Category Archives: Digital

The Distraction of our Digital Eyes

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Wearable Tech, xR

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Digital EyeAs the world evolves our need to consume information grows at an exponential rate. Since the advent of the screen our  for appetite for smaller, better screens to display information has increased.  Developments in Virtual and Augmented Reality have provided a way of displaying information in different formats.

We have in recent times been distracted by the mobile phone and the ability to view information 24×7 on what we want and need. This has become a distraction to many whilst walking , eating and unfortunatley whilst driving!

Recent developments in technology have introduced smart glasses that can project information from your mobile device on to the glass such as Focals 2.0 by North which will soon be available as version 2.0. If glasses are not your thing then contact lenses maybe and Mojo Vision recently announced a smart contact lens.

Used in the right way and environments these advancements will bring great benefit to us, such as giving work instructions, directions whilst walking, words to a speech whilst presenting. The list goes on.

The risk of using these technologies with things we should not is already known in some cases, such as Mobiles and Driving.

Tracking of eye movement is also becoming more main stream and are being added to cars to check our ability to look at the road and also control things. Companies such as SmartEye is developing solutions that are looking at identification, alertness to sleepiness for vehicles.  Within business use the latest version of the Hololens uses eye tracking to help display and select items within the headset. Perhaps this type technology will detect the use of Smart Eyes technology in the future and not start a car until removed.

Heads Up Displays are being used to project information to glass in the car to allow the driver to maintain road contact with their eyes whilst seeing vital information such as speed.

I hope that the future should see the next level of developments bringing interaction with the environment or things we are interacting with. For example the ability for a device for our eyes to switch off automatically whilst driving or at least display information in a Heads Up Display format from the car.

Intergration will be key between these types of systems going forward to increase the usefulness in the right environment and reduce the distraction elements in the wrong environments.

 

 

 

 

 

Personal Knowledge Management System – Revised for 2020

02 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Productivity, Social Media, Tools

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

As the new year has begun, its time to review my Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS) on how I consume information and knowledge, I have blogged about this before and have updated for 2020.

I still split and keep apart my personal and professional lives on Social Media, although occasionally they may cross where appropriate.

Since the last time I wrote about this the amount of information and data that is available has grown and multiplied on a huge scale. Keeping track of what you need to drink from the fast flow of the firehose of information is itself something that needs managing. This is why I have set up my feeds in the manner illustrated below.

PKMS

Personal Life

Personal Journal

Journalling in both a Personal and Work life is a useful tool to keep notes on your thoughts and ideas. In my personal life I still opt for recording these in a Moleskine – See my blog post No batteries required for further details. I find the Moleskine a great notebook to use and the pocket version a good size to use.

Social Media

I separate from my work life from my personal life using things like Instagram and Facebook for friends and family with appropriate security settings in place. Even with those settings you still need to consider that once something is online, it could be public in the future. Wikipedia lists 186 Social Media Websites and this list is out of date. I choose a few mainstream that I am comfortable with. 2020 may see me have a look at some of the others to see if there is any benefit or other data I am missing.

Professional Life

Research

This is split into several areas and these are a few of the inputs that I use to grab information, feeds, data from:

  • Podcasts
  • Audio subscriptions
  • Videos
  • RSS Feeds
  • Web Searches
  • Blog Posts

Podcasts cover both Audio and Video casts that I watch/stream online or download to my Media Player (Audio and Videos) to listen to on journeys (Audio). The mobile is a great device for using as a media player across these casts.

Flipboard

Flipboard provides another stream of data that I consume bringing in news feeds from many sources around a series of topics. It does work well on a mobile device allowing you to flip the pages through the articles.

Feedly

Feedly provides an aggregation tool which I use to collect the stories from blogs and web sites I regularly pull information from.  This provides a list of stories that can be scanned tin a few minutes on a single screen without going via multiple sites. Clicking on a story will bring up a snippet from the source site and provide the link to read the source article if required. Using a series of key strokes you can read the headlines, then move down the articles at a reasonable speed, stopping and opening when needed.

Sources can be categorised to allow an all view or just whats new in a category.

IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) provides a level of automation to my lists from saving articles to creating alerts on topics and triggering different actions as needed to my devices. I would like to automate more of this PKMS to bring the information I need, but it can also help to scan other information to help innovate and see other points of views.

Thinking / Learning Time

This is where view the data streams through the tools and assimilate and think about what has been reported/said. I also use this time to learn and take courses.

Courses

Coursera is a great site to used, but there are lots of others from Industry and Vendors to open learning sites that I use as needed. Relative exams and certificates are then added to my LinkedIn pages.

Blogging and Being Social

From thoughts and research I will write about things through my blogs and publish these into Social Media streams such as Twitter and Linkedin.

I have also been producing a few podcast episodes with other technologists and will look to do some more in 2020.

I have been using GitHub to mainly support some courses but its there as an option to publish data and code in the future.

Do you have a Personal Knowledge Management System or using tools not mentioned above?

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Personal

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Digital

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

BalanceI have previously written about “Having the Right Digital Mindset” where I covered six topic areas to help shape your Digital Mindset.

In this series of blog posts I will expand on each of these topics.

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Personal

Having the Right Digital Mindset requires a mindset change and part of this is to keep the mind fresh and positive. Ensuring that your health is good and you are living life to the full or best you can helps. Eating well and keeping fit help keep the mind fresh and positive.

We are inundated with advice on what to eat, how to live and be positive via many sources and channels that it can be hard to understand what is right or wrong. I believe that there is no full right or wrong answer to this as we are all different in many ways and one model does not fit all. Due to this you will need to find what is right for you, however there are three key areas that you should consider whilst looking at the personal side of having the Right Digital Mindset:

  • Looking after yourself and well being
  • Striking the right work/life balance
  • Learn to deal with change and ambiguity

Again, there are lots of advice, quotes, books, videos and studies on how to be more mindful and change that it would be a long list, however here are some of my top ones:

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

Websites:

Apps:

Books:

Videos:

 

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business (Change, Agility and a Growth Mindset)

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, ,

Growth MindsetI have previously written about “Having the Right Digital Mindset” where I covered six topic areas to help shape your Digital Mindset.

In this series of blog posts I will expand on each of these topics.

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Business

The business area covers the skills and thinking that are needed in your workplace and what you need to succeed. Businesses are being constantly challenged in the way that they operate today and look forward to tomorrow against what their customers demand, the market wants and competition are doing.

Mastering Change

One of the major key components in having the Right Digital Mindset is Mastering Change. Change happens all the time and is a constant thing that occurs in our daily lives. We are guided by our experiences, what we know and our habits.

Have you every heard yourself or anyone say any of these?

  • “We’ve always done it that way”
  • “X set the the process years ago and no one has taken responsibility to change it”
  • “Costs to much to make changes”

Learning to understand and cope with change yourself helps enable any business/organisational changes that are happening. This can also be helped by also learning to work with and deal with ambiguity and help us to cope with the unknown, and act with out knowing what the overall looks like, whilst also breaking our habits to form new ones that allow us to accept and work with change.

Useful pointers on change and ambiguity. Click on the links for the full articles.

Gartner – Four-Step Plan to Instigate Mindset Change

1. Vision
2. Define
3. Implement
4. Measure, Monitor and Wait

Source: Gartner Says Digital Business Requires Growth Mindset and Not Just Technology

Letsgrowleaders.com – 7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal With Ambiguity

1. Understand your Own Tolerance and Reactions
2. Be Crystal Clear on What is Clear
3. Know What You Collectively Know and What You Don’t
4. Don’t Waffle
5. Encourage Risk Taking
6. Envision Alternative Scenarios
7. Engage Other People and Perspectives

Source: 7 Ways to Help Your Team Deal with Ambiguity

Agility

Agility is a word that is used in business every day and is an important facet of Digital Transformation and Mindset. The principle frameworks for being agile comes from the areas such as DevOps, Agile Software Development and Scrum.

However being Agile with a Digital Mindset is more than just these. You need the ability to:

  • Keep up with what is going on in your organisation and industry
  • Remain relevant – invest in yourself
  • Adopt and be comfortable with new ways of working
  • Experiment and learn from failure (fail fast and theory of small bets)
  • Apply the 80/20 Rule

Useful pointers on agility.  Click on the links for the full articles.

Agile software development principles

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development.
3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

Source: Agile Software Development

Growth Mindset

The next major component is having a Growth Mindset in which you are comfortable with the amount of change and the rapidly changing business landscape.

The term Growth Mindset comes from the study and theory of Dr Carol Dweck that intelligence can be developed. This can be applied to every person young and old to reach higher levels of achievement.

Adopting a Growth Mindset by taking every opportunity to experiment, embrace failure, learn, change and seek challenges will enable yourself and business to realise potential and success.

Below is an info-graphic from Dr Carol Dwecks work and theory:

Carol-Dweck-Two-Mindsets

Infographic of Dr Carol Dwecks thoery. Credit Carol S. Dweck Ph.D and Nigel Holmes

Useful pointers to help grow your mindset. Click on the links for the full articles.

CIO.com – Change your thinking

1. They thrive in the face of uncertainty
2. Select your digital-era strength
3. They focus on ideas that leapfrog ahead
4. Start, experiment, learn, repeat
5. Innovate fast

Source: 5 mindset traits to become a digital disruptor

Digital Insider Blog – How to Develop a Growth Mindset

1. Make Learning a Habit
2. Journal
3. Embrace Failure
4. Ask for Feedback
5. Seek Challenge
6. Add the Word “Yet” to Your Vocabulary
7. Be Positive

Source: How to Develop a Growth Mindset

Questions to ask yourself

  • What will I learn today
  • What habit can I forget
  • What can I make a habit
  • How can I be more Agile
  • What did I do that failed that I can learn from
  • What is my next challenge
  • With the constraints being removed through innovation and advancements, with costs coming down, how can you change/transform your business processes to meet the market challenges of today?
  • What tasks and processes can you automate?

Further Reading

Books:

Blog Posts and Articles:

Ted Talk:

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Pack Learning

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Digital, Productivity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Pack LearningHaving been involved with code clubs, STEM and learning in the workplace over many years, I have interacted with different types of learning. Each style has its place and different styles, suit different people.

Since our birth we have been learning and have done so every day since. The subjects and topics change but our ability to take in information is vast.

We have learnt as a pack at School and gained benefit from each others insight. As we move onward’s in our life, we loose some of opportunities to learn in a pack. The days of going on a classroom based course have been few and far between as these day’s the use of the internet and online courses makes solo learning an easy option, but how many of us actually go further and interact with the message boards behind the courses to help others out, perhaps only venturing there when you have a problem that you don’t understand.

Adopting the habit of checking the forums behind a course and helping others learn, does help re-enforce the subjects and topics that we learn and brings in different points of view. Interacting with others in these forums helps drive the Pack Learning mentality and increases the strength of the Pack.

Remember there are no silly questions. It’s just a level of understanding of the subject or topic. Next time you take a course, help someone and re-enforce your own learning. Be part of the Pack!

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Social Data Security

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Digital, Security

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

SocialDataWhen you mention personal data at the moment, most people think straight away of the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica new story and how your personal data is being used. However when you take a step back from this story and look across your own digital ecosystem you are generating a lot of data across a lot of systems. Are you really secure and do you help yourself over data security?

The drive of the social platforms has been to get people to post and upload lots of data about what they are doing and it has become a Social Norm to just tweet about this or post a photo on Instagram or Facebook, upload a video, Snapchat with friends etc…

As these things are now second nature to some people, the question of “Should I actually post that or say that” doesn’t get asked or thought about.

Here an example of this – I often see my feeds full of holiday snaps and people “Checking In” at a location such as an airport with a line off “Off on Holiday for 2 weeks”. Not the best plan if you haven’t secured your settings on your social feed of who can see your post. This doesn’t cover other people re-posting your post though to their friends.  This is evident in the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica news as once someone used a web link the system went out and picked up details of that persons friends details.

There have been lots of stories in the news of postings being directly related to house burglaries. How many people know that these types of social posts could effect your house insurance.

  • Check your social platform security settings
  • Remove any location tagging from photos you take (Check your camera apps as well – it may be putting gps locations into the photo metadata)
  • Consider posting after the event if you can
  • Think about your location check ins
  • Think before you post

 

References

https://globalnews.ca/news/2831282/are-your-vacation-pictures-putting-your-home-at-risk-of-robbery/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/04/john-terrys-mansion-burgled-footballer-posted-holiday-pictures/

https://www.confused.com/home-insurance/guides/burglars-turn-to-facebook-and-twitter-to-target-victims

 

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Balancing the Noise

13 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

Sound DeskListening is one of the key skills in life and it is also the same across the various information streams, however you can get flooded with “noise” that you need to filter out to get to the messages and content that you want to hear about.

I have written in the past about a Personal Knowledge Management System that can be used to help filter out noise and focus on the streams and information that is relevant to yourself.

We have many forms of information streams that can be tapped into such as email and social media platforms. It can take time to keep looking at each stream in turn and scrolling through the history. Many of the streams change at a very fast rate – for example how many people you follow on twitter and who you follow can make a difference. If your following a bot that basically picks up other tweets about a subject and re-tweets them you will be picking up a lot of traffic from many accounts.  This can be to coin and old phrase “drinking from the firehose”. You are only able to take in so much information.

Top 4 tips for Balancing the Noise:

  • Manage who you follow. If they get too noisy about things that you don’t want to know about you can unfollow them (and re follow them later)
  • Be wary of following too many bots as they can fill your streams quickly.
  • Think about using tools such as feedly to bring some streams together for viewing in a list.
  • Set up your own Personal Knowledge Management System

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

Digital Fit in 2018: Build up a Readership

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Build up a Readership

25 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , ,

binocularsIf you have been following this series of blog posts, you should now have a blog and a set of social channels. That’s a great start, however how do you get noticed? How to you get a readership? How can you increase your Digital Profile? These are questions that I was asked yesterday following my last post. Here are my thoughts on this topic.

Have you ever Googled yourself? (other search engines are available). Did you appear in any of the search results or not? Did you check the images as well?

If you already have a presence in a blog or social channels the chances are that the search engine has found one of these – unless you have a name that competes with someone with a stronger profile, where if you go through the results you should be there.  If you do not have any social presence its most likely you will not feature in the results.

Looking yourself up on a search engine is also a good way of checking any security or privacy settings you have on your social platforms. Have you opened up enough for the search engines to find you, or have you exposed too much and need to dial it back a bit.

There isn’t a super magic sauce for building a readership and some of it will happen over time, however there are a number of things you can do to get started.

The content you post is only half of the story. People will often like to click through if the content is good to find out who has written it. Having a profile will help the reader understand who you are and your background.

Lets break this down into two main headings. Profile and Content.

Profile

Blog Profile

In most blogging platforms you can set your profile within your account. It is important to ensure that you have a good profile picture in place as well. Search engines love profile data as it tells them who has written the blog. Make sure you set the metadata on the picture as well. Name, Description, and Keywords which search engine pick up on.

Blog About

Setting your About page to a good description of yourself. Think about using other sites such as about.me Here is my profile as an example – https://about.me/maxhemingway. You will see that it links back to my blog, twitter and other sites. You can also set these on your blog site using icons to link back to other pages.

 

Social Channel Profiles

Again it is important to set your profile and picture. Keep consistency in your profile information, although an alternative profile picture can be used.

At the end of this you will end up with a small web of interlinks between your sites.

Content

Searchable Subjects – Blogs

Your subject and content are key in order to gain a readership. This will be down to what subjects you blog on, however using tags and keyword functions in your blog can also help search engines find your content. There are lots of search engines in use today and each has its quirks on how it ranks results and collects data, however using the standard features in your blog for Categories and Tags can help search engines. It also helps group content you write on your site and makes any local site searching using the blog search engine easy.

Posting regular content also helps build a readership and following.

Broadcasting content

When you write a blog or post something in a social channel you can link between the channels so one post can automatically be posted in other channels. For instance, when I post a blog, it also gets broadcast out on Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn using the Sharing function. You can link to a number of other channels as well.

Once a reader finds your blog post, they can have a look at the other content on your site. If its good, you can build a set of followers.

Timing

The time that you publish your blog or tweets can also have an effect on your readership levels due to different time zones around the world. I find that publishing after GMT 14:00 is usually a good time, but this may differ depending upon your own timezone and your target audience.

Headlines

Popular Press has mastered this art and provides its reader with a catchy headline to its stories. You need to think about the message your headine or tweet is trying to convey. Will it attract the readers you want, or is it not quite on message. Short snappy headlines pull in the readers.

Social Channels

Social channels can provide a readership and following for your content. For example Twitter uses hashtags which are searchable via twitter and let you view tweets of a similar hashtag. Love them or hate them, the hashtag is a useful tool in building your readership.

Following the followers

You don’t have to follow lots of people to get a good following, however if people are following you, its because they like the subject you are communicating. They may have similar views or posts, so following them back may help you with research into your next post.

The important part to remember (as mentioned in my last blog post) is that social platforms are relational not transactional. Following people in your field/subject also shows your readers that you are interested in your topic and the views of others.

Re-tweeted

Having good content and messages that are re-tweeted or re-blogged by someone else introduces your post to a different circles of followers. This only happens though if people consider your content and messages to be relevant to their followers and readership.

Talk

When your in conversation and a subject comes up that you have blogged about, tell people you have a point of view on that as reference your work. Send out links to people so they can find it easily.

Guest Write

Consider guest writing for a blog or channel as they often provider a link back to the authors blog/twitter. This usually needs you to be established with some good content in the first place before being accepted as a guest writer.

Lastly, time is a factor. It does take time to build up your content, build followers and getting the search engines to list you in the results, however once you start getting noticed, your readership does go up.

Try searching for yourself in a couple of weeks again. Any change?

 

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

 

Digital Fit in 2018: Get Social

24 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

SocialFollowing on my series on Digital Fit in 2018, being social is an important part of building your Digital Profile. There are two main things which spring to mind when you mention the word social. Going out with family and friends, and using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc.

In this post I mean the latter. Using these social tools to gain an understanding of what is going on in the world, industry and your focus areas, as well as using the platforms to broadcast your own views and opinions.

There are groupings of favorable social tools which depend upon your age range and have become the defacto tools you use. For some its Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. For others its Snapchat, Flickr, YouTube, Pintrest. There are many different combinations and its mainly down to what we have been comfortable with for a period of time.

There are many different social platforms available and some are more mainstream than others. Some are new and some have fallen out of favour with people and usage has decreased on them. Which ever platforms you use will be down to how you want to evolve your usage of them.

Social tools provide an abundance of information that you can consume real time and through historical views. Choosing what to view will be down to personal preference.

Using the social tools as a broadcast channel is a good method to getting your voice heard on subjects that you want to discuss. It will take time to build a following or readership so don’t be put off by this or the fact that people may follow then unfollow depending if your messages are useful to them. The main thing is to keep up a regular drumbeat of postings or tweets, even if its once a week.

It is important to remember that social platforms are relational not transactional – understanding your audience is key.

Here are some tips to help you:

  • Check your messages before posting
  • Respond to comments
  • Give credit
  • Pick who you follow and regularly check to see you have
  • See who is following you – Are your messages pulling in the right audience – do you need to change anything
  • Don’t over hashtag your posts

Here are my top 5 tips on being Social Media Savvy

Social Channels – Choose the channels that you want to use and look at the audience on those channels. They type of things being posted. Split your channels between personal and professional work.

Listen, Research, Listen Again – Listening to what is going on in your channels is important to understand the trends and topics being talked about.

Be Authentic And True – Be yourself – don’t try to be someone your not.

Keep It Regular and Relevant – Posting a couple of times a week is a good measure. Making sure that your posts are relevant to what you want to say and what your audience is looking for.  You could always automate your posts – e.g. writing some blog posts and having them published during the week via a scheduler.

Think Security – Would you want anyone outside your friends network seeing that post? Eventually your post could be public as once something is posted you don’t have control on what other people can do with it.

Source: A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

Further Reading:

Digital Mindset

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

A-Z of Digital – K is for Knowledge

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

Digital Fit in 2018: Start Blogging

02 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Digital, DigitalFit, Social Media, Tools

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Blog TilesThis is the first in a series of posts I will be doing in 2018 about getting Digital Fit. By this I mean achieving the right Digital Mindset for your current or future role and honing your skills to meet the demands of the Digital Era.

There is no single course or video that can achieve this goal, however there are many that can help you along the journey.

“To Blog or Not to Blog!”, Blogging isn’t for everyone and may not come naturally, however it plays a big part in the Digital Era, whether you are reading them or publishing them, you will read blogs at some point. Your reading this one!

One of the biggest issues with starting a blog is what content should you be writing about. Having an idea about what your blog is going to be about is the first step. Here are some ideas:

  • Work based subject area
  • Re-enforce your learning areas by blogging about them
  • Hobby or interest

The main key points to blogging for me are:

  • Be Authentic
  • Be yourself
  • Don’t be afraid on posting that idea or thought
  • Don’t be afraid of posting different opinions
  • You learn things doing research for your blog posts
  • Post regularly
  • Blogging helps build your confidence
  • Blogging helps build an audience

The next stage is to choose where to host your blog. There are many different blogging platforms available that you can choose from. I have listed two Free Blogging Sites below, but there are many more that you can find using an internet search. There are already lots of reviews on which blogging site to choose and it really depends upon your needs. I’ll leave the choice down to you and your own research:

I myself have chosen WordPress* as my blogging platform as it is well established and has a set a great features available on the free tier:

  • Sharing with Social platforms
  • Scheduling posts to be published at a later date
  • Good site usage statistics
  • Search indexing

 

When you publish a blog, you should use other social platforms such as Twitter, Linked-In and Facebook (to name a few) to share the post which will help build your audience.

References

 

(*I am not affiliated with WordPress or receiving any kick back from this post from them)