Chris Betcher

Being a bit of a technology geek, one place I've always wanted to visit is Silicon Valley . Stretching southwards from San Francisco to San Jose, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are home to many of the world's major computing and technology organisations. Birthplace of companies like Apple, Adobe, Google and Twitter, breeding ground for new ideas at universities like Stanford, and host to big annual tech events like MacWorld and WWDC; the SF Bay Area really is a slice of geek Mecca. So I'm pleased to say that I'll be spending the next week or so here. I'm actually here for the Adobe Summer Institute, a 5 day conference and workshops held at Adobe's San Jose offices as part of their Education Leaders program. We get to spend all week immersing into the serious end of fun stuff like Photoshop and Flash. This afternoon I visited Wikispaces , a company based right here in San Fran only a few blocks from my hotel. Wikispaces put a message out on Twitter a while...

One of the side effects of the new web is greatly increased disintermediation , or cutting out the middleman.  It seems that everywhere you look, entire industries are being turned upside down because the web makes it so easy for people to completely bypass the traditional "middlemen" that we all used to rely on so heavily.  Musicians are bypassing record labels and releasing their music directly to their fans.  Authors are bypassing publishers and using services like lulu.com to self publish. Homebuyers often know just as much about the real estate markets as the agents.  Ordinary people can buy and sell shares without the need to go though expensive stockbrokers.  In all of these processes (and many others like them) unless the middlemen add real value along the way, they face eventual extinction.  Why would you continue to pay someone to do something that you can just as easily do yourself? This disintermediation seems to be obvious in three main areas.....

Of all the tools to emerge from the Web 2.0 revolution, few are as intriguing as Twitter. When Twitter first appeared in 2006 it was one of those hard to define web tools that, on the surface, sounded silly and trivial. However, in the last few years it has risen to be one of the web’s most powerful simple ideas. At its best, Twitter is the ultimate real-time communication tool, enabling ideas to spread across the Internet with unprecedented speed and reach. As a mechanism for gaining insight into the “wisdom of the crowds” it has few equals. During the recent elections in Iran for example, Twitter proved its worth as a vehicle for people in Tehran to keep the flow of information going to the outside world, even when official news crews were being silenced and censored by the government. Thanks to Twitter, the truth still had a voice. At its worst, Twitter can be nothing but an embarrassing parade of personal ephemera, filled with people publicly sharing the most inane and trivial a...

Someone once said to me that if you do something once, it's an accident. Do it twice and it's a coincidence. Do it three or more times and that's just the way you're living. The underlying message is that if you repeat something enough, then the patterns of use start to tell their own story. Your repeated activity starts to build up into a pattern of use and looking at those patterns can often give insights into the activity that are not apparent by looking at the individual instances of the activity. This idea of allowing data to "rest where it lays" and deriving insights from it is essentially the idea behind tag clouds, whose patterns reflect repeated use of words, tags, keywords or ideas. If you look at someone's Delicious tag cloud and see the patterns emerging in the form of highlighted, emphasised words, then you see a clear indication of what interests that person. The more they bookmark using tags, the more evident their interests. The numbers...

If you’re not blogging in this day and age, are you at a disadvantage? I can see a day in the not too distant future (if it's not already here) where your "digital footprint" will carry far more weight than anything you might include in a resume or CV. It's perhaps not so relevant (yet) in the public education sector where the criteria for employment is not always  based solely on a meritocracy, but in the independent sector there is a definite awareness of an individual's digital footprint as a way to gauge their involvement, passion, engagement and understanding of their chosen field. It may not yet be happening in the public sector because of unionisation and the existing promotional structures in place, but in the outside world where people are employed, promoted and recognised by their actual contributions and not just by the amount of time they have been in a given role, the notion of knowing about an individual because of the trail of ideas they leave behin...

With millions of Twitter messages floating through the Twittersphere each day, you can use the search tool at http://search.twitter.com to find references to ANY word that gets uttered there. So a search for the word "dog" will find every tweet that contains the word dog, and so on. You can even search for your own twittername and see any time your name is referenced online. Many companies now use this search feature to find out whenever anyone mentions their products or services on Twitter. The search tool for Twitter is really quite powerful, and can also be used to generate RSS feeds that can then be embedded into other pages and services. There is some awesome potential there. However, Twitter's ability to search for words being mentioned out there becomes less useful when you search for a really common word, since the search results will invariably turn up lots of stuff you probably don't want. When you're attending a conference for example, you could fi...

The Internet has made it easier than ever to find virtually any digital resource we might want. The ability to locate, download and use a piece of music, a passage of text, a video or a photo for our own use is so trivially easy to do that in the excitement of knowing we CAN do it, we sometimes overlook the question of whether we SHOULD do it.  The idea of the Internet as a place where things are freely shared has become so much a part of our thinking that we sometimes believe we have a right to reuse whatever resources we happen to find online. One of the casualties of this cavalier approach to sharing can be a loss of respect for the intellectual property of others. In a world where everything appears to be so freely available, it is easy to overlook the fact that someone, somewhere, owns these resources.  We tend to rationalise our use of them, reasoning that if people put them on the Internet they must be willing to share them.  And that’s not always true.  Some ...

One of the unavoidable buzzwords of Web 2.0 is the term “tag”. Everywhere you look online you come across the term, and everything from photos to news articles to blogposts are getting “tagged”. But what exactly are “tags” and why are they such a big deal these days? To understand the importance of tagging, first let’s consider the problem that tagging sets out to solve. There was a time when everything in our lives existed only in the physical world. Books sat on shelves. Photos were in photo albums. Music was stored on CDs. Life was simple. If you wanted to find that photo of your sister-in-law Wendy wearing a silly hat at last year’s family Christmas party you simply went to the family photo album and flicked through the pages till you found it. The photo was a real physical object that existed in one real physical location. Storing a photo in a family photo album seems pretty obvious, but the problem is that this method of storing, finding and accessing an object does not scale...

I was in New Zealand recently for a conference and thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Land of the Long White Cloud. I got to meet other passionate educators, talk geeky edtech stuff and just generally hang out with them for a couple of days.  As part of the fun of hanging out with fellow geeks, I made a short video from my Nokia N95 using the live streaming ability of Qik.  The live stream was just a bit of fun, and went for a total of 5 minutes and 15 seconds.  Apart from the brief live stream, I also checked my email twice using the mobile Gmail client, and also checked my location on a Google Map while wandering through the streets of Napier. While in Napier, a text message arrived from my carrier, 3 Mobile , saying that my account balance for the month has just reached $535.  What??!!  I mean, I know that mobile roaming can be expensive, but surely this had to be some sort of mistake!  I switched my phone off and left it off until I returned to Australia. When I arrived back home ...

My daughter Kate loves to sing. She discovered this ability a few years ago when she came home from school and announced that she wanted to try out for a solo part in a local performing arts concert. Although we always thought she had a nice voice that could carry a tune, we had totally missed the fact that she was actually quite talented vocally and so her intention to sing solo at this concert was a bit of a surprise. Long story short, she has discovered her voice and is working hard at developing it further. She's done workshops and music camps and is now working with a singing coach. She really does love to sing. She was recently selected to be part of the Talent Advancement Program (TAP), a program for kids with musical talent aged 13 to 18. For the 23 kids selected to be part of TAP, it's a pretty special group to be take part of. They get to learn and grow by actually performing in front of people. Tomorrow, they are all performing at the Sydney Royal Easter Sh...