No Blackberry for you, Mr. Obama
According to the New York Times, Barack Obama will be giving up his Blackberry and e-mail when he moves into the Oval Office.
Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.
Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.
For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.
At issue here is the Presidential Records Act, a law that makes all communication done by a sitting President part of the public record. It’s not clear For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.
One wonders how long this will go on. As mobile devices and mobile network connectivity become increasingly ubiquitous and necessary for daily existence, how insulated from them can politicians be kept?
Praxis users on Twitter, and community support
The Praxis user community, spread out across five sites (welcome to the fold, EnglishPod!) is without a doubt our company’s biggest strength. One of the things we’re trying to do more of is help our users connect and build relationships with other users — we do, after all, believe that learning is a strongly social activity.
One small step to that end is the new Community page on this blog. Right now it has a small but growing list of our users that are active on the microblogging service Twitter (message @chinesepod with your Praxis username to get added to the list!), but will expand in the future to help bring our users together.
If you have any ideas of what we can do with this page, or other efforts to support the Praxis community here on LOYT, let me know in the comments are directly via e-mail.
Blended reality, and moving online offline
I recently stumbled across Semapedia, a service that generates QR codes from Wikipedia links, letting people paste “physical hyperlinks” that can then be read by people with the right software on their phones. This is a first step, of course — geotagged information linked to GPS-enabled phones, and RFID-equipped physical artifacts, will allow for an even greater penetration of rich, networked data into the real world.
How will we view the world when layers of information are available for everything around us? At what point will we start disabling the automatic retrieval of such data in order to preserve some of the world’s mystery for ourselves to discover?
There are a few applications I can think of in a learning context:
- History and background of local buildings, important people, etc.
- Products that tell you their names (in a foreign language context, this would be a killer app)
- An extension of Amazon’s “people that liked this also liked that” functionality to everything once products and places are all mappable and queryable
There are millions of possibilities, and many of them will undoubtedly change the way we live. How will online moving into the offline world, and being accessible anywhere through persistent, mobile network connections, affect your life?
Reset and reconnect
On my personal blog, I wrote recently about idea mills — blogs in which ideas are presented to readers with the goal of enticing the reader to mull over the idea, chew it up, spit it out, and help refine the raw idea into something more useful, both for the writer and for the reader. It’s an idea that I have spent a lot of time pondering.
My goal for Learning on Your Terms has always been to connect with and spread ideas through our user community. We are lucky enough to have thousands of really bright people visit our sites and learn from our products every day, and I think that it is from them — you! — that we can learn the most.
Ken Carroll, when he was writing heavily for the ChinesePod blog in 2006 and early 2007, often referred to the user community we had then as “the Big Brain” — a nod to the pure and simple truth that as a group you are far smarter than any one of us. I hope to over the next weeks and months plug back into that Big Brain, put out the ideas that are bouncing around our heads, throw them out for everyone to chew on and pick apart, and then learn.
I’m looking forward to it.