Welcome!

Posted on May 24, 2010 by admin

Welcome to Future Ready 101, a free online tutorial to help make you “future ready” — prepared for the increasingly rapid changing world!

In this module you will learn about ten fundamental trends that are changing our world. Some of these trends are already clearly visible while others are still emerging.

We tend to overestimate the short term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term impact.
— Dr. Francis Collins

As Dr. Collins has stated, there may be too much hype around the immediate impacts of these trends but we ignore them at our peril if we fail to see the longer term impacts and fail to adapt. In many of the trends discussed, we are still in the early stages and there are plenty of opportunities for those that can adapt to meet these new paradigm shifts.

While you learn about these different trends you will have the opportunity to create a personalized, professional e-portfolio. e-Portfolios help you retain your learning better by reflecting on what it is you are studying and creating. It is also a valuable tool you can use in your career and personal development.
Creating your e-portfolio while going through this tutorial will give you some hands-on experience with many of the concepts and technologies covered and will leave you with something tangible at the end that if you wish, you can continue on for just a short period of time or for your lifetime.

The tool we will use in this tutorial for developing your e-portfolio is ZEN Portfolios, a WordPress-based tool. WordPress is a popular blogging and content management system that you will hear about a bit later in the tutorial. It currently powers about 14% of all websites and about 50% of all content management systems. It’s increasingly a skill sought after by employers so something good you can add to your resume.

You can use however any tool you like to create an e-portfolio. For a comprehensive list, you can see Helen Barrett’s Categories of e-Portfolio Tools. If you are technically adept or even if you aren’t and you are willing to learn more technical skills, you may even want to create your personal online presence from scratch. This might mean learning HTML, the markup language of the Web along with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for displaying content, some Javascript for adding more interactivity to your site and possibly even some scripting languages like PHP and databases like MySQL that you can use to make your site “dynamic” (based on content served up from a database instead of just “static” content that is harder to maintain).

If you do decide to try the build-it-yourself from scratch approach, a good, free reference is W3Schools. It’s not too difficult to learn the basics, it just takes some time and a willingness to learn.

ZEN Portfolios is a simple way to create and promote your e-portfolio. It also includes a number of “social network” features that more traditional e-portfolio systems don’t usually have. It’s a good starting place, you aren’t “locked in” as you can always export your content later or even completely delete your material if you prefer after you have learned about it or after you feel it has fulfilled your purpose, e.g. finding a job, learning about the technology, etc. You may find that even if you have a different type of e-portfolio, built with a different tool, that it’s still worth creating a ZEN Portfolio to act as a starting point or anchor for your other social media tools and online presence.

So back to these ten trends! What are these trends?

1. Crowdsourcing, Open Source and Creative Commons
2. Social Media, Cloud Computing and Mobile Devices
3. Digital Identity and Privacy Control
4. Online Collaboration & Team Work
5. Project Management
6. Internationalization
7. Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Social Enterprise
8. Environmental Sustainability
9. Networked Healthcare
10. Lifelong Learning

We recommend you go through this tutorial sequentially, as some of the trends build on others. That being said, you are free to jump around or skip sections you feel you already know enough about.

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Future Shock

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

Just a quick note. Change is usually difficult so it may be best to look at how you can adapt to some of the trends mentioned in smaller steps. In fact, back in 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote his famous “Future Shock” book where he described the problem of how the world was changing far faster than our ability to adapt or “too much change in too short a period of time”.

Of course, not all change is good and an important part of being “future ready” is to be intentional in your decisions about which trend you embrace and which you pass by.

It’s just a box of rain. I don’t know who put it there. Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare. But it’s just a box of rain or a ribbon for your hair. Such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there – Words by Robert Hunter; music by Phil Lesh

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

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Finding your Passion

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

When we look into e-portfolios a bit later, we will look more into the importance of knowing who you are, what your unique abilities are and how that can help you determine your career direction and your e-portfolio presentation.

To start with though, this video from Sir Ken Robinson, an expert on education and creativity, challenges us with moving outside our comfort zones of traditional education approaches. He argues that formal education is one of the biggest barriers to finding your passion, not that it has to be this way, just that our education systems were designed for a different era. The important thing is to have an environment where you can find your passion.

If you’re interested in seeing a more in-depth overview of how we ended up here, Sir Ken Robinson has a great animated video that more than five million people have already enjoyed via the power of YouTube.

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1. Open Source, Crowdsourcing, and Creative Commons

Posted on September 15, 2011 by admin

Open Source

Open source, crowdsourcing and the Creative Commons are all incredibly popular topics these days. Where did they come from? How did we move from a world dominated by hierarchies and hording resources to one where it suddenly has become viable to freely share across “flat” but dynamic networked structures.

One of the most important pioneers in this area is Richard Stallman. Here is an overview from his Wikipedia entry (Sept. 15th, 2011).

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms,[2] is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project[3] to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985[4] he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.[5] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws

Here is a video where he describes the four important software freedoms (from beginning to 3 min., 33 seconds). In the rest of the video he talks about privacy protection.

This next video shows Matt Mullenweg‘s thoughts on open source. Matt is the co-founder of the open source blogging platform, WordPress and founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com (the hosted version of the blogging software).

Crowdsourcing

Another concept with similar philisophical underpinnings as open source is crowdsourcing where organizations or companies leverage user-generated content from a large group. The most famous example is the Wikipedia. More than 100 million hours of work have been contributed by volunteers on this project that is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. A study in Nature magazine found that the accuracy of the wikipedia despite it possible for anyone to edit, is actually quite similar to that of traditional encyclopedias like Britannica.

Here is a diagram that shows the 100 million hours of crowdsourcing compared to annual television watching in the US. It shows how much potential there still is to channel our aggregated resources to useful projects like the Wikipedia.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons is an increasingly popular licensing approach for photos, articles, legal agreements and other intellectual property where the author (the owner of the material) gives permission to others to use the material for free as long as they provide attribution.

A great example of this is flickr, the photo storage and sharing service.

If you go to their Creative Commons area at flickr.com/creativecommons you can see more than 200 million photos, many of them very high quality, that you can use for free in presentations, reports, brochures etc. as long as you provide attribution to the original creator (photographer). There are a number of different types of creative commons licenses, some require that you only use for non-commercial purposes and that you don’t modify the materials, others allow you to do “mash-ups” where you may modify the content as you see fit.

This mash-up culture has battled the traditional copyright powers that be. Here is a trailer to a good Canadian National Film Board video showing this growing trend.

If you’re interested, you can watch the full Remix Manifesto documentary here (it’s 86 minutes so best to make an evening of it!).
http://films.nfb.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto/

Underlying the movement towards open source, crowdsourcing and Creative Commons licensing is the move away from hierarchies to more horizontal, social networked structures. Here is a video from Ericsson articulating this major paradigm shift, described as a move from “pyramids” to “birds nests.”

e-Portfolio Exercise:

Go to flickr.com/creativecommons and search for some images that you might want to use on your e-portfolios, either as your home page image, for your avatar or for one of your e-portfolio posts where you showcase a project you were involved with, event attended, etc.

Save two or three pictures to your local computer. Make sure you copy the URL of the original photos so that you can attribute them when you later use.

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2. Social Media, Cloud Computing and Mobile Devices

Posted on September 14, 2011 by admin

Watch the following videos that provide some insight into “cloud computing”.

Cloud computing has been somewhat of a controversial term. Some say it’s just a marketing term to make something that has existed for decades appear to be something new. Others say it is really is a paradigm shift of how computing is done.

Here is a good quote by a venture capitalist that shows the impact on the enterprise.

“We’ve spent the past 40 years putting technology inside the enterprise and we’re going to spend the next 20 years ripping it out.” – Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital

The main theme of cloud computing is that instead of having to have all of your own IT infrastructure you can “rent” what you need, as you need it from external, specialized and usually large, IT providers. This normally means it is substantially more affordable and also usually provides better service quality.

Here’s a good overview of what the “cloud computing” data centres look like. This is one of Microsoft’s data centres.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7694471.stm

This one shows how robust these data centres are.

Not everyone thinks cloud computing is anything new. Here’s what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks.

Recently Apple launched its “iCloud” like they had just invented this new cloud computing approach despite the fact that Apple was about a decade slow to the game.

One area that cloud computing impacts students is that you now have a lot of powerful cloud based applications available to you like Google Docs, Flickr, DropBox, etc. You can access your files from anywhere there is a browser and Internet connectivity, from your smart phone, iPad, computer in different locations, etc. There isn’t the same need for a local IT department to provide everything.

There are a lot of opportunities for student entrepreneurs to come up with a good idea for a cloud based service and then launch their business. Starting a business takes a lot of work and perseverance but the barriers to entry have never been lower for IT-based ventures. What used to cost millions to get started can now be started for $50K to $200K or even a lot less on a shoe string budget.

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3. Digital Identity and Privacy Control

Posted on September 13, 2011 by admin

Digital identity and privacy control is becoming increasingly important.

For example, 95% of employers use LinkedIn, the business social network, to help with recruiting. Seventy percent of companies said they specifically did not hire someone based on their online profile info that showed up when they “googled” them. Between 80% and 90% of employers do in fact google their prospective employees before short listing them or hiring them (references for these stats will be posted shortly!)

Here is a good article entitled “Putting Social Media to Work: Networking your way to a career” from Career Options magazine.

http://issuu.com/gordongroup/docs/15885-cacee-co-winter2011-eng (see page 12 to 21)

When the recent “hockey riot” in Vancouver took place, people soon realized that negative impacts of being caught on social media as a participant. In fact, with facial recognition software, ICBC is able to identify most of the rioters based on their B.C. drivers license and the photos and videos from the riot and they recently received permission from the privacy commissioner in B.C. to do so.

http://www.straight.com/article-399779/vancouver/icbc-offers-facialrecognition-technology-vancouver-police%E2%80%99s-riot-investigation

Even US President Obama has some advice on what’s important if you want to one day be President.

Here are some more videos that discuss digital identity and privacy protection that are good to look through and consider so you have an intentional decision towards how you manage your own online identity and reputation rather than taking just an ad-hoc approach which can be dangerous. One study said that 30% of today’s students were unemployable based on what shows up when employers google them (source coming…).

Here is a good infographic that shows how Facebook has evolved over time. You can click on the different years to the right of the diagram to see how the settings have changed.

The creator of this is Matt McKeon, a developer with the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software.  It’s good to note that he isn’t bashing Facebook, he says he has benefited from it.  He says his message is that Facebook users should though be aware of their privacy settings.

Facebook is now starting to get some backlash for its approach towards privacy. Here is an interesting article about some students from New York that have received “crowd sourced” funding to create an alternative approach to a social network that respects their users’ privacy. It’s called Diaspora and it’s worth checking out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html

Here is a good video by Kirby Anderson that gives some practical tips on how you can be proactive about having a positive online reputation.

One trend that is growing is for people to take control of their online reputation by creating a personal web page or e-portfolio that showcases some of their good work and skills.

e-Portfolio Exercise:

To learn more about this, you can create your own e-portfolio at ZEN Portfolios. From the home page, just click on sign-up and then go through the steps.

Be sure you are on the ZEN Portfolios.ca site (not the zenportfolios.com site).

There are a lot of other e-portfolio software options if you want to try something different. Here is a good list of e-portfolio options by e-portfolio guru Helen Barrett: e-Portfolio directory.

Another trend gaining momentum is to develop an online avatar that can associate you with your content on the Web, in a way a form of personal branding (if you look at it from a marketing perspective) or simply a way to make sure people can keep track of who is saying what with online conversations since you can’t see each other face to face.

Gravatar is a free tool provided by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress.com.  Here is an overview of their innovative and simple approach where you can upload your avatar to one central location and it’s tied to your email.  Whenever you go to millions of web sites and leave comments and either log in with your email address or enter your email address in the comments box, your “globally recognized avatar” (i.e. your gravatar) will then appear.

Here’s a brief video showing you how it works.

Posted in Online recruiting, digital identity, e-portfolios, privacy control | Leave a comment

4. Online Collaboration & Team Work

Posted on September 12, 2011 by admin

Working on small projects can be a challenge.  They aren’t often large enough to warrant serious infrastructure and software tools like MS Project but they are often too big to just “wing it”.  A good open source tool for simple collaboration in teams or for communities of interest is BuddyPress, a plugin framework for WordPress.

Here is a video overview of this increasingly popular tool:

Here are the instructions for creating your team collaboration site. Note: You have to first have created your ZEN Portfolio in the previous Step 3. It has been customized to tie in with your e-portfolio. For example, you can plan projects and assign tasks that will show up both on your group’s calendar but also the individual calendars on the e-portfolios of those assigned the tasks. It’s a good way to keep track of your tasks by project and individually. You can set how frequently you get digest emails that summarize the activity of the team. It’s a much more efficient way to do a project than to just email back and forth.

team-collaboration-site-set-up-instructions

Team collaboration-site-set-up-instructions

View more presentations from cyrijones2.
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5. Project Management

Posted on September 11, 2011 by admin

What is project management?

Here is the wikipedia entry defining project management:

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables),[1] undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives,[2] typically to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast with business as usual (or operations),[3] which are repetitive permanent, or semi-permanent functional activities to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and management strategies.

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6. Internationalization

Posted on September 10, 2011 by admin

Coming soon…

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7. Entrepreneurship, Social Enterprise & Innovation

Posted on September 9, 2011 by admin

Increasingly companies are looking for employees to be innovative, entrepreneurial to gain or maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What is entrepreneurship?

This short video describes how there are at least two quite different types of entrepreneurs.

Here is a good survey from the Business Development Bank of Canada that helps you assess your fit with entrepreneurship.

http://www.potentielentrepreneur.ca/client/questionnairenewsection1en.asp

There are 50 questions in total and at the end you will see how you score on motivation, aptitude and attitudes.

It’s good to answer the questions honestly… only you will see the results and it’s just intended to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses in perhaps pursuing an entrepreneurship career path. Where you have weaknesses you can always partner up with others that have those strengths.

Creating new ventures almost always involves teams of people as almost no one has broad enough skills and abilities to do it on their own.

Here is a video of Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computer that provides some good tips for starting entrepreneurs. He founded Dell Computers from his university dorm room with almost no capital!

Social Enterprise

It’s not just for-profit companies interested in looking at new ways of doing things, not-for-profit organizations are starting to use entrepreneurial principles to address social needs and the area of social enterprise is expanding rapidly.

Here is a short video that articulates the social enterprise vision.

It used to be most people would get a job with a big company and have that for life and it was only the “crazy” risk takers that would try to start their own businesses. This has changed with the average person changing their career multiple times, with long term loyalty to a single company (and to employees) less common. The costs of starting a new company… the barriers of entry… in many sectors have fallen. This is especially true for information technology.

Hear what Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist for Apple, has to say about the opportunities in starting an IT company leveraging open source software. You don’t need millions of dollars to get started… it’s really possible to get started on a shoe-string if you’re willing to work really hard and have a persevering attitude. In some areas like mobile apps, you can get a product to market for as little as $5000 or almost nothing if you happen to be a programmer.

Countries also see the importance of promoting innovation and many have invested in knowledge clusters as a national priority.

Here is a good article by the BBC’s Sean Coughlan entitled “Battle of the Knowledge SuperPowers” that highlights this.

What this means is that if you do chose to make the plunge and start a business, there will be a lot government services and sometimes even partial funding programs to help you commercialize your idea. Governments know that entrepreneurs create jobs and can help kick-start a poor economy.

Innovation

So what exactly is innovation? Here is what the wikipedia entry (Sept. 29th, 2011) says about innovation:

The term innovation derives from the Latin word innovatus, which is the noun form of innovare “to renew or change,” stemming from in—”into” + novus—”new”. Although the term is broadly used, innovation generally refers to the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention or renovation in that innovation generally signifies a substantial positive change compared to incremental changes.

How do you come up with innovative ideas? Hear what Guy Kawasaki has to say in this video!

There has never been a better time to be innovative and to start a new venture, whether it’s a “for-profit” one or a social enterprise. Many people already have good ideas and say they would like to start a business “some day”. That “some day” will never come though if you don’t just one day decide to “go for it!”.

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8. Environmental Sustainability

Posted on September 8, 2011 by admin
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment