As I moved around from friends’ houses and hotel to hotel over the Christmas and New Year period, I reflected on the need to continually charge devices, becoming ever alert to plug sockets on trains, planes and unfamiliar living rooms.  Where to sit to be close (and not leave wires for people to trip over), do I have the correct charger/adapter and dongles. I’ve managed to internalise the need to carry a raft of chargers, adapters, duplicates in different bags. I’ve become adept at flipping between wifi and network carriers, hopping in and out of hotel lobbies.  It occurred to me that I have become the equivalent of a 21st century hunter-gatherer drifting from point to point, picking up electricity, wifi or broadband juice where I find it – and in competition at times for sometimes scarce resources.  adds a frisson of excitement to the journey I guess!

As many of you are aware, I spend a fair bit of time trying to debunk the myth of the so-called Digital Native. Here’s a link to a blogpost in the new Tech publication, The Kernel.

Looking forward to working with Lisa Harris, Alan Rae and Cristina Cost tomorrow, giving a workshop in Southampton on how to get out there using Social Media.  My part of the presentation is here but for more detail, see Lisa’s blog here.

Update

I’m  pleased to say that I have had some good people applying for this opportunity – sorry to say the deadline is now passed, and I’m working on the selection.  Of course, I’m always interested in new colleagues who want to work with me in this space so feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss anything further.  Thanks to all those who applied and colleagues who circulated the link.

Work with me at the University of Southampton’s School of Management

Project Title: Digital disruption and value creation

The research focuses on how small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector can realise value from mobile communications.  It embraces innovation theory and business strategy and will enhance competitiveness in UK plc.

Supervisor: Dr Lorraine Warren

Start Date: October 2010

Details of the Project:

The rapid development of digital technologies now presents a nexus of possibilities: widespread access to broadband/mobile technologies; smartphones enabling new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development; software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication  with the potential to amplify to (potentially) a global audience; readily available real-time geographical data; increasing availability of government datasets to the public.  This nexus produces a new locus of innovation, a shift from the corporation to the individual, recognised in new so-called paradigms for innovation, ‘open innovation’ (Chesbrough) and ‘democratic innovation’ (von Hippel) across the distributed innovation networks foreseen by Rothwell.  The barriers to digital innovation by non-computer scientists have been significantly lowered as the plethora of new businesses in the fields of social media, or smartphone applications demonstrate.  It should now easier than it has ever been to not only access and use new technologies, but to extend them, customise them, develop new combinations, and to access and develop new sectors and markets.  Thus the potential for not only incremental innovation but transformative, disruptive innovation is also possible.

However the roadmap for inductive thinking that will create value in novel and unforeseen ways in new contexts and settings is not clear.  Classical technology transfer models are too linear to translate into this milieu and are also too focussed on economic value creation at the expense of the other forms of value – social, cultural, creative, artistic and technological – that are so significant in the 21st century.

At the heart of this project is a continuation, development and extension of ongoing research on the use of complexity theory to provide an understanding of value creation in disruptive contexts because of its potential to: conceptualise across multiple, interlinked levels of analysis (ie non linear); relate initial conditions to indeterminate outcomes.  To explore the above, the project will take as its starting point the use of the iphone/smartphone as a tool for small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector, now that people are using mobile applications  for a wide range of tasks, from purchases, service access communication and information retrieval, bypassing traditional web access.

The Student

The project would suit a School of Management student with an MSc in a relevant qualitative discipline, or a mature student with industry experience.  In terms of future employability, the student would graduate with detailed knowledge and practical understandings that would support entry into the industry, or the development of their own business, trading consultancy skills either to companies or government agencies.

To apply for one of the above scholarships, please apply for a place on our PhD programme by following these instructions at: http://www.management.soton.ac.uk/StudyOpportunities/PhD Please email Phdteam@soton.ac.uk once you have applied stating your application number and which scholarship you are interested in.

All completed applications, which include all supporting documents and details of any funding already awarded, received by 31st July 2010 will be considered for the scholarships.  Students who already have significant sponsorship will not be awarded scholarships under this scheme.

Just a quick post to say how much I enjoyed my visit to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim this week.  Thanks to Ole Jonny Klakegg and Hans Petter Krane for making my visit so pleasant and so useful. We’re all looking forward to building an ongoing collaboration to enrich both teaching and research in many different ways in future.  As well as a number of business meetings, I was pleased to give  a short workshop on the theme of how to use social media to build academic identity online.  About 12 people attended and I’m hoping to see at least some of them online soon .

Trondheim is certainly a beautiful place, and I’m looking forward to going back, especially to a couple of very good eating places, the Fischmarkt [where they sell fish and will cook you some fresh   ], and the historic Skydsstation.

Just a very short post to make people aware, if they’re not already, about a great new magazine I came across at the EPSRC’s ExICTe workshop in Birmingham on Wednesday.   Computer Science for Fun, or cs4fn, was created and is written and edited by Paul Curzon, Peter McOwan and Jonathan Black of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science of Queen Mary, University of London. Google, Microsoft and ARM are supporters from industry.  It’s a collection of fun stuff about computer science, teaching resources and advice.  The idea is to get sophisticated ideas over in schools by methods that capture the attention – such as magic tricks – while making a conceptual point as well – and encourage people to take up Computer Science as a career or at university.   There’s a high-quality magazine as well as a website, with entertaining articles such as Torchwood: In need of Backup Actually, grown-up kids would enjoy this too!

Boomers are tech-savvy, avid Internet users and multitask online while watching TV, says a recent report from eMarketer, Boomer Demographics and Media Usage. In the article, the author of the report Lisa E. Phillips points out that in their youth Boomers  “…eagerly adopted new technologies such as Walkmans, VCRs, PCs, DVRs and the Internet” .  In many cases this is true, and in earlier posts I have questioned the ‘Digital Native’ tag attached so frequently to Generation Y.  I’d go further than that too:  there are some very savvy Boomers out there, I speak from experience here, who came up the hard way through technology.  Many of them learned the basics of computing on command-line driven systems of various kinds, including DOS, and had to write short macros to get  office-style  applications to do anything remotely interesting.  Indeed for some of us it was dumb terminals on a mainframe.  We then got used to Windows/GUI WYSIWYG working, and started to work with ‘multimedia’, graphics, videos and sound, when applications were thin on the ground and processor power and RAM memory were low, and CD-ROM was the storage du jour.  To make things work, you had to know a fair bit about the underlying system, for workarounds and dodges.  And so it went on, as peer-to-peer networking and eventually the Internet became the norm.  Adopters expanded the capabilities of these technologies, through knowing quite  a bit about what went on underneath the interface – you just had to, to make early stuff work just that little bit harder.  So, yes, my settee looks a bit like mission control, as I mix TV, PC and smartphone, apps, location, cloud – looking forward to the next stage!

In a recent blogpost my colleague Lisa Harris presented an overview of the idea of the ‘digital native’, that is, someone who has grown up with the technology and uses it proficiently and naturally [How competent are new students with technology (really), www.lisaharrismarketing.com].  In the post, she shows that while there is some evidence for the existence of the digital native student, there is quite as much against.  She highlights that Bennett, Maton and Kevin (2008) consider that ‘it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations’ (p779).

Indeed in our everyday experience (we work together in  the University of Southampton’s School of Management) we find many students, both postgraduate and undergraduate, who are quite weak in technology skills and reluctant to engage with new learning styles based around, say, social media. Underneath this debate, informal conversations with undergraduate students worry me – they seem at times to reveal an over-confidence in their skills (perhaps fuelled by the digital native discourse) that may not be justified in a fast-changing world where the use of social media and mobile communications is changing what is needed.  If universities are to respond to this, and support our students in their efforts to meet the needs of the job market, we need to be clear about what is meant by digital competence.  With that in mind, reflecting on all the conversations I produced the categorisation below:

In short, passives are quite adept with using technology to acquire and re-present information and communicate with others, using mobile phones, or sites such as Facebook.  Essentially they consume the outputs of others.  And they may do this very efficiently and effectively, although their usage tends to be largely at the individual level – they join and use group, but again not very proactively.  Creators however take things a little further – they produce material, perhaps uploading videos, soundfiles, acquire collections of bookmarks and perhaps keep a (regularly updated) blog.  They are more active users of say, Facebook, perhaps using it to organise events, rather than just tag along.  They may well network actively online, but largely among existing friends.  Disruptors are the most skilled, defined by their maintenance of a strong online personal identity; they may download applications to smartphones, develop new activities as a result, and use social media to bring in contacts and resources from outside their sphere of existing influence.

Experience suggests that there may be a pyramid here, with most students falling into the passive category, and only a few  aspiring to be disruptors. I would very much like to continue my research on this topic!!  What is worrying is that those in the passive category may consider themselves to be quite skilled.  This needs to be challenged if students are going to impress employers.  Just this Tuesday, I flew back from Guernsey sitting next to a guy from one of the town’s leading accountancy firms.  As we compared our views on the performance of our Blackberry Bold phones (yeah, I know) it was clear that he was expected as part of his everyday job to be able to download, and use new applications on a smartphone – this is not tomorrow in business, this is not for technologists, this is NOW.  We owe it to our students to take this agenda forward.  I’ll finish with a quote from Lisa, as I really couldn’t have put it better myself,

“At a time when universities face criticism for declining standards and graduate unemployment is at record levels, producing individuals with the skills, time and confidence to navigate and manage the online environment is increasingly important. Such students will stand out from the crowd by gaining access to new career opportunities, finding niche or potentially global audiences for their work, or enriching the lives of others. Those who do not display such initiative risk being marginalised or left behind.”

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L.(2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology 39/5 775-786

Harris, L. J., Warren, L., Leah, J. H. and Ashleigh, M. J. A. (2009), Small steps across the chasm: ideas for embedding a culture of open education in the university sector, OpenEd2009, August, Vancouver