Category Archives: Digital

Avatars – My Digital Selfie

29 Friday May 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital

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The ability to create avatars has been around for sometime, but more recently more platforms have provided this ability to create them. Facebook being one of the latest to introduce a create an avatar based on some standard forms that you can then modify to your nearest look. This has caused a recent splurge of posts on the social media channel as everyone is keen to show off their new avatar.

Some people find using an avatar more comfortable than using their real picture

Other systems use a photo of yourself either uploading or taking a selfie to create your avatar and try to make the avatar more realistic to you.

Most avatar systems are based on a set of generic shapes and colour choices. One of the challenges with using a fully custom avatar in channel where the avatar is an active part of the actions, such as in Virtual Reality and Gaming is the downloading and rendering of the images. Multiple versions of avatars may have an impact/slowdown on a system as it tries to cope with the additional images and polygons to render and process.

I have brought some of my avatars together below to show the different types. These are by no means a comprehensive list of avatars, but a sample of whats available.

In brining these together the differences in how the systems either see me or allow me to interpret my face and features. There is quite a difference across all the systems.

Ready Player Me

The avatar from Ready Player Me is my latest one and create as I needed a virtual version of myself for a virtual experience. Running the web page from your PC/Laptop or phone and take a selfie or use an existing photo creates an avatar that you can then change appearance and colour on.

The output is a .glb file that can be used in creating virtual environments.

Avatar in https://readyplayer.me/

Spatial.io

The avatar from spacial produces a floating version of yourself using a photo of your face using this as a skin to the model. Out of all my avatars this is the most realistic, but is platform specific.

Avatar from Spatial.io

Samsung

The Samsung Avatar runs on a Samsung phone (Using an S9 to create these). Taking a selfie you can create a set of AR Emojis/stickers for use in your social channels. It creates a avatr that you can then customise.

Avatar from Samsung Phone

Facebook

Using the facebook avatar creator within the Facebook application you can choose from a number of face shapes and skin tones to set your initial version that can then be customised to be as near as it can to your image.

Avatar from Facebook

X-Box

The X-Box Avatar is built up from a standard avatar set that you can then customise the look. This was the nearest I got to myself using the platform.

Avatar from XBox

There are lots more platforms out there that you can set and customise your avatars in. For me there is a lot of variation in the avatars and only a couple are near realistic for me. The others are good fun though.

The future may see the option to standardise on a set of avatars. Until then happy avataring.

The Distraction of our Digital Eyes

17 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Digital, Wearable Tech, xR

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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

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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: Learning

13 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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books-2158737_1920

I 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: Learning

How much learning have you done today? this week? this month? Keeping your skills up to date by regular learning is an important part of developing your mindset and keeping it active. So why bother with learning? This is easy to answer in that if you don’t, others are. The next generations of IT Professionals are already learning from an early age supported by Government Educational Curriculum’s.

Learning is easier with the internet through online courses, videos and podcasts allowing it to be undertaken at anytime. The topics that you choose to learn will be down to your role and there is no magic course on being Digital. Its an amalgamation of different skills and knowledge, both hard and soft skills.

One key factor though is that software is eating the world and the delivery of things as code is becoming common place. having an understanding of what is going on in the coding world helps with today’s advancing technology. Learning to code is a great way of understanding these advancements and everyone should have a knowledge of this.

Re-enforcing your learning through explaining it to someone else or blogging about it is part of  The Nature and Cycle of CPD and a good way of checking you have learnt correctly.

There are two main types of learning that we do:

  • On the Job
  • Focused Learning

Learning that comes as part of our regular day can be classed as “On the Job” where as focused learning is where you take time out to do some research, reading or a course.

Everyone has their own preference for learning and the amount of learning that you do is also down to preference. Looking at other industries where learning is mandated as part of ongoing professional development, such as a Dentist or Doctor who must do a number of hours to maintain their skills and knowledge and also their registration to practice. Why should this be any different for IT Professionals? Some wold argue that they don’t need to keep their skills upto date and others that you should. For me considering that IT Professionals produce, code and maintain systems that the Densists and Doctors use everyday in support of patients, why would it be any different for IT?

You should be looking to do 50 to 60 hours learning a year as a minimum (some professions require higher number of hours). Number of hours that some professions require learning:

CPDTable

The number of hours that you commit to learning is down to personal choice, but if you did at least 1 hour a week, thats 52 Hours of learning you have achieved.

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

 

 

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Application

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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brain-2062057_960_720I 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: Application

Application is how you apply your Mindset (not an application running on a mobile or computer device).

We all have habits and norms that define our daily lives and how we apply ourselves. Some people embrace change and others find change not easy to accept, however making changes are needed to ensuring that you are working with a good Digital Mindset.

One of the biggest areas I come across on this subject is training with statements like “I don’t have time”, “I’m busy on projects all day”, “I’m not training in my own time”. Whilst you do need a good work life balance, you need to recognise that others around you are making the time and you may be left behind in growing your skills.

Changing the way that we have programmed ourselves can be done by changing small things in our routines – think Agile. Growing your skills can help you think about and adopt change.

Book in an hour in your diary (every week) to review some reading or undertake some training that will boost your skills and knowledge. Diaries often change, but if you keep to that hour a week to start with, then you can change the habit and benefit from the skills you are learning.

When you make the changes is another important step. There are lots of people who are doing this by changing their morning routines to include things like catching up on the latest social media (related to their areas of interests, jobs). I would recommend looking at a site called “My Morning Routine”. Listing a number of different morning routines from people working in many industries, it may give you some ideas on how you could make changes.

My 5 Tips

  • Make small changes to your routine and over time they will become your new habits
  • Embrace the change. Make it a challenge to stretch your thinking rather than a chore
  • Take the opportunity to learn
  • Don’t ignore the social channels, filter out the noise anD get the good content
  • Think about your time. Could you listen to a podcast while you are travelling?

 

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

 

Websites:

 

Books

 

Videos

 

 

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Personal

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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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: Social

11 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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SocialI 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: Social

The social area covers how you interact with the rest of the world, including your work and family life. Being social is not just around how you use the tools and what you communicate, but also what you don’t say and being Social Media Savvy on your communications.

There are many different social channels available today. The latest We Are Social 2019 figures reports 3.48 Billion social media users. That’s a lot of posts, selfies, tweets and a lot of data.  With all of this going on searching through Social Media is literally “drinking from the fire hose”. There is no right or wrong mix of channels to use, however when deciding which channel to use, you should consider who and where your audience is.

The graph below illustrates the number of users (in millions) in the top used social channels. Source: Statista2019 No Social Users Per Channel

Choosing and focusing on the social channels that are right for you and your business, then refining your following and search results can bring a wealth of knowledge on what is happening around your area of interest.

Building a Personal Knowledge Management System is one way of keeping in touch with what is happening and trending on topics that you are interested in on Social Media.

Personal Knowledge Management System

One of the most important things to remember is that when you post its online and visible to the world even if its a private group. That might sound scary and put you off using social media, but it shouldn’t. It means think about what you say on Social Media because once its online anyone could re-post your comments from what you think is a private group to an open group.

Setting yourself a series of Social Media Rules will help define when and what you should put in the public domain and when not to.

For this reason, I keep my social channels separate from work and family/friends as different channels appreciate different topics. This also means you can set different security settings on family/friends channels to that of being open.

The news is often reporting on bad things said on a social channel or trawling up something that someone posted many years ago.

Here are my top 5 Social Media Rules

  • Choose your Social Channels
  • Listen, Research, Listen Again
  • Be Authentic And True
  • Keep It Regular and Relevant
  • Think Security

 

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

Having the Right Digital Mindset: Technology

24 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, Mindset

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digital technologyI 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: Technology

Technology plays a part in any Digital Transformation, however its not the full answer, building your Digital Mindset is key. That said, it is important to keep up to date with the latest innovations, road maps and trends for the industry/sector you work in.

Technology should be seen as an enabler to help a business meeting its Business Outcomes and Goals rather than a dictator on the direction you should mould your business around. It is important to invest in  the right digital technology capabilities to drive this.

The abundance of services that provide “Cloud” and “As a Service” capabilities are allowing businesses to adpot new ways of working and look at meeting business outcomes using a different approach in an agile manner to the traditional types of technologies and waterfall implementations. Building a partner eco system from many different suppliers provides the best of breed solutions without the need to rely on a single partner.

Further Reading

Blog Posts and Articles:

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

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Human, Digital, DigitalFit, Mindset

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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

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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!