Will teachers grab onto Augmented Reality?

June 2, 2011June 2, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

What kind of crazy person will incorporate Augmented Reality in a classroom?

Don’t student’s already have too much of gaming and visual distraction in their lives? I hear you. But AR is a whole new system. I don’t think a teacher’s age will be a factor of adoption. I’ve met some who are willing to do anything to make text-books and charts come alive. They will be those who say ‘this is way too technical for us’ –the same ones who fear digital readers will kill libraries, or think blogs are too scary–and stick to photocopies and glue.

Unfortunately students may not agree! Many of them come to school with some digital device in their backpack. They cannot turn them on, but they sure know how to use them. Then, when they leave their analog classroom, and get back home, they become fully-engaged digital citizens. Something’s wrong with this picture!

OK, I over-simplified the problem. Classrooms are not exactly analog. We do have computers for students to use. We do have smart boards such as Blackboard and Promethean. But often, these are used to broaden and amplify what the teacher has to say, not what the student might be ready to experience.

I have covered Augmented Reality many times before, especially how it is being used in business environments. Now, as it begins making tentative steps into the classroom, we need to make sure educators understand where this is coming from, where it is headed. Many will want to understand how it might integrate with that marvelous piece of technology a.k.a the text book!

Yesterday, I interviewed Scot Jochim, from Digital Tech Frontier, a Tempe, Arizona-based company. He has some radical ideas about how AR could be embedded in educational environments to enhance ‘non-linear skill sets.’ (Stay tuned for a longer post on that interview.)

As I have moved from the digital world of business into teaching, I am exploring how schools of the future might be run.

Will they be something like the twilight zone scenario portrayed by Ira Glass in a recent episode of This American Life, which featured Brooklyn Free School?
Or will it be there be social media-enhanced curricula, such as the school profiled in The New York Times, where a teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa uses a Twitter-like feature in a literature class?

In an upcoming story, ‘Messing Around In Class,’ I featured how Higher Ed is moving in this direction, away from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ model to more interactive, collaborative classrooms. Truly inspiring work at Purdue, Scottsdale Community College, and Singapore Management University.

Farewell To Always-On!

May 14, 2011May 14, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Noise. We hear a lot of it. Sometimes in the form of amplified sound. Other times in a lot of useless chatter.

In the past few weeks, since I gave up my Blackberry and YES, downgraded to a regular phone, I’ve rediscovered what it means to face a day minus the noise that streams into our lives.

But there is another type of noise that’s ramping up as the US election season moves into gear. The noise of politicians trying to get all ears tuned to their agenda.

This image tells us something about how the hoi polloi could sometimes wrestle control and ask the noise-makers to listen, for a change.

What’s the context here? The lady, supposedly, someone named Virginia Vollmer, used the bullhorn (at a rally in Tennessee) to ‘talk back’ to the anti-healthcare reform person on the right.

There are many means to change the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio, which refers to how much of the original signal has been drowned or corrupted by the noise. Sometimes it means turning out the stuff you don’t need to hear or watch. At other times –and I’m not saying this is for everyone –it might mean getting rid of the amplification devices entirely.

In a great post by Josip Petrusa, he notes that we have all become willing accomplices in this noise-making, in the senseless amplification of the good, the bad and the useless information.

The resulting impact of this has glorified, popularized and hyped events, actions and individuals that were ordinary, everyday and commonplace pre-social media into something beyond wild expectations and possibility. I

…Social media itself has fallen victim and benefactor to the cruelty and kindness of this effect.

For me, suddenly there’s a lot more time for reading, for conversations across a table or in a parking lot. After many years of being always-on, it’s refreshing to be able to sometimes-on, and focus on what I really care about, at my own pace.

Teachers should be “more than talking heads”

April 1, 2011April 1, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

You may have heard of Nolan Bushnell. No?

He founded Atari, and is perhaps one of the fathers of the video game industry. (He was named by Newsweek as one of the “50 Men Who Changed America.”)

He makes a point about education that is true for communicators: that the learning environment is toast, and we are competing for the minds and hearts of an audience that has moved far beyond what our established systems can cope with.

I just got done with an article for publication on why the marriage between newsletter publishers and readers is on the rocks. While researching this topic I came across a common thread between education and business communication. We are trying to pry open the new cannister (attention) with an old set of tools.

The competition for the minds of kids is not sufficient. We have to have more than talking heads, says Bushnell. (He recommends abolishing classrooms!). The one-to-many distribution of information is fraught with problems.

Pace is one of those problems
Class size is the other.

These are connected. Altering the pace means altering the class size, he says.

I’ve conducted many webinars and workshops. Virtual and face-to-face. I can see from where he comes. The moment I become the talking head in front of a cool PowerPoint template, I lose the audience. Sure I have their attention, but I lose the connection — between my brain and theirs.

Watch Bushnell’s presentation, and even if you have issues with video games, try to see the meta discussion here. I have problems with the lure of instant gratification and the goals of education. But new media is not something we can keep locked up in a dark room. The academic response to Wikipedia has moved quite a bit from horror to skepticism to adoption. I have seen how teachers have inspired students to create a literary project using a Wiki. Social learning is here –another topic worth exploring –whether we like it or not.

But if I put this aside, I could glean some great ideas from some of what he says here.

Thanks to my friend Manoj Fernando for pointing me to Bushnell

Why the “Unsubscribe” link’s my new best friend

March 14, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Are newsletters the face of TMI –too much information?

I must have subscribed to more than I could have handled over the past decade. I’m pretty certain that I was tricked into some of them, too. The odd thing is I love newsletters, and weekly digests. But there comes a time when I just can’t cope with the torrent of the ‘This Just In’ and ‘Today’s Top Stories.’ There’s another problem with e-newsletters. Many have begun to abuse/misuse the opt-in. They often send me duplicates (maybe it’s a glitch), or something that’s a thinly veiled sales pitch.

So over the past week I’ve probably hit the unsubscribe button about two dozen times. For those e-newsletter services that have been slow to purge me from their databases, I’ve happily created a filter to make that happen, and skip my inbox.

Have you had a similar experience, or is it just me? I admit I’ve become ruthless about keeping my inbox to no more than 10 messages deep.

So, to look at it from the opposite end, here’s what this might mean to us communicators. It’s about time we stopped trying to fight clutter with clutter. Let’s start fighting clutter with relevance. This means:

Clean up your database. Do some serious database hygiene; purge, segment, and double-checking who’s on our lists. Maybe some people in the database have changed jobs, move laterally, or just use the provided email address for ‘junk’ mail –or when forced to subscribe to something just to get a discount.
Stop automating every newsletter to the point that we just fill up the next scheduled one with ‘stuff’ because we don’t like to break the cycle. (We might be doing our audience a huge favor by giving them a breather!)
Write better stories. This is hard because it requires some real storytelling, rather than a lead paragraph, followed by 4 bullet points, snuggling up to a cool stock-photo image.
Link to relevance. Point the story and newsletter to something more satisfying than the bland web site. Too many e-newsletter stories that promise ‘more information’ are nothing but traffic drivers. Someone in Corporate wanted to see a spike in page hits, perhaps…
Use analytics. Track how many ‘opens’ are engaged audiences. Maybe many of the recipients are stashing your newsletter (and dozens of others) to be read over the weekend. Which might explain why some never get beyond one click. Maybe that group could become a secondary segment for less frequent mailings, or a different shorter version.

If all your content manager is doing is copying and pasting story leads from other sources, and sending it off to every week, it may be time to kill it.

Or it could be dead on arrival.

Dealing with downtime in an always-on world

March 2, 2011March 14, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

This is my column in LMD Magazine, published in March.

Considering all the time we spend online trying to be productive, it maybe a good idea to think about what we might do with our downtime when we are offline – off the grid, so to speak. I come across plenty of discussion on this, where people – especially in HR divisions – wrestle with the concept of that work-life balance.

Some make a case for there not being a work-life balance as such, because work and life have collided and the two aspects of life can’t be easily pried apart. In other words, a work-life imbalance is more the norm!

And if you buy this, you will most likely agree too that there is no difference between online and offline.

You are in a nice quiet restaurant with your family, but pull your Blackberry out every few minutes to check on the incoming stream of emails and texts. Your kid may ask to play with the iPhone… and before you know it, you’re forwarding a YouTube video to a friend.

Or you are relaxing on a towel on the beach, but feel compelled to snap into citizen-journalist mode and take a picture of some dude and upload it on to Facebook. Or if you’re into status updates, you ‘check in’ to a location using Foursquare, even if there’s no apparent benefit.

Faced with this magnetic pull, and the urge to be online while you are offline every moment of the day, where do you find that elusive downtime?

While driving? Forget it! They may have been one of the few insulated spaces in which you could happily be off the grid in the days gone by, but cars are now coming with smart dashboards to help us stay connected.

One company, Hughes Telematics, is working on ‘in-dash applications’ that will keep drivers updated on a slew of communications or travel-related news and issues. These include Twitter integration, iPhone controls for passengers who want to change the music, check the pollution index outside or cite emissions data… and so on!

Another company, Visteon, has the ultimate iPad in-car device. It’s a docking station with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that turns your iPad into a second dashboard to help you interact with the vehicle’s electronic controls. This could include engine information, GPS directions or the ability to pull in external information such as web radio… and even make phone calls!

This so-called ‘embedded connectivity’ could make for smart driving… or make it highly distracting for the man or woman at the wheel, depending on your perspective.

BRAIN POWER.
Few like to venture into this area for fear of being branded as Luddites. But sometimes it’s good to hit that ‘pause’ button, and wonder just where we are going with so much technology in our lives.

A recent study on downtime by the University of California points to how brains function better when they break away from constant activity. “Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” says Loren Frank, Assistant Professor at the university’s Department of Physiology.

Learning, he contends, diminishes as a result of non-stop stimulation. About two decades ago, many spoke of ubiquitous computing as a good thing. Computer devices would become so embedded in human environments that we would not need to enter ‘machine environments’ to engage with them.

CONVERSATIONS
It is very easy to make fun of teenagers who can’t stop texting, even while they are spending time ‘alone’ with a certain someone. But the truth is, adults are getting far more addicted to digital tools, to the point that it’s impossible to get them to pay attention to the real – as opposed to the virtual – situation.

Sometimes, this even distracts us from large physical objects that are in front of us. A hilarious example of this is captured on video, where a girl fell into a fountain at a shopping mall while she was busy texting (if you want to watch this, just Google the words in the previous sentence!).

Texting in church used to be disallowed, since mobile phones were supposed to be turned off anyway. Today, some progressive churches in the US are experimenting with it, asking young people to text a question after the sermon – they’re just trying to be more interactive, I suppose! But whatever happened to asking the congregation to raise their hands?

In our zeal to be interactive, are we going too far by trying to promote conversations and interaction as full-time activities, leaving little room in our lives for offline thinking? At the end of last year, in JWT’s annual list of ‘100 things to watch for in 2011’, the ad agency pointed to digital downtime as being a big trend. This was somewhat related to another trend it called ‘digital interventions’. This refers to friends and family members staging interventions to take a person offline, because they sense it is necessary to help the person log off!

REALITY CHECK
Maybe it’s time for a reality check – even in a column like this, that by definition covers digital communications! I meet with organisations that are looking to find ways to be more digital, and I have to admit that I have advised and coached people on how to be more (and I put this word within quotes for good reason) ‘productive’ by using digital strategies.

But I am acutely aware that there is a downside to all of this, especially if we go headlong into all things digital and ignore the rich analogue, traditional communications opportunities swirling around us. Becoming digital just because we can, and turning everything into a relentless social-media stream is not the answer to our communication problems.

In fact, sometimes the opposite is true. The answer to a particular communications problem might be to get off our digital high horses and tune into the analogue world around us. The customer-service person could assume that there are no complaints this week because no one has emailed a complaint or posted a rant via Twitter.

The truth is that there might be an ugly customer problem out there being passed around word-of-mouth channels in taxi cabs and trains that no one is paying attention to (but you wouldn’t hear it, would you, if you’re in the cab or train with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones?)

Spending a portion of our day offline might be a habit we soon need acquire – or require – our employees to cultivate. Being plugged-in doesn’t mean shutting out the rest of the world. It’s so basic that HR people don’t even think it’s necessary to instruct new recruits to do. But at the rate at which our offline lives are being infiltrated with online tools, digital downtime may be one of the most productive issues today.

Activists know this: Posters are magnets for media coverage

February 9, 2011February 22, 2011 / Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Capturing a sound byte used to be a great way to thread a breaking story. News organisations such as NPR, or BBC for instance use the formula well. Some use it to balance a story, others, to tilt one in favor of a point of view it wishes to hold up.

Audio is also a great way to capture the ambiance of a particular environment. A machine grinding away on factory floor, a call to prayer from a far away minaret, children on a playground…

So why is it that the poster is suddenly making a comeback? It’s one dimensional, after all!

I think of it as a powerful tool not only because of what it says but how it is displayed. In other words, there is more contextual detail that surrounds a poster that adds to the story, even though it is a frozen moment. Two things come into play that make a poster powerful:

The image is at once analog (when printed) and digital (when photographed and preserved in a digital stream).
The message feeds a story because it tends to be connected to a human who holds it up, or a group of people in which it seems to be rooted

There is a third element – mystery. The unknown or un-clarified details take on greater significance, goading our curiosity, and our need to fill in the gaps of the larger story.

The protests in the past few weeks in Egypt demonstrate this. From the simple pen sketches, to the large-font messages to the administration:

No face here, but the reference to another country adds a new dimension to political intrigue in the region.

Adding more context, a paper poster is just another element to counterpoint the heavy machinery around it!