What's hot is NOT hot... disabling 'What's hot' in Google+

... otherwise known as 'how do I get rid of the unwanted rubbish that's appearing in my Google+ stream???'

I'm currently trying to get my head around using Google+ and it's turning out to be most useful as a professional tool.  Which is fine, apart from the fact that by default Google have a seriously annoying 'what's hot' feature which pushes random content into your stream, disrupting the flow of conversation / ideas and essentially spamming you with nonsense.  Now, I can hear my inner fuddy-duddy shouting that last sentence out, but it really isn't a helpful feature at all.  I had a penny drop moment the other day when someone described Google+ as having the advantage of being 'curated' content, i.e. people choose to share stuff there rather than it automatically happening.  What's hot doesn't fit in with that sense of the curatorial at all... but getting rid of it is not as easy as it should be.

So, since I've just been through the process, I thought I'd describe the three easy (but not obvious!) steps to clearing your Google+ stream of twaddle.

1.  Click on the 'What's hot' link on the left hand side of your Google+ page

2.  Find the slider at the top of the 'What's hot' page which allows you to select how much of that content is shown on your stream - it's not obvious, it's a little grey circle on top of a faint grey line

3.  Click on the slider and drag it to the left.  This changes it to 'Show nothing from what's hot in your stream' - which de-clutters things nicely.

Oh, and this doesn't mean I've completely warmed to Google+ yet - it still feels like wandering into a cavernous room and trying to start up a conversation by just talking into the sparsely populated space... then wondering if you're in the right room at all.  But, I'm getting closer to getting it...

Creativity and potential...

Just seen the following quote on Steve Wheeler's excellent blog:

Learning with 'e's: Content is a tyrant...: "The internet is better as a creative space that it is as a repository. This is due in no small part to the gradual evolution of so called Web 2.0 tools and services, the majority of which are richly social and participatory in nature. The capability of social networks to connect people with similar interests from across the globe also promotes the need to create, organise, share and consume content within appropriate contexts. As a society, and within our communities of practice, we need to be able to discern the good content from the bad content."

I think this could easily be applied to virtual learning environments too. The traditional 'document dump' use of a virtual learning environment is the equivalent of giving sawdust to a parched man. When people crave interesting, engaging, exciting, inspiring... and what they get instead are PowerPoints and pdfs... the potential of that creative space disappears in an instant.

Doing more than the simple repository version of online education is quite a feat, however. The structure of a virtual learning environment isn't the structure of the learner. When I browse the internet for content, I move around making connections which suit me. So often this isn't the case in institutional online spaces. Adaptive release forces learners into the predefined processes of the author. Chronological chunking drip feeds learning in pieces which don't encourage the flow of the motivated learner. The technological complexity of constructing a well-designed activity is a hurdle too high for many time-pushed academics.

If web 2.0 is about user-generated content, creativity and connection... how can we turn the spaces we've got - the institutional VLE into a place where real learning happens? What would be the elements which went into the transformation of online / blended learning from the mundane to the magical?

Y'know. I really don't know. I know there are lots of different approaches I'm trying. From solid support for the basics to helping people to connect with one another to develop their innovative practices. Being responsive. Being flexible. Keeping in mind the bigger picture and all that stuff. But it never quite feels like it's enough. I go to conferences and every time get that same sense of déjà vue as the same problems and the same attempts at the same solutions are presented.

The VLE is better as a creative space than a repository. Right?

There just has to be a better way...

If this then that...

I don't see many people mentioning this, but it's something I came across a while ago and it is brilliant.

'It' being the website ifttt

Okay, so brilliant is a nerdy kind of brilliance but nevertheless for helping to make connections between bits of yourself on the web, it's fabulous.  The basic premise is built on the idea of recipes.  You combine tasks to create recipes.  And the tasks are attached to various services - called channels - from Twitter to Facebook, SMS to email.

You then use the formula 'if this then that' (if this then that = ifttt - geddit?) to combine those tasks to get it to do brilliant stuff.

For example, whenever I post something to this blog, I want it to appear on Twitter.  I just set up a recipe that says 'when there's a new entry on the RSS feed... put out a Tweet that looks like that' and away it goes.  I want to know when it's going to rain... I create a recipe that says 'when this website says it's going to rain tomorrow in my region... send me a text message to remind me to take a brolly'.  Favourite a Tweet and the link automatically gets saved to your Diigo account etc... save something on Diigo with a particular tag and a Tweet broadcasts it or it appears on your Facebook page.  Want to backup your Instagram photos to Dropbox then ifttt can do that automatically.  Got the idea?

Blogging is a bit like an ifttt recipe - if I see something I want to share then I'm going to blog about it - only ifttt automates the bit in the middle! It's the combining of services and tasks which makes this just a genius little site.  Oh, and you don't even have to do the combining yourself... people also publish 'recipes' which you can reuse / tweak.

'if this then that' - a little combination of words I never knew I needed until I started using them!

All that caught my eye...

Image from paul (dex), available under

CC Attribution license

... this week anyway!

I'm always on the look out for interesting ideas / trends where learning technologies are concerned and I'm often asked what's out there,  so I thought it would be useful to share some of the pages which caught my eye each week.

Here goes with the first set of links:

• 'Google privacy policy: a stranglehold most users are happy to be held in' - good article from The Guardian which comes in the week where Google changed its privacy policy.

• 'Google's privacy settings - controlling your settings' - again, from The Guardian, this article looks at how users can adjust their privacy and take a bit of control.  Short of not using Google, however, there will always be issues to consider where your data and using services like Google are concerned though.

• 'RSA Animate - Drive' - the animations from RSA are great anyway, but Dan Pink's work on motivation is given an added twist by the RSA treatment

• 'Ten videos every educator should watch' - if the rest of the ten are as good as the ones I've already seen, then these are a source of handy inspiration

• 'Review of University Business Collaboration' - the Wilson review was released this week... some interesting times ahead where collaboration between business and universities is concerned, I think!

• '10 Education Technology Implementation Pitfalls and how to avoid them' - a list of pitfalls which, if you've worked in learning technology for a while, will have you nodding along.  Number 10 is especially true (and one of the biggest reasons so many projects fail to achieve sustainability)

• 'What technologies will shape the future of education' - from ZDNet this reports on the NMC Horizons Report.  So... what technologies to look out for?  The themes which emerge are mobile, personal, information heavy, flexible, active, the cloud and games-based learning - I can imagine that some of these will be difficult challenges for institutions as they untangle the policies, standards, processes and strategies to accommodate the impact of these.  Yes, more interesting times to look forward to!

Wonder what other things have caught everyone else's eye this week?

How not to use social media for customer service...

I saw this series of tweets by chance this morning...

Now, as I did... I'm sure you can see that a quick response was needed.  It would have been the right thing to do.  It would have been the humane thing to do.  You only have to read the tweets to see how urgent things were... to find out more... following a link or two would have given you a deeper glimpse of the story behind it.  A wife with her husband (and father of her two small children) dying in hospital just before Christmas.

You know what the response was from Vodafone?  Silence.  When pushed by another person... what was their response?

This:

'We answer our tweets in a chronological order'

And it took them 6 hours to make that response.  The same generic response they gave to someone else in their very next tweet.  They still haven't responded to @rachelacj as of 8 hours after her original tweets.  An opportunity to do the right thing and offer true customer service at a time where it would have made a big difference?  Missed completely. 

The lessons from this:

1.  Be a human being if you're providing a human service on Twitter

2.  Prioritise using whatever method you want... but be flexible when appropriate

3.  Remember the world is watching

4.  Make a difference where it matters.

Sad, sad bit of customer service on the day before Christmas Eve.

Thoughts are with rachelacj.  For some reason, though I brushed up against these tweets by chance this morning they've lodged themselves in my head.

Reflecting on JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011

Thought it was about time to write up some general notes from the JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011 online conference.

These are my personal summary points for me to reflect on for the future... so here goes...

1.  Online conferencing can be a really satisfying experience in terms of the way you can engage with the speakers' presentations with others.  The flow of text chat is excellent and you can dip in and dip out as you fancy, influenced by the direction of the presentation leading to lots of interesting ideas and possibly less turgid questions at the end?  That last bit is my own theory, but I think that at traditional conferences you so often see the same old people asking questions of the same type that it's refreshing to see a range of questions being picked up from multiple sources.

2. I attend these things for my staff development but also to see what others across the sector are thinking.  Sometimes I feel trapped in a time-warp.  The same old conversations are going on.  The same ideas are being dredged up.  The same tale of 'pilot does well... but how did it translate into a tangible change in practice?' remains without answer.  How can we escape the hamster wheel of discussion and rhetoric?  Small scale change isn't enough any more.  Just because you are doing interesting things in your classroom or nicely contained project doesn't mean that we can't and shouldn't be striving to go bigger and more inclusive where innovation is concerned.

3.  eLearning bingo is alive and well.  Edupunk, anarchogogy and 'changing student expectations' would all have been good to have on your bingo card this time around.  There was some debate about the need to change the use of jargon to gain real ground in understanding, particularly where open practice is concerned - however, this was another of those deja vu moments where I wonder what can actively be done to make this change - when all the while we invent and proudly wear our new jargon like this season's latest fashions at each of these events.

4.  Education and learning are still being used in an interchangeable fashion.  They are *not* the same thing.  The sooner we realise this, the better.  The ludicrous idea that in some way a PhD is evidence of 'lifelong learning' is as meaningless as the suggestion that a great educational experience for a primary school aged child would set them up for the journey of a lifelong learner is nonsense.  Both are about the educational system.  Moments where that works well - then yes, perhaps you can say that true, deep learning exists.  But devoid of any educational system at all... people have always been learning for life.  It's in our nature.  It's what makes us human.  It's how we cope with a changing, complex environment.  It's how we adapt to our various life stages.  The arrogance that education is the tool which facilitates lifelong learning is laughable.  They need decoupling in order for us to get our heads around what makes for good learning experiences rather than what makes for pretty educational systems.  The talk of how people acquired their digital literacy skills was a case in point - most participants (71% of attendees polled during the Digital Literacy panel session) hadn't attended a course or studied it, but had learned about it and gained their knowledge through experience.  Yet, there we were discussing how to educate others in the ways of digital literacy.  An odd situation.

5.  Open is on the agenda.  Open practice.  Collaboration.  Sharing.  Learning from and with each other.  There was a clear direction away from closed, inward-looking practice to a more shared, open outlook.  What that actually means, however, wasn't clear.  Was it the small-scale culture of sharing which already exists in departments?  Is it the large scaled massive open online courses (MOOCs) which were flagged as gaining ground linguistically?  And what is it that we're sharing exactly?  I'm not clear that we're at the stage where we're doing much more than batting around buzzwords - though 'open by default, closed by exception', would tend to be the way I would describe my working practices.  I also wondered how the culture of open and collaboration will sit with an increasingly financially strapped, competitive higher education sector?

6.  Tweetable presentations make you sit up and take notice.  Increasingly I think that people's presentation styles will have to change to accommodate the fact that you may no longer be talking to the audience (virtual or physical) in front of you in the room.  If you can give people some strong concise statements, some facts, some structure to hang a comment on - then these are likely to go out beyond the room.  If you simply describe a project or a process which you've gone through, this tends to be passively received and I noticed that the number of #jiscel11 tweets fell considerably during presentations of this type.  Whether or not that's a good or bad thing, I'm not sure.  But if you want to work in an open manner, then working out how to open up the various elements of your practice will be the thing that makes a difference both personally and professionally.

7.  I really liked the idea of having a 'thinking space' as a kind of reverse plenary on the morning of each new conference day.  The thinking space summarised the main themes of the previous day's presentations in a visual form - they had an illustrator put together some great visualisations which weren't necessarily without controversy (the visual representation of education and employment being islands separated by water, but connected by a bridge was a little disturbing yet representative of the disconnect between the artificial nature of education and the workplace possibly?), but which certainly put you in a good frame of mind for reflecting and connecting ideas.  Really liked the idea and would like to think of ways to carry that forward.

8.  If you're attending an online conference you still need to demark your time so that you can participate properly - whether that's closing a door, finding a separate space to sit etc you have to work extra hard to say 'I'm busy', some how!  People don't seem to readily accept that if you're physically present in work that you can virtually need to be present elsewhere.  You have to take a fairly disciplined approach to your own attendance to maximise the benefit of an online conference.  If that means working from home to properly take part, then it's worth doing this.  In the week of 'pre-conference activities' I was so tied up with meetings / ad hoc discussions / other work that I didn't get to participate at all, it was only when I physically removed myself from the office that I could really engage with it.  

Think those are my main points - plenty of links shared too and I'll try to pull those together into a separate blog posting.

Definitely worth attending.  Really enjoyed it.  Didn't miss the rubbish catering or stands flogging ed tech products I'm not interested in.  And I've got enough stress balls and free pens to last me... so virtual worked well!

JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011 - Bill Rammell

Notes from 'Tensions in collaboration in a changing landscape'. Really didn’t enjoy this presentation.  It smacked of the sort of talk you hear VCs give up and down the country.  There were nods to ‘student expectations’, the ‘changing educational landscape’, ‘cross sector collaboration’, but really nothing terribly concrete.  It felt like lots of soundbites glued together in many ways. The presenter was Bill Rammell, currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Plymouth responsible for the 'student experience' (a mysterious phrase if ever there was one) and internationalisation.

Rammell started with an ice breaker, where he asked what was the key source of innovative ideas - students, colleagues, JISC publications or another university.  Most people said ‘colleagues’ which doesn’t really come as a surprise since most practice is grounded in the shared day-to-day experience of lecturers.  He then went on to talk about cross-sector collaboration and highlighted it as one of the challenges for consideration, what to do about it and how could we facilitate collaboration.  I do wonder, however, that if the reality is that shared experiences with colleagues, grounded in their own discipline and practice is where people are comfortable, what benefit would they / could they see from something much broader than that?

After that followed mention of the UK Government White Paper ‘Students at the Heart of the System’ and he said that the funding reform was the most radical change in a generation.  The argument then followed - as is typical - that student expectations would increase with the increasing fees.  I always wonder however, whether this reflects correlation rather than causation?  It also saddens me that the only thing that seems to have shaken some out of complacency about the ‘student experience’ is the thought that students are now paying customers and *that’s* what drives their expectations, rather than the commitment to a high quality education.

The real turning point in my engagement with Rammell’s talk came when he shared the promo video for Plymouth University.  It encouraged students to think of their university education as ‘less than the weekly cost of their cinema ticket’.  I found this profoundly depressing.  Reducing what is and should be a life changing, mind opening experience of university to being something which is ‘less than the cost of your weekly cinema ticket’ seems to trivialise it to the level of just another consumer good.  And not even any consumer good, but a form of entertainment.  Something which doesn’t even figure in most people’s lives due to cost, the fact that it is a luxury good and often an extremely lightweight, passive means of spending time.

At this point, the response to the talk seemed to change.  People seemed uncomfortable with the terminology being used (judging by the reaction on Twitter) and points were made in response about fear of debt, students as customers / partners etc - and very little mention of their learning.  Rammell also suggested that things like ‘comparethemarket.com’ might be an appropriate means for selection of HE provider for students - and the commodification of learning made for extremely uncomfortable listening.  His examples of students sharing information about university was also lightweight and again, rather uncomfortable.

Rammell moved on to talking about the potential for shared service and highlighted the guidance available from JISC on this as being a cost-effective and powerful possibility - JANET being a prime example, though increasing cost for these shared services also needs consideration.  He also talked about the importance of digital literacy and asked whether any institutions had a digital literacy strategy.  Only 6% of people responded that they had - however, I’m not sure to what extent this even matter.  Not everything that’s working is that way because of a strategy.  Not every strategy even makes an impact.  

His conclusions were that we face significant challenges in terms of in terms of funding, student numbers, distribution (types of students), increased expectations (from funding) - nothing unsurprising there, but little to do with collaboration.  Rammell’s idea of good news seemed to be that with 40% of cuts to the teaching budget in Higher Education, this was better than in other parts of the public sector.

Thoroughly depressing stuff.

JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011 - David Puttnam's keynote

Some notes (made up from my tweets during the talk) from the opening keynote of JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011. Held online, the lack of conference freebies was made up for by sheer convenience and ability to participate!

So... the keynote. Delivered by Lord David Puttnam and entitled 'Towards a Digital Pedagogy'. It was a good talk although, as someone observed, he didn’t actually touch on much pedagogy throughout his presentation.  However... definitely worth listening to.

He opened with some extremely interesting contextual material - the notion that we have perceived creativity as a Western phenomenon, for example, means that we have taken our eye off the ball in terms of what’s going on in countries like China.  There has also been a distinct lack of political wisdom in the West and this is problematic when we start to look at education.  Not least because we are complacent in terms of what we can do compared to what others can do.  Again, the point goes back to our perception of China as a producer of cheap products, but the reality is that their impact on creativity (primarily discipline-based creativity and innovation as opposed to free-form originality) has been huge.  Puttnam said that ‘the idea that China will never be creative is our own personal fantasy... we have been looking West when we should have been looking East’.  In essence, as a country we have been complacent and our investment in the future of education - and the investment in ICT in education - has been falling in the EU, despite it representing a dividend.

He then went on to talk about the level of skills within education.  An interesting comparison he made was between medicine and education.  He said that if you took a surgeon from 1911 and dropped them in the 21st Century they would be able to do nothing as their skills would have become obviated by all the advances which have occurred in the past century.  If you took a teacher from 1911, with their ability to stand in front of a board and talk at pupil... and put them in the 21st Century, they’d just about survive.  What does this say about education?  What does it say about pedagogy?  Puttnam concluded that we haven’t moved on in terms of educational development, despite all of the developments in aligned fields such as psychology etc.  He went on to say that we’re losing the trust of learners because of this disconnect.  In order to win back their trust we need to engage far more with their world and also engage with it as they do.

The point is that ‘you will never successfully influence anyone if they don’t believe you to be authentic’ (Puttnam, 2011) and I think this doesn’t just relate to school-based education, or even student - tutor education - it also relates to our role as professional developers.  We are disconnected from the world in which our academic colleagues are working and our guidance is inauthentic and therefore dismissible.  

In terms of how the modern learning space should look, Puttnam suggested that students should become the moderators of their own learning, helping each other to learn.  Where this puts traditional forms of teaching such as the lecture or the ‘chalk and talk’ work which is so typically found in education, it wasn’t clear.  It appeared that an entirely fresh look at education was needed.  A useful analogy was that simply digitising existing teaching materials was like telling the man who used to walk in front of cars with a red flag, to jog.  He then asked what an entirely digital pedagogy could achieve?  An interesting question - and there isn’t an answer to this yet.

There were some interesting points made about the role or potential role for voice recognition in education.  The process of ordering your thoughts to make them coherent for a third party is about oracy and about organisation - key skills for the future.  Though the technology is in the early stages of mainstream use, with Google, Apple (Siri) and Amazon involved, change will inevitably quicken.  It may not be an educational issue now, but Puttnam suggests strongly that it’s an area to keep an eye on.

The last section of his presentation concerned skills development - of teachers - and of the socio-economic value of education.  No educational system, Puttnam said, was better than the quality of its teachers and it was essential to commit to teacher training and ongoing skills development (and allow this to be two-way).  Further, there needs to be global acceptance of the importance of educating women.  Plus, recognition of the impact quality education has on many other areas such as health - investment in education is a win-win situation.  

This could be the ‘Gettysburg Address’ moment for education (Cathy Davidson, 2011 - http://www.cathydavidson.com/2011/11/why-this-is-a-gettysburg-address-moment-for-higher-education/) and it’s worth a read as a provocative and thought-provoking piece of writing which looks at these debates.  The issues currently faced by students are those faced by society more widely, it’s just that they’re hitting students with particular force.  

The TES community - with approx 2 million (off the top of my head that was the figure quoted!) users was cited as being an exciting development.  Bringing together teachers who were discussing and developing themselves.  This feeds into the creativity in learning which he touched on earlier.  Another interesting suggestion he made was that the learning environment should become a ‘copyright-free zone’, where teachers could teach with whatever they laid their hands on.  There would and should be a responsibility for them to teach respect for copyright, but that within the classroom, there should be far greater freedom.  Issues surrounding copyright and fear of infringement are a real barrier to creativity and reuse - which is currently hampering the type of learning which students can experience.

Three themes were summarised as:
1. Use technology creatively as a means to an end not an end in itself (nothing new here and something I strongly support!)
2.  Voice recognition and the importance of oracy plus its value to learners.  It is a big issue... what role will it play?
3.  This is the ‘Gettysburg Address moment’ for Higher Education - what lessons might we also learn from the student protests of the 1960s?

Moving on to talk about employability, Puttnam said that it was a crime that any young person should be unemployable when they leave school - but asked how this could be meshed with parents so that they understood its importance.  He also said that change in education was difficult but used the example of the Open University to illustrate this.  It had been with great resistance by all of the cabinet that the OU had been started - and as Wilson’s ‘pet project’ it was allowed to go ahead.  When Heath came along, he wanted it closed down as he didn’t see the value - but Thatcher prevented that from happening.  The Open University smashed through as a vision. As educators, Puttnam said, we have to take the same risks and get past the obstructions presented to us - even by the leaders of the day.  You need guts to get things through (very very true!).  Technophobia has no place in education.

A final word about the Russell Group and the divisiveness currently going on in Higher Education.  Although it isn’t being explicitly said, Puttnam says that some universities will close as a result of the financial changes being imposed.  Students as customers also not that helpful - they have a different set of criteria to students.  Imagining that the Russell Group will be able to move the UK into the 21st Century was a mistake.  Puttnam cuttingly said that they were a ‘cartel moving fowards on its own terms’ and ‘a disaster’.  Educators needed to work together to deliver a compelling learning experience for every student.  If we slice away at the edges, as the Russell Group are doing, this makes us failures as educators.  A real challenge to those of us who work for Russell Group institutions!

Thought-provoking and challenging.  A good keynote and great start to JISC Innovating e-Learning 2011.

Facebook and the little stuff

What's that?  The sound of Facebook listening to its users?  Good grief!

So, rather than having some hideous automated random content generator sort the newsfeed, users can now change back to 'Recent Stories First'... which is a good thing.  Not least because the immediacy of Facebook and being able to react to what other people are doing is part of the reason that it made sense.  It was simple, it was easy to understand and sorting things by how recently they'd appeared made sense.

No, this isn't exactly earth shattering news, but it does show how important the little stuff can be when it comes to usability and people's interactions with technology.  And how important it is to respond (in a timely fashion) when you're being told by your user group that something just isn't working for them.

Those are the lessons worth learning.  Regardless of whether or not Facebook features in your life.  Getting the little stuff right is always important.

The problem with...

... going paperless... is that there's nothing like a good scribble on a piece of paper to get your thoughts together.

Actually, that's far too simplistic, but I have been trying my hardest for the past couple of months to go paperless.  The 'going paperless' tools I've been using are as follows:
1.  PC
2.  MacBook Pro
3.  iPad
4.  iPhone
5. HTC Desire

Now, as I said above, I do love a good scribble on paper.  And I'm also one of those people who write 'in hieroglyphics' (as other people tend to describe it!).  In other words, I can do shorthand.  As a result, the gap between an idea or a comment entering my ears and onto paper is very very small.  I'm also a bit of a soft systems person too.  Present me with a complex problem and within minutes you'll be laughing at my stick people (who always have bobbly feet), lines, arrows, thought bubbles as I get to grips with trying to understand what I see in front of me.  I can spray diagram my way out of most situations quicker than you can say 'the exit's over there you can stop doing a spray diagram now...'

Going without paper was tough.

Very tough.

The first few weeks of not using pens and paper I physically had to stop myself from taking a notepad around with me.  Instead, I diligently noted everything down in Evernote which, after a lapse of a couple of years where I didn't use it, I've been enjoying rediscovering its loveliness.  From pictures to audio to text and more, it sat happily on my PC, MacBook, iPad, iPhone etc... waiting for notes to head its way.  And it's been great.  However, the funny thing is that note taking on an iPad, for example, requires a different level of concentration to just taking shorthand notes.  With shorthand I don't have to think about how I'm recording what's being said.  It's the difference between listening to words being spoken and hearing the letters read out of a word you have to piece back together.  You just listen.  With the iPad I found that part of my brain became disengaged as I struggled to touch type with no physical keyboard.

Eventually, this worked okay - my spelling became atrocious, I hated the shift key and its location next to the letter 'a' and auto-correct produced plenty of on-screen comedy for me to sort out later.  But it worked.  But I still wasn't listening in the way I'd listened before.

I could spray diagram, but instead of drawing, scribbling, adjusting and annotating as before, I had to glue spray diagrams together.  The bubbles wouldn't behave themselves, moving about the screen with a steely determination to thwart my order.  Eventually, they would look pretty and presentable - but you know what?  I could have done that before.  Sketching things out roughly using my pen and pad, and then putting the next draft into whichever mind mapping tool did most of the things I wanted.  The software inhibited my thinking by conforming it to the order *it* imagined I was after.  What was quick and dynamic became laboured and laborious.

What else went paperless?  Well, my 'to do' lists also went electronic.  My habit of sitting down first thing and creating the day's to do list in my notepad disappeared and instead, I added tasks as I went to my Google Tasks.  Actually, this has been a goodie in lots of ways.  I can link things to my Google Calendar... can create tasks from emails within Gmail.  Yup.  It's worked nicely.  Especially since Google Apps landed at both of the institutions where I work.  But there's something about physically creating a list and physically crossing things out which a little click doesn't capture.  Isn't that sad?  The 'all ticked off'  satisfying flourish of a pen across the list as another item disappeared.  Sanitised *clicks* as my 'to do's' became 'to done' wasn't quite the same.

I did, on the other hand, love Dropbox even more than before as my notepad... sorry... iPad... moved from being simply the here and now (and a few scribbles before), to being all of that and my entire filing system and document store as well.  Plus, syncing between multiple devices was easy.  And the joy of not having to lug a stack load of meeting papers across the campus was something to treasure!

So... where am I now with paperless?  I have to admit (and given that the image above was me diagramming a problem just yesterday!), that I'm in 'compromise land'.

Going paperless is perfectly possible.  Going paperless is great.

Going 'almost paperless'.. well... that works much better for me. That said, shorthand seems to be a dying art and diagramming will become much easier as software becomes increasingly fluid and user-centred.  I can see a (nearly) paperless future.  Even for me.  My petty issues, such as they were, will be non-issues in the future.

Yet... there's nothing like a good scribble.