Here comes the $35 tablet!

Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Well, if you're at school in India, that is. Even allowing for a Government subsidy of about $20 this is one cheap solution that works and will enable millions more children to see what we see and take for granted on our notebooks, pcs and tablets that cost ten times as much.

Yes, our kit may look cooler, work a bit faster, even have the seemingly essential letter i at the start of the model name but...

... the information we all access remains the same.

Thanks to Robert Rendl, a thinker at Easytouch.com, Vienna, for sharing this initially.

Reason 543 Why You MUST Stop Site Blocking: Your Employees Can't Solve Their Problems On Their Own

I couldn't have put this better myself. So I won't. Here's an excellent article by Michelle Martin's The Bamboo Project. The link takes you to the original article which I have simply reproduced below. Of course, it's probably blocked by your institution :/

Yesterday was a typical day for me as a knowledge worker--lots of unrelated problems to solve, ranging from troubleshooting an issue with a Wordpress blog I was setting up for a client to gathering information on employment statistics for people with disabilities. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having this kind of wide-ranging work to do. Even the specialists among us have found their job duties broadening in this tight economy.

For me, solving these problems turned out to be relatively easy. I work for myself and don't have to worry about site blocking, so was able to easily access and search the blogs, social networks, videos and forums that gave me the answers I needed. If necessary, I would also have been able to access my own networks through social media.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of front line workers at the organizations I work with, this would not have been the case. For them, many of these sites are blocked. If "blog" is in the title or URL, they can't go there. If the information is on a social network or forum, they can't visit it. Forget YouTube and its vast array of tutorials. Even many basic websites are blocked.

At the same time, their managers will complain that staff don't solve their own problems, that they aren't innovative or creative in their work. Well of course they aren't--they are denied basic access to the people and information that might actually help them get their jobs done! They are forced to rely on people within their own organizations--many of whom don't have the answer either--and on those websites the powers that be deem to be "acceptable."

When I do trainings and presentations, participants will frequently ask me how I "know so much." It's simple. No one is blocking my access to the web, so when I have a question, I can get an answer. I'm empowered to get information and solve problems on my own. If you want people to do their best work, they need the same access.

Well said! Not only do I see the Access Denied sign almost every day at work but the screen also tells me my attempt has been logged and if I'd bothered to read the rest of the small print it's probably also been passed to HR to add to my file and someone will be talking to me about retraining and mind adjustment in due course. I am so tempted to type in some really bad site addresses and don't know how I've resisted that to date! To be fair, IT technicians do usually free sites up for me when I ask them but I'm usually in the middle of trying to get some answers and waiting for however long it takes them to do that isn't an option.

People wonder why I do so much work at home.

Binging - it simply neither looks nor sounds right

It's amazing to watch students searching on the web these days. I nearly typed googling but that doesn't actually describe what they do . . .

You see at one of the places I lecture the IT technicians have made Internet Explorer the only browser they can use and left all the Microsoft defaults in place. That means the search box is for Bing. But that doesn't seem to affect students because as soon as you ask them to do anything they type google into the address bar anyway which produces a list of sites from which they choose google.co.uk and then, finally, type what they want to know about in the box. (In fact, they'd probably do this anyway even if the technicians did change the deafult search tool to Google.)

If we had Chrome then they could just type the search term in the address bar and they'd save a lot of time. I did ask why some of them did the long-winded thing and thought it might have been because they all now used Chrome at home but no, they just seem to have got into the habit and some didn't even notice the Bing box

I suppose that instead of googling we might have been talking of students binging. Hmm. I guess now I understand wht that never took off.

Getting IT right and getting IT wrong

Interesting e-learning forum meeting at Broxbourne today. Wandering around the brand new college it was great to see plenty of spaces that students, or anyone else for that matter, could use with pcs and wireless access available across the building for those with the log-in details. They claim to have 'the fastest network speeds of any educational establishment in Europe' which wasn't something I could test although web pages certainly did snap at you, loading as fast as you could enter an address. In a funny way, I quite missed the small delay!

What I did particularly like, though, were the myriad facebook pages evident and the fact that the equipment was scattered and not limited to strict rows in a workshop. There were even comfy seats, sofas and I could well imagine students happily staying on there after the last timetabled session as opposed to rushing to get away as most tend to do in most places I'm aware of. Well done, all involved in planning there.

Sure, the small matter of £zillions being available so that one could start from scratch will have helped but I am certain these kind of areas could be created at other institutions, and the less restrictive attitude to where students go in their own time wouldn't cost anything except a few slices of humble pie to be eaten by those who keep maintaining that they have to block all blogs and social networking to, er, protect students. They do have filters in place for the nasty stuff but generally tutors are trusted to control where they visit in classrooms and the use of proxy browsers appears to be as close to nil as it'll ever get.

That cheered me which I did rather need as a lunchtime discussion was worrying. Another member of the forum was explaining how yet another compliance word now being spelled with a capital letter, safeguarding, had affected her day-to-day life at another college. Apparently she could not have students as 'friends' on social networking sites, she couldn't send e-mails from a private account, nor text from her own phone. Basically, she was told she mustn't communicate in any way with a student other than via an 'official' route and that included offering lifts as well, incidentally, and not for reasons that had anything to do with insurance. I presumed that it was OK to talk to them about something not directly associated with college but not so sure she wouldn't have had restrictions on that too!

The person in question was not some dodgy old bloke with a history of complaints from 16 year olds. It was a bright and cheery young lady dealing with students not a great deal younger than herself. Whatever the age or gender, though, this sort of misinterpretation of initially well-intended guidlines is dreadful. Clearly her institutional managers have decided to bolt down the hatches and have attempted to regulate themselves out of any possible issue but just what does that say about their trust in the decency of their staff? It says they have none, or worse: they presume that their staff will behave despicably unless controlled somehow.

It is so difficult to argue against this sort of thing. You get all sorts of looks and tut-tutting but someone has to. I am beginning to wonder if I might need safeguarding myself - against misguided policy-makers and the aspersions they'll be casting before long.