Shift to the Future

The first time I experienced any form of telepresence was probably 10 years ago at a Cisco Systems office.  They produced a hi-tech corporate teleconferencing room that was and is fairly expensive but unique in how it makes the room participants feel connected to one another.  It worked by connecting like rooms together.  For example I was in a teleroom in Vancouver connected to identically equipped and designed rooms in various US cities and we were able to see each other and our voices were heard in relation to where we sat.  The cameras would auto focus on the speaker.  Participants could present from any of the rooms to all participants.  That was than but the world has changed, dramatically. Do you remember when Sheldon on the TV show Big Bang Theory confined himself to his room and would only ‘come out’ as a telepresence robot?  Well, I was at a conference this past week in Montreal, an historic city in Quebec eastern Canada and at one of the e...

I’ve noticed that some people are abandoning Facebook or Twitter, or at a minimum, removing the apps from their smartphones.  A colleague of mine was finding it difficult to focus in the present when with real people while his smartphone buzzed with new Facebook and Twitter posts commanding his attention.  My eldest son disabled his Facebook account – he found that he was wasting too much time there, not getting to important things.  We were chatting as a family recently about how ‘friends’ build up in Facebook and talked about deleting all those who aren’t really friends (or family) – I did and so did my second son – it reduced the noise level.  Add to the mix Twitter, Google +, Pinterest, LinkedIn, About.Me, Flickr, Diigo, Yelp, Skype, Strava Cycle, Prezi, Instagram, and it does tend to become overwhelming doesn’t it.  However, I think social media tools are super useful for sharing, learning, and staying in touch, but users of these must learn to self-regul...

Once upon a time, people who could learn to read, write, and calculate were deemed competent to participate in the democracy, work in a factory, and live the good life.  Don’t you just long for the simplicity of that era?  Some days, I think I do.  Our fast paced world where “ [c]hange is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be nearly continuous ” ( Present Shock : When Everything Happens Now) is not simple, and old competencies are the very basic minimum requirements to prepare a person to fully participate.  Our world has changed dramatically since the days when learning was simple and slow. Competence (or competency ) is the ability of an individual to do a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees. A key responsibility I have in my role as CIO is to develop and lead an IT group.  Overall, I am impresse...

Isn’t it amazing how choice has developed in our world, particularly in the developed world?  You walk into a large grocery store and you are faced with what seems like an infinite set of choices.  In some ways, choice has become a bit of burden for our brains.  I mean, how many types of breakfast cereal do we really need?  But seriously, it is a valued aspect of our freedom – to make choices for ourselves.  When our choices are limited or constrained by others in ways that don’t make sense to us, we are frustrated and disengaged.  I believe this is the experience for most students in most schools most of the time when talking about using technology.  Technology use is usually limited to what teachers prescribe.  If and when students bring personal technology to school and class, they are usually asked to power it off and put it away.  This seems rather bizarre given the limitless power digital tools exhibit.  Shouldn’t we leverage all t...

When I wrote my first post to this blog Dec. 29, 2009, Disruption is Coming , I committed to a post every week within the themes of the future, technology, and education.  I held to that until May 6, 2012.  My wife and I went on our first European vacation in that month and both disconnected from blogging and Twitter.  Again in August, I only wrote one post and on Christmas break, skipped a week.  This past summer I skipped six weeks of blogging – it was awesome.  It would seem that blogging has become a bit of a chore for me and I’m having some difficulty with the commitment to write regularly.  I guess after 171 posts, I’m struggling to find inspiring new things I want to write about.  Perhaps I have ‘bloggers block’.  This post is a think-out-loud on some concerns I have on my mind about the three themes for this blog. The more I read about the future the more concerned I become.  Technology is “miraculous” for sure, but there are distu...

It’s a short but profound little question, “why?”.  Why influences a persons motivation to choose one path or thing over another.  In the book “ Start with Why ” by Simon Sinek that I’m currently listening to on my commute between Vancouver and Maple Ridge, the author introduces the golden circle ( watch the TEDx video ).  So many companies and individuals are focused on what they do and how they do it but miss the mark of why they are doing it.  In his book, Simon uses an example of when MP3 players came out.  Manufacturers would talk about what these did or had such as how many gigabytes, how long the battery would last, etc.  When Apple produced the iPod, they focused on why you would want one.  They described a lifestyle, talked about why you would want 1000 songs in your pocket, etc.  Once you were hooked, you would ask about what such as how much memory.  Apple wanted to change your life as you experienced music, not just sell you a...

Shelley and watched a great movie a few weeks ago on Netflix called Chasing Mavericks , which is based on a true story.  This one will tug at your heart strings a bit.  One of the characters Frosty Hesson, agreed to train young Jay Moriarity how to prepare to surf a maverick wave (think massive 30-40 footers) in California.  Frosty talked to Jay about fear being a good and natural thing but that panic is not.  In other words, it’s what you do when you face fear that matters, not the fear itself.  He also asked Jay “what do you fear?” and asked him to write about and face it.  Jay had to face many fears without panic, to be fully prepared mentally and emotionally to accomplish the monumental task of riding a maverick and living to tell about. Since we’re on the movie theme, I have to mention that we watched Money Ball , also based on a true story, last night on Netflix.  Our Superintendent showed a clip from this inspiring movie last week during th...