you add some audio or video and how to apply some cross-media feats.
This sounds quite simple but it requires a lot of practice, time and patience. Anyone can be a great presenter, even if you believe you don’t have any sensibility for visual communication. By applying this simple advice you can get so much better results. Here is what I would suggest to improve an existing slide full of bullet points and corporate branding:
Drop the bullet points to the notes section. If you know your stuff, you don’t need them. If you really must, split the slide so that you have a slide for each bullet point
Think of a metaphor that could illustrate your point to draw the picture in the mind of your audience just as it is (think Jesus, much of his success is based on inspiring metaphors)
If you cannot come up with a metaphor, use a simple photo to illustrate your point (see istockphoto.com for examples)
If you need to add words, use a 2-5 words or use a short quote, if possible
Never position text over a detailed part of your image, because it interferes with the background and reduces readability. If you need, edit the photo by reducing detail on certain parts with fades or blur, or cut it into pieces
Use high quality photos. If the photo is a bit dull, use the built-in features to cheer it up by adding contrast or fiddling with gamma and brightness settings
Remove all slide numbers, corporate branding, visually unnecessary elements and links. You can have those on their individual slides (e.g. on the beginning and end), but not on every slide
If you really need motion, add slide animation that makes sense and supports the image (say, if you have a picture of a book, use a page flip transition)
Make sure all elements are lined up symmetrically to slide borders or other considerable boundaries
If your presentation has some identifiable major sections, you might want to use some slides to identify change of phase. Use similar style on each that stands out of the rest
Use the largest font size you can afford with a readable font (arial, verdana, gill sans…)
Use font color that sticks out of the background. With dark backgrounds use white or a very light color, with white backgrounds use slightly gray black or any almost black color
If you have a Mac, use Apple Keynote to get really professional results with less work
Be proud to do things differently than anyone else in the conference
With this approach you will get slides that do not interfere with your speech (avoid all situations where people start to read your slides or need binoculars to make sense of it). When using images and less words, the photos as metaphors give you much more freedom to modify your presentation on the fly if you need to.
The next step is to forget slides altogether, maybe even making your presentation completely non-linear and spontaneous.
For more resources, see the following presentation by Garr Reynolds:
My friend Eric Davidove from London made a great presentation on effective learning, as it happens today. Well, Super Learners do not use the 70s method called superlearning to acquire and remember a lot of information, but rather the 21st century method of messy Web 2.0 spaces to actively remix and co-create knowledge to reach even greater results. Coming to thing about this, superlearning as a concept is so school 1.0, where you acquire as much information as possible, so that you can reproduce it in various contexts…and bore yourself to death. We have moved forward from that, let’s call it superlearning x.o, where you no longer acquire as much as possible, but share as much as possible in a two-way environment.
Eric encourages sharing and high-density communication, both by learners and organizations to empower themselves through various unguided serendipitous activity. Super learners see clarity in noisy, messy and information-overladen environments. Well, that’s my gobbeligoo of the topic, Eric has a very down to earth and easy to understand presentation (about 7 minutes) on the topic:
A few moments ago I delivered my presentation entitled “Culture Matters: The cultural requirements for Web 2.0 powered innovation, networking, and collaboration” at Accenture Innovation Forum here in London. I had plenty of time to research, create and cook up new ideas, so the slideshow is almost completely new compared to my earlier work, but I couldn’t resist to put in a few of my favourites.
I also created a 2×2 matrix to explain my strategy for releasing my presentation recordings. I usually use a camcorder with a wireless microphone to record my talks and I make them available in one way or another - even if the talk was complete failure, as illustrated in the chart below:
Top performance and great ideas Action: Video goes unedited on the internet. Job done.
Top performance but boring rambling Action: If you have less of those great ideas, it helps to drop back to audio form and edit out the parts that are complete nonsense.
Weary and unanimated performance, but great ideas Action: Better cut out the boring looks and bad hairday, and just release the audio podcast.
Weary and unanimated performance combined with boring rambling Action: If you look bad and the content is from somewhere down under, it’s better just cook up a fantasy of what you thought should have happened, in other words blog about it.
The point is to share, no matter what. We’ll see what I will do with the video recording from this event.
MasterNewMedia.org and Robin Good have released an edited version of my thoughts on the future of education, and packs a lot of my recent thinking into one article. Well done, Robin. Thanks to Dr. Sam Inkinen for some of the collaboration.
The skills that are highly valued today are not even distantly related to the skills that are developed in our educational prison facilities year after year, week after week, class after class, when students are put into classrooms, disconnected from each other to fill tests, amputated from their prosthesis of thinking like mobile phones and their intellectual capabilities being hammered into the dirt by requiring certain outcomes rather than creativity and imagination.
