So I gave a presentation at Professional Development day. While my execution was not up to par, the content was well received and I believe appropriate for the opening presentation. Basically, I provide 5 steps to keeping up with technology.
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You have to love technology. It touches almost every aspect of our lives and it always comes with a learning curve. And right when you get comfortable and life seems manageable, a new technology surfaces offering new capabilities, opportunities and challenges.
This is not to suggest that technology is bad, but it can present challenges. If you are like most people, you may be interested in why 225 million people are on MySpace or why Facebook has a growth rate of over 500%. You may want to know which of the latest cell phones provide the best capabilities and keep you connected via voice, text, email and web. What are the advantages of YouTube over the other 30 online video publishing services?
However, the rapid pace of change coupled with the sheer number of new services can leave you feeling left behind and anxious about how to get started.
I would like to suggest five steps towards approaching the task of keeping up with technology. Note, these same steps can be used to stay current with most subject matter.
1. First and foremost, relax. Do not let technology overwhelm and stress you. There are over 100 million blogs covering thousands of subjects, you cannot read them all. Studies have shown that up to 90% of software features go unused, don’t feel you have to learn them all. Recognize your own limitations and priorities and understand that you are not alone.
2. Stay curious. Embrace your inner child and don’t be afraid to play. It can be more challenging for people over the age of 25 to experiment with technology. We didn’t grow up in the digital age and we like to understand what will happen before we press a button. Don’t be too quick to judge the value of a new service or technology until you have had a chance to experience it. Look for potential and be creative.
3. Use a Start Page service like PageFlakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/), Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) or iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig) to organize and review information. These services provide capabilities to create your own “home” page and aggregate information and applications into one easy to use location. They list numerous resources which can keep you current on everything from the newest gadgets to the latest entries in social media.
4. Network with your friends and colleagues. We can communicate, share information and engage with more people today than ever before. Take advantage of services like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) or Twitter (http://twitter.com/) and build relationships with individuals who share your interests. My personal favorite is Twitter for its portability and casual conversation. Don’t underestimate the power of networking. Your network can become the single most important filter for relevant information.
5. Participate and plan time to explore and learn. Easy to say and hard to do. Work at your own pace and set aside a reasonable amount of time given your individual priorities. Today, I let my network guide me to resources on a daily basis and I review other resources a couple of times each week.
In about one month I have to give a talk for our Professional Development Conference here at Iowa state University. I haven't been blogging in quite a while, but I thought it might help me to begin to organize my thoughts for this presentation.
I'm still working up a framework for my talk - but it will focus on information technology which is changing the way we work and interact both in our personal and professional lives (and how the differences are blurring).
I want to start thinking about key concepts... specifically, I would like to incorporate the importance and relationship of "participation" and "relevance". What does it mean to be relevant? We hear every day the need for Extension to be relevant in the future. When I think of relevance, I consider context, connection and value. So to be relevant, I need to bring value into a context where others are connected. In the world of social media, I believe this requires participation.
Basically, in the future you can't be relevant and not participate. While this seems obvious, when we discuss new social media technologies and enviroments, it may not be obvious that you will need to particpate. When you can no longer control the message, you can only participate in its creation and interpretation.
I also believe that Personal Branding is related in that you again brand yourself through participation. I agree with Brian Shaler blog entry Who Are You? in that you will need to plan how best to use social media to brand themselves. How do you want to connect with people and in what context?
OK, this is a start... pretty boring. I need to consider some interesting examples.
If anyone is reading this blog anymore, feel free to comment.
I wanted to test the ability to publish content using different web-based services and then bring the context of the content into one area, like my blog.
We have had Truman for about 5 weeks, he is 11 weeks old.
Here is a short video of Truman in the park...
And a short slideshare of Truman getting a bath...
I went to see the Bourne Ultimatum today. Sweet. Great action, ends a little quick, but still fun series, hate to see it end.
A few unanswered questions, but I guess it wouldn’t be Bourne.
Matt Damon is a great actor.
Yep, going get a dog. Yikes!
But who could resist Romeo… his new-born name, not sure we will keep it.
Romeo is a Shih Tzu. Light brown, dark eyes… who could resist him.
Here he is at two weeks. Looks like a cute rat.
Here he is at five weeks. About twice the size and much more active…
We run our own blogging software (Moveable Type), but Typepad is really easy to use. We have our own media streaming server, but Youtube is both easy and provides community above what our own system provides. Along those same lines, we use Adobe Presenter for publishing presentations, but Slideshare has continued to enhance their services.
Now to be fair, each of our services provides advantages over their online counterparts, like a index for presentations. However, I think there is great “untapped” benefits to these online services as well.
I also serve on a campus committee for evaluating the benefits of a portal system. I’m starting to think the “age of campus Portals” may have passed. Instead of creating a campus portal, should we be focusing on the future of integration with online portals and communities?
Can I have a little faith… and let go? Or will I continue to provide in-house services?
I think I can do both.
This weekend I watched the new Harry Potter movie. It was good… I’m in the process of re-reading book 6 before I read the last book. Anyway, I’ve decided my favorite character is Luna Lovegood. Although Luna is a little bit of a loner, she is a loyal friend. She has a very unwavering and unique perspective on life. But what I love most is her accepting nature.
When a group of admiring girls come to ask Harry to sit with them on the train saying “you don’t have to sit with them”, referring to Neville and Luna, Harry, responds “they’re my friends”. At which Luna simply says with no malace “they think you should have cooler friends”. She isn’t hurt or upset. There has to be a certain freedom which comes with that way of thinking.
I may need to create a list of some of my other favorite movie characters (top 10?)… like Samwise Gamgee or Shane.
Lately I’ve been looking at new ways to webcast video with presentations. We (ISU Extension) do this today using Windows Media Encoder – which seems to work just fine… but I would like to encode at a bit rate of about 300 Kbps at a resolution of about 600X800 and with sharper quality for digital materials such as PowerPoint slides.
Long story short… I’ve come across a nice little device that converts VGA or DVI video into digital video via USB. And it works surprisingly well.
http://www.epiphan.com/ see Frame Grabbers.
The potential is …
1. To integrate with a digital video switch which can be used in a studio for much higher quality presentation broadcasts.
2. Use within Windows Media Encoder as a separate video source for screencasting… takes the load off the CPU and allows for the potential of switching video sources… speaker and presentation.
3. Use with an application like Adobe Connect to get a good quality picture in picture with presentation for webcasting (works pretty well).
If you attend ACE/NETC 2007, I have a presentation “Web Conferencing by Example” and I’ll try to demonstration some examples.
Another fun mash-up… Two Minute World.
Spin the world and see videos and news from that area. Nice video of Victoria Falls in Zambia.
OK, here is a fun mash-up. Lord of the Rings Maps.
Yep, my son plays the online LOTR game and thought this mash-up of Google Earth was “ridiculous” – which I believe means “cool”.
Pretty geeky but fun. This would have been fun and helpful when I read the books years ago.