Online Communities Change the World - marketing and consumer

Impact of YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor and other online communities. Why traditional advertising agencies cannot respond. Power of community opinion. New marketing models. Why online communities are trusted more than official websites or information sources. Web 2.0. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Future of education -- instant knowledge in an online ...

Old style education focus on memory and knowledge. New style education needs to focus on how to find immediate answers to complex problems from a starting point of ignorance, using new technology. How education promotes useless skills and neglects primary requirements eg instant summary of state of knowledge, fine to draw heavily on existing material. But in education such a summary could be rejected as plagiarism. But in business originality is often less important than a superb summary. Radical changes needed in examinations, assessments. Future of examinations -- online, using keyboard to prepare answers, assistance is allowed, using existing sources is encouraged. Impact of Google on education. Impact on Universities. Need to teach evaluation methods to assess authority of online sources. References. Video on future of education, high schools, colleges, universities, curriculum, trends, syllabus, exams, assessments, business schools, MBAs, degree courses - by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist conference keynote speaker for NAIS.

Search engines and personal privacy - invading our space? - Video

Big controversy over personal privacy using code on your computer to track search requests, and enable a personal profile to be built up. This means that search results and advertising can be targeted to the individual person using a web browser. Search engine cookies from engines like Google had been set in the past to remain active for more than a decade. Under pressure from the EU, Google recently announced that the two years of user history they keep would be reduced to 18 months. Expect pressure to continue for personal opt out boxes enabling search engine users to block personal data from being stored. Expect search engines to push back perhaps by only allowing the fullest search results for those who give personal data to be stored. As it is they will claim (correctly) that personal history is vital to make the results as relevant as possible. Expect big civil rights debates and worries about invasion of personal life by security agencies. Video comment by Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist, leading authority on global trends and conference speaker.

Dominance of Wikipedia - threat of legal action may force tightening up of editing access

Watch out for the rising star of Wikipedia which now is starting to dominate search engine results.  This co-operative information guide is astonishing not only for speed of growth but also for the fact that it is still completely open (to abuse).  Anyone in the world can go onto the site and alter any page in any way they like.  So far the anarchists have been contained by active monitoring by the rest of the community, but this kind of openness is already melting away.  It is now necessary to log in a s a registered user to create new pages, and I predict it will not be long before a series of high profile legal threats force Wikipedia to tighten up further.  The problem is sensitive when for example people write untrue things on entries for political leaders – which has happened recently.