Workplace Learning in the Digital Age
Dr. Donna Murdoch
“With literally a million apps to choose from, users benefit from discovery services and developers need the help of promotion. But we need some commonsense practices to preserve those nascent industries before it’s too late.” Article posted at GigaOm here.
“Morozov rejects the idea that “technology can make us better,” and he rails against “technological solutionism,” defined here as “recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definitive, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized” through algorithms or other digital fixes. These include, among other things, efforts to improve politics and elections through digital transparency, efforts to shore up the publishing business via crowdsourcing, and the use of various self-tracking technologies to monitor and improve our personal health.”
It’s an – interesting – point of view. To read the full review of the book quoted, see the article here at reason.com.
An experience from TechCrunch: “…..using your voice to do various commands like “Take a picture.” If you have someone standing in front of you, this is extremely odd. Suddenly they are cut out of the conversation and you’re talking to the Glass. This is very unlike being able to check something on your smartphone while you are chatting casually to someone. The latter feels quite normal, but performing similar operations while wearing Google Glass would seem downright rude in front of someone.” Full article here.
Interesting points from Robert Scoble after wearing Google Glasses for 2 weeks.
“1. I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It’s that significant.
2. The success of this totally depends on price. Each audience I asked at the end of my presentations “who would buy this?” As the price got down to $200 literally every hand went up. At $500 a few hands went up. This was consistent, whether talking with students, or more mainstream, older audiences.
3. Nearly everyone had an emotional outburst of “wow” or “amazing” or “that’s crazy” or “stunning.”
4. At NextWeb 50 people surrounded me and wouldn’t let me leave until they had a chance at trying them. I haven’t seen that kind of product angst at a conference for a while. This happened to me all week long, it is just crazy.
5. Most of the privacy concerns I had before coming to Germany just didn’t show up. I was shocked by how few negative reactions I got (only one, where an audience member said he wouldn’t talk to me with them on). Funny, someone asked me to try them in a bathroom (I had them aimed up at that time and refused).
6. There is a total generational gap that I found. The older people said they would use them, probably, but were far more skeptical, or, at minimum, less passionate about the fact that these are the future, than the 13-21-year-olds I met.”
Workplace Learning in the Digital Age 