[...] and unfiltered what I’ve been blogging about… enjoy. Since Tapscott’s own blog references it, rest assured that you’re not doing any harm by watching the extraordinarily high-quality [...]
I’m glad you posted this video Mike – I felt like I was in the audience and able to absorb the wealth of information being put in front of me. It seems as if the Internet’s evolution has thus far involved a plethora of text based knowledge sharing (e.g. Wikipedia) and digital media aimed at entertaining (e.g. YouTube), but I have also recently noticed a rise in the use of digital media as a way of educating people. YouTube does have a lot of entertainment based content, but it also has its Education, News and Politics, and How To channels where people post engaging video discussions. Last week I came across a lecture from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was dying of cancer and gave a talk that discussed his fascinating perspective on life and some lessons he’d learned along the way (http://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv). Also, within the last 2 years Stanford decided that it was going to do the same, and it now allows anyone to view many of its lectures on ITunes for free (http://itunes.stanford.edu/).
These are examples of a change in thinking that Don talked about, where organizations recognize the value of opening up their ‘intellectual property,’ in order to further build the business along brand, usability, or sales lines. To get there, they are employing incredible new mediums that allow people to collaboratively learn and share ideas. Going back to the online lectures, think about the potential of a virtual University, where you’re no longer paying $20,000 a year to be taught a slice of thinking from Queen’s, Western, Harvard or Insead in a classroom. Instead, Universities around the world could collaborate to bring you the very best thinking and ideas from experienced professors and educators, package these interesting videos in a pay per download or subscription basis, and develop relevant and educational tools for discussion. If you can get past the many logistical issues that I’ve blatantly ignored, you might agree that the idea reflects some of the characteristics of the changing consumer demographics, preferences, and behaviours.
As Don talked about in his speech, young people today want to customize their learning, social, and entertainment experiences exactly to their interests. And it’s possible to see the way some businesses are embracing these demands and employing innovative ways to engage and interact with people around the world – to great success! Don’s lecture provided an overview of 7 major factors that are now allowing for the possibility of collaboration on an unimaginable scale, should an organization take advantage of it. Although I do agree, I also think that companies need to put great thought into how best to enable innovation from collaboration rather than simply ‘collecting ideas.’ Don talked about the old days of the Internet where website content is king and that now is the age of customized computation. That’s very true when you compare the old Internet model of information content to the new model of databases and interactivity. But I would say that content is still king, and the strongest and most travelled of websites on the Internet [Facebook.com, MySpace.com (social), Digg.com, popurls, reddit.com (misc. news), gizmodo.com, engadget.com (technology), somethingawful.com (114,000 person forums), StumbleUpon.com, YouTube.com (misc. content), and countless others], are the ones that deliver interesting and relevant information and media – just at a level of sophistication previously unparalleled.
So what’s my point? It’s not enough to bring people together, and it’s not enough to simply have people providing good ideas, the two need to be combined in an easy to use and effective technical/social infrastructure that allows good content/ideas to percolate to the top, and the worst to sink to the bottom. The Internet is simply too sprawling now, and a business must consider the sheer volume of voices that are clamouring to be heard, and figure out a way to review and filter ideas so that rich content is not buried (or enable peers to review them, as is increasingly the case in the world of Web 2.0). The same issue presents itself for businesses that have a good model for collaborating but have no people who are collaborating! It’s not enough to build something and hope that people will come, because your innovative resource will become lost in the back alleys of the Internet – nobody can contribute if they don’t know where or how to contribute. Businesses need to combine rich content (and enable others to sustain it) with sophisticated interactivity, and they must further apply creative marketing, social, and technical resources to build a community of involved people. After that…who knows!
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
Thanks! Ulrike
Comment by ulrike reinhard - November 11, 2007 9:11 am
[...] and unfiltered what I’ve been blogging about… enjoy. Since Tapscott’s own blog references it, rest assured that you’re not doing any harm by watching the extraordinarily high-quality [...]
Pingback by Don Tapscott Keynote at Web 2.0 Expo — Flash For Learning - November 11, 2007 2:00 pm
I’m glad you posted this video Mike – I felt like I was in the audience and able to absorb the wealth of information being put in front of me. It seems as if the Internet’s evolution has thus far involved a plethora of text based knowledge sharing (e.g. Wikipedia) and digital media aimed at entertaining (e.g. YouTube), but I have also recently noticed a rise in the use of digital media as a way of educating people. YouTube does have a lot of entertainment based content, but it also has its Education, News and Politics, and How To channels where people post engaging video discussions. Last week I came across a lecture from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was dying of cancer and gave a talk that discussed his fascinating perspective on life and some lessons he’d learned along the way (http://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv). Also, within the last 2 years Stanford decided that it was going to do the same, and it now allows anyone to view many of its lectures on ITunes for free (http://itunes.stanford.edu/).
These are examples of a change in thinking that Don talked about, where organizations recognize the value of opening up their ‘intellectual property,’ in order to further build the business along brand, usability, or sales lines. To get there, they are employing incredible new mediums that allow people to collaboratively learn and share ideas. Going back to the online lectures, think about the potential of a virtual University, where you’re no longer paying $20,000 a year to be taught a slice of thinking from Queen’s, Western, Harvard or Insead in a classroom. Instead, Universities around the world could collaborate to bring you the very best thinking and ideas from experienced professors and educators, package these interesting videos in a pay per download or subscription basis, and develop relevant and educational tools for discussion. If you can get past the many logistical issues that I’ve blatantly ignored, you might agree that the idea reflects some of the characteristics of the changing consumer demographics, preferences, and behaviours.
As Don talked about in his speech, young people today want to customize their learning, social, and entertainment experiences exactly to their interests. And it’s possible to see the way some businesses are embracing these demands and employing innovative ways to engage and interact with people around the world – to great success! Don’s lecture provided an overview of 7 major factors that are now allowing for the possibility of collaboration on an unimaginable scale, should an organization take advantage of it. Although I do agree, I also think that companies need to put great thought into how best to enable innovation from collaboration rather than simply ‘collecting ideas.’ Don talked about the old days of the Internet where website content is king and that now is the age of customized computation. That’s very true when you compare the old Internet model of information content to the new model of databases and interactivity. But I would say that content is still king, and the strongest and most travelled of websites on the Internet [Facebook.com, MySpace.com (social), Digg.com, popurls, reddit.com (misc. news), gizmodo.com, engadget.com (technology), somethingawful.com (114,000 person forums), StumbleUpon.com, YouTube.com (misc. content), and countless others], are the ones that deliver interesting and relevant information and media – just at a level of sophistication previously unparalleled.
So what’s my point? It’s not enough to bring people together, and it’s not enough to simply have people providing good ideas, the two need to be combined in an easy to use and effective technical/social infrastructure that allows good content/ideas to percolate to the top, and the worst to sink to the bottom. The Internet is simply too sprawling now, and a business must consider the sheer volume of voices that are clamouring to be heard, and figure out a way to review and filter ideas so that rich content is not buried (or enable peers to review them, as is increasingly the case in the world of Web 2.0). The same issue presents itself for businesses that have a good model for collaborating but have no people who are collaborating! It’s not enough to build something and hope that people will come, because your innovative resource will become lost in the back alleys of the Internet – nobody can contribute if they don’t know where or how to contribute. Businesses need to combine rich content (and enable others to sustain it) with sophisticated interactivity, and they must further apply creative marketing, social, and technical resources to build a community of involved people. After that…who knows!
Comment by JudeF - March 30, 2008 8:03 pm