Key takeaways for me from a great day at Future of Technology in Education (#FOTE11) at the University of London yesterday:

There was angst from the IT department as the ever increasing consumerisation of technology challenges creaking university systems and a too prevalent culture of ‘computer says no’. It is more productive for staff and students to collaborate and operate outside the system using free online tools (Google docs, Dropbox and Skype do the job perfectly well for me).

Vendors who try too hard to plug their stuff to an ed tech audience risk the ire of the backchannel (you know who you are!)

While a sense of place is still important, (we had a great tourist’s guide to Bristol from @nick_skelton ) mobile phones have allowed people to make their meeting plans on the fly (for example, student bars are struggling) and economics keep many students away from campus (eg living with parents). And this is before the increase in fees…

Time and time again we heard examples of poor communication (between university and students, teaching staff and students, IT and staff/students…etc)

We don’t know enough about what students want and how students live – it was agreed we should try *asking them*more often.

The importance of digital literacy – plenty of staff and students just don’t have it. Thankfully, there seemed to be general agreement that the ‘digital native’ is simply a myth. @suebecks gave a great presentation with many fascinating examples of the importance of digital skills to employability.

There was more emphasis on challenges than solutions. How do we take change forward…we have identified the need for it, but how to make change actually happen? Andrew Bollington provided a reality check, suggesting that appreciating and incorporating the contrasting perspectives of finance, strategy and marketing would be a good start.

@andypowe11 provided a great summary of who and what was shared on Twitter – as you can see, quite a lot!

It was good to catch up with mobile supremo Jane Vincent from the University of Surrey at Digital Surrey last night. The topic was recent developments in mobile, presented by Jon Bishop, Head of Social Media at PayPal UK (@jonin60seconds). Jon’s slides are available on Slideshare and a detailed review of his talk was very quickly posted by Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit)

The purpose of this post is to flag up some points arising from listening to Jon, that could be pursued in a research project by Jane and myself as a sequel to our investigation from a few years back of the role of mobile communication in e-government. We suggested in this paper that mobile phones may offer the most viable electronic channel through which to encourage large-scale take-up of online public services, but ‘m-government’ would take a significant amount of time to become a reality unless there was a substantial change in social practices.

It was clear from Jon’s fascinating discussion of mobile payments in Africa that the developed world has a lot to learn from successful services developed in Kenya.

In the UK, mobiles have become even more central to people’s lives and business is clearly waking up to the marketing potential of location based services. But effective interaction with government services via mobile looks no closer than it did back in 2007.

The Digital Surrey community are by definition enthusiastic adopters of new developments in technology, but I’m not sure that the general population is quite ready for NFC and QR codes…and as Jon noted, 76% of websites are still not optimised for mobile devices.

Infrastructure issues still remain…just try staying connected while travelling by train.

And are smartphones really that smart? My BlackBerry (a recent model) takes forever to simply load a website, and if password access is required, forget it. I certainly won’t be using it to buy anything with. Perhaps a ‘hype v reality’ project might be a useful exercise…

Many thanks to Jon, Abigail and the rest of the Digital Surrey team for laying on great weather and free beer, as well as an informative and entertaining evening! For information about upcoming events, check out the website

Mike Lister (Principal Business Fellow at the School of Management) will be presenting this Seminar at the University of Southampton. Mike was one of the experts consulted by the Office of Fair Trading as they looked into the future of where digital tracking is taking society.

Venue: Room 1019, Building 58a (School of Management Executive Education Centre), University of Southampton, Highfield Campus.

Internet use is so pervasive across society now that using it is considered normal behaviour.  But consumers are surprisingly unaware of how much information about them is collected – either online or offline and how this gets combined.

Currently the main application of this knowledge is to entice you to buy products and services that you otherwise might not have bought.  You use Google but do you realise how much they know about you?  German authorities are so concerned they have just told Google to stop tracking website visitors without their consent.

In the UK we seem less anxious.  But privacy and the data about you that companies capture and sell on to others will become a hot topic.  Not least because of the business opportunity this represents for the legal profession.

Date: Thursday 28th January 2010. 6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation, 8pm finish.

To book your FREE place please email busdev@soton.ac.uk with your contact details and numbers of seats you wish to reserve.

last week I presented a paper at the Network Ethics Conference in Lisbon(co-authored by Lorraine Warren of the University of Southampton and Kelly Smith of the University of Huddersfield)

The event was small but friendly and the City of Lisbon is lovely

This paper is now being developed into a book chapter for publication next year…watch this space!

The slides can be viewed here:

Gathered at FUEL the next day (www.fuel-conference.com) were the sons (but not many of the daughters) of the Goodwood delegates. Here are some bullet points copied from the tweets I sent at the event to provide a flavour of the day (with thanks to Alan Patrick for the idea):

• Richard Moross from Moo.com talked about keeping employees happy with cake and beer
• Rummble.com allows you to update multiple platforms in one hit
• The Web 2.0 company praised most frequently today is Flickr
• The word ‘mashup’ is going out of fashion…but has the mainstream even got to it yet?
• Innocent drinks use the product carton as media space…and they have a great sense of humour
• www.summize.com turns tweets into conversations
• www.twitpic.com allows you to post photos to twitterfeed, worth a look
• www.ustream.TV provides live video for the opportunistic, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/06/mobile_video_are_we_getting_th.html for Rory’s analysis of various new video tools
• The trend towards pulling required content by RSS means people are bypassing even the snazziest websites
• This is very cool – check out your brand’s footprint at http://virgindev.saintdigital.co.uk/flash/VirginEye.html
• Virgin is one of the few corporate brands cool enough to be credible in the Web 2 world

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic and one highlight was the Global Summit http://www.21cglobalsummit.com at Goodwood House, an amazing venue as you can see from the pictures. The delegates were mainly from telco and media companies who were trying to make sense out of developments in technology and emerging collaborative business models.

The owner of Goodwood, Lord March, gave a very interesting talk at the Gala Dinner about the development of the prestige ‘Goodwood brand’. The estate provides high quality leisure experiences encompassing history, fine art, premier league horse racing, vintage cars and champagne.

I was a panel member for the Innovation and Disruption session along with senior managers from Transport for London, Virgin Media and Amdocs. The most memorable aspect of the discussion was the scale of the challenge facing Transport for London in providing an efficient transport infrastructure for the London Olympics in terms of finance, logistics and communication. At the other end of the business spectrum I talked about how the ‘gifted amateurs’ we studied in the Punch Above Your Weight project are making waves with innovative and inexpensive online marketing techniques.

Alan Jenkins from Broadstuff has blogged in detail about individual presentations here: http://broadstuff.com/archives/1019-21st-Century-Global-Summit-Part-I.html

All in all it was a very informative and friendly event and despite being some distance from London the location is hard to beat.