I spent half of last week at the Thinking Digital conference. If you ever get the chance to go I really would take it, being such a concentrated dose of all things awesome. There really was a staggering depth and breadth do it. I fully intend to go through my notes and write up my highlights, but I want to focus in this post on an almost throw-away comment made by David Siegel in his (otherwise fantastic) presentation.
The comment was something along the lines of predicting that in the future we will have ‘dumbphones’ instead of ‘smartphones’. The scenario presented was that if you lose your phone you’ll be able to borrow someone else’s, or pick one up cheaply, connect it to your ‘personal data locker’ and carry on as normal.
Behind this scenario I felt there was a fatalistic view of the future, one in which humankind attempts to design and engineer a world seen only in science-fiction films. I’m no psychology or sociology expert, but I’ve 29 years’ experience and observation of human nature under my belt. And it strikes me that the one, highly personal and customised thing that people carry around with them everywhere is their mobile phone. So to say that they will become commodity items (in the way that, for example, batteries are) doesn’t ring true for me.
A related point, not made or even insinuated by Siegel, is the assumption held by many that the internet was created for businesses to make a profit. I’d just like to make the fairly obvious point that this is not the case. I’m beginning to see what Chris Messina was getting at last year when he pointed out the dangers surrounding the death of the URL and the ‘appification’ of the web. I’m experimenting by ditching my iPhone for a more open platform.
I guess I could sum it up in one single sentence: “The more heavily involved I’m with the various social networking sites available out there, the more I heart my own… blogs“.
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It all has got to do with something as important as protecting your identity, your brand… your personal image, your own self in various social software spaces that more and more we seem to keep losing control over, and with no remedy.
I’ve decided to start the Curmudgeon’s Manifesto, which may serve as a call to arms to start dumping platforms that don’t understand how to play nice on the Internet. It’s our playground, and through our actions we get to set the rules of conduct.
Here’s my start (additions welcome):
I will not use web services that hijack my data or that of my network.
I will share openly on the Web and not constrain those with whom I share.
I will not lead others into the temptation of using web services that do not respect privacy, re-use, open formats or exportable data.
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed (e.g. open process).
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The term “open standard” is sometimes coupled with “open source” with the idea that a standard is not truly open if it does not have a complete free/open source reference implementation available.
Friends are fun, but they’re only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site’s social data from anywhere on the web.
OpenID is a decentralized standard, meaning it is not controlled by any one website or service provider. You control how much personal information you choose to share with websites that accept OpenIDs, and multiple OpenIDs can be used for different websites or purposes. If your email (Google, Yahoo, AOL), photo stream (Flickr) or blog (Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal) serves as your primary online presence, OpenID allows you to use that portable identity across the web.
Conclusion:
Change the name of the Curmudgeon’s Manifesto to the Open Educators’ Manifesto (or similar). Back OpenID and OpenSocial. People like to sign up to positive-sounding things that cite big players or existing traction. I’m sure Chris Messina and other open (source/web) advocates have a take on this! 😀
Update: view the latest #movemeon tweets via Twitter Search!
If you’ve been living under a rock, Twitter is a communications medium limited to 140-characters that has taken the world by storm.
If you’re baffled by what’s below, the hashtag (first proposed by Chris Messina in 2007) allows ‘channels’ to be created in Twitter. These can be followed by services like TwitterFall.
Thus we get tweets similar to the following that recommends people to follow:
I’d like to propose a new hashtag to help new and existing teachers share and pick up tips. It’s based on the title of a section of the Historical Association’s Teaching Historymagazine that aims to move student and newly qualified teachers forward. Thus we’d get something like:
I think this would be manageable. After all, how long does it take to reflect on a lesson, realise something and fire off a 140-character message? :-p
I spent half of last week at the Thinking Digital conference. If you ever get the chance to go I really would take it, being such a concentrated dose of all things awesome. There really was a staggering depth and breadth do it. I fully intend to go through my notes and write up my highlights, but I want to focus in this post on an almost throw-away comment made by David Siegel in his (otherwise fantastic) presentation.
