Hans de Zwart: Technology as a Solution…

The Lisbon Council

In an earlier post I referred to the European Human Capital Index, a metric for the development of human capital by the Lisbon Council. I decided to go the source and read the original policy brief titled Innovation at Work: The European Human Capital Index (PDF) written by Peer Ederer.

The index looks at the ability of thirteen European Union countries to develop and deploy their human capital. Human capital is defined as:

[..] the cost of formal and informal education expressed in euros and multiplied by the number of people living in each country.
[..]
Specifically the index identifies and defines four types of human capital and analyses the way they collectively contribute to the wealth of European citizens:

1. Human Capital Endowment. This figure measures the cost of all types of education and training in a particular country per person active in the labour force [..]. Specifically, we look at five different types of learning for each active person: learning on the job, adult education, university, primary and secondary schooling and parental education. The figure is subsequently depreciated to account for obsolescence in the existing knowledge base and some level of forgetting.
2. Human Capital Utilisation. This figure looks at how much of a country’s human capital stock is actually deployed. It differs from traditional employment ratios in that measures human capital as a proportion of the overall population.
3. Human Capital Productivity. This figure measures the productivity of human capital. It is derived by dividing gross domestic product by all of the human capital employed in that country. This diverges from traditional productivity measures, in that the figure takes account of how well educated employed labour is, instead of just how many hours are being worked.
4. Demography and Employment. This figure looks at existing economic, demographic and migratory trends to estimate the number of people who will be employed (or not employed) in the year 2030 in each country.

When the thirteen European countries are ranked on each of the four dimensions and then the rankings are summed the following table results (four is the best possible score, 52 the worst):

This policy brief is a treasure trove of fascinating and insightful statistical information. The author analyses the data and even gives some policy advice.

Did you know that Sweden invests 2.5 times as much in education as Portugal? The difference is biggest in parental education.
Did you know that the Netherlands leads in human capital utilisation? 64% of the total human capital stock is utilised. This is due to our policy schemes like the Life Course Saving Scheme (“Levensloopregeling”) and the abolishing of early retirement schemes in 2004.
Did you know that the rapid expansion of the utilisation of human capital has depressed the growth of human capital productivity? Only Sweden and Finland have managed to keep human capital productivity stable. The human capital productivity of the Netherlands is falling rapidly.
Did you know that (if current employment and immigration patterns continue) Germany and Italy will lose 8.7 million employees by 2030, together accounting for 70% percent of the total European drop? In Italy 60 year olds will outnumber 20 year olds by two to one in 2030.

Based on the Human Capital Index methodology a couple of policy recommendations are made. Some of these are obvious (increase the quality and the quantity of spending on education, Europe spend less on education than its OECD peers), others might be controversial (being open to immigration of skilled labour: “By 2030, can Germans or Italians learn to live in a society where every other 20-year old is a foreigner?”).

This article is well worth the read.

Image by Joost Swarte

For most of the years that I worked as a teacher at the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer I was a part time coach for new teachers. The goal was to try and help them be a better educator in a new school. I always had the feeling that my input had very little effect: some teachers seemed to get it intuitively, others would never learn. Malcom Gladwell, author of the highly enjoyable The Tipping Point and Blink has written an article for the New Yorker titled Most Likely to Succeed, How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?. It partially addresses this question.

He introduces the topic by explaining how difficult it is for scouts to predict which successful college football quarterbacks will be successful in the National Football League (NFL). These scouts have developed different methodologies to select players for the draft, but they haven’t hit on a great predictor yet.

There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they how they’ll do once they are hired. So how do we know how to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.

The quality of teachers is highly variable. There is a big difference between the best teachers and bad teachers:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effect are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

Bob Pianta is doing research by taping teachers as they explain things and interact with a class. They then closely watch these tapes and try to extract the competencies of a great teacher.

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers – that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. [..]
A group of researchers [..] investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees and certifications – as much as they appear related to teaching prowess – turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.

Koumin did research into desist behaviour (stopping some kind of misbehaviour). He found that teachers need to have an ability which he calls “withisness” which he defines as:

“[..] a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head’.” It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withishness. But how do you know whether someone has withisness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?

In the field of financial-advice, companies have the same problem: no one knows in advance who will become a high performing financial adviser. Recruiters in that field typically interview a thousand people (keeping the gates wide open) and pick out about 1 in 20. These recruits will go through an extensive training camp in which they need to obtain a minimum number of clients and have a minimum number of meetings in a certain amount of time. If they manage this, then they are hired.

This example suggest that for the teaching profession:

[..] we shouldn’t be raising the standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree – and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of [the financial-advice field's] training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.

Is this research valuable for the Dutch policy makers in trying to solve our looming educational crisis? I have to admit I haven’t followed Dutch educational policy very closely but I can imagine a couple of things that are relevant to this topic:

• The Dutch currently have a shortage of teachers. This shortage will get bigger in the next couple of years. Schools have trouble finding teachers for certain topics, let alone find great teachers. Lowering the barrier for HBO and WO educated people to be let into the teaching profession might become a necessity. It is good to know that this will not necessarily be a bad thing for the quality of the teaching (my years as a coach confirm this for me).
• How do you ethically arrange for affordable apprenticeships in schools? When the budding financial advisers fail, they only incur costs to the company that was trying to hire them. When an apprentice teacher fails, a whole group of children will have had a bad educational experience. We need a framework in which we can safely try and find out who is a great teacher and who isn’t.
• Gladwell’s article refers to teacher salaries. These are currently extremely rigid. I used to say that I could predict what I would earn in 15 years time. If we want to rate teachers based on their actual performance, then we should also try and go to a system which rewards excellent performance in some way. The introduction of “scale 11″  in the Netherlands has not had this effect. Which school in the Netherlands will be the first to pay their teachers according to performance? I would love to see that happen!

During the second day of the Online Educa I was able to go to the Going Global with E-Learning keynote in the morning and to the Battle of the Bloggers session in the afternoon. Here are some of my notes and thoughts:

The keynote started with a presentation by Christophe Binot, E-Learning Manager at Total in France. What he showed was quite shocking to me. All the things he described were classic webbased training materials. It felt like I was back in the 20th century. There was no talk of collaborating, of networks, not even of performance support. Instead he focused on the more than 1000 lessons in four languages.

Next up was Richard Straub. He is currently the Secretary General of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and used to by an employee of IBM, but has gradually stepped out. ELIG has the mission to promote innovation in learning in Europe. They are trying to anticipate the 21st century.

The theme of his talk was the unstoppable move towards openness and how this will enable an education continuum.

We are making a move from a closed world to a more open world:

We are moving from a society of relatively static organisations towards what Straub calls the “Hollywood studio approach” of dynamic teams built around a project. The knowledge workers of the second half of the 20st century will be replaced by knowledge entrepreneurs who will work on the basis of flexible contractual relationships.

Focusing on education this might mean that the traditional silos (elementary school, secondary education, tertiary education, employment) will be bridged to create an education continuum of lifelong learning.

Straub then presented some new research from the Lisbon Council focusing on the European Human Capital Index. He had a fascinating graph showing the human capital biography of a German professional:

x-axis = age, y-axis = human captial

This is definitely material which I will look into further.

He finished his talk by mentioning that the new notion of blended learning is mixing formal and informal learning (not mixing classroom and online learning), and by recommending Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge.

The last speaker of the keynote session was Laura Overton of the independent, not for profit, community interest company Towards Maturity. Her organisation does research in multinational companies with the goal of improving the impact of learning technologies at work.

According to their research the key factors hindering the implementation of innovative learning technologies are the lack of knowledge about its potential, the high reluctance to adopt and the lack of implementation skills. Interestingly 23% of the global companies also considered the overhyping of learning products by their suppliers to be a significant hindrance to implementation.

Mature companies are moving from aligning to needs to delivering impact. Towards maturity has an interesting model of factors in this process:

Towards Maturity

• Alignment to (business) needs is the most important factor for success.
• Learner context. Engage learners and listen to them, involve them in the design and  the implementation.
• Work context. Connect to regional priorities, don’t fight technical infrastructures, work with local cultures to your advantage.
• Building capacity. Collaboratively author content, ensure that local training divisions are equipped using the latest tools, support and connect.
• Ensuring engagement. Equip local heroes, organise pilots, develop communication toolkits, create peer to peer communication strategies.
• Demonstrating value. Don’t be afraid to ask for value, dig deeper and communicate successes via a wide selection of media.

These strands collectively intertwine. All contribute to impact and involve stakeholders at all stages. Overton sees it like a “six-legged” race where each of these strands has to coordinate with the others to progress.

The Battle of the Bloggers session in the late afternoon was meant to be a reflective and interactive session on what had been the most relevant topics of the conference. A back channel was provided using Backnoise.

Unfortunately I only learnt two things from this session:

• Belgium has another unknown comic: session chair Bert De Coutere lead it with a great sense of humour.
• A backchannel does not add a lot of value yet. People (me included) do two things in it: they discuss the backchannel itself (“we should have this in every session”) or they make witty remarks.

The blogger panelists did not seem to be too comfortable behind their tables on the stage in front of a very large and largely empty room. We had a heckler that could only talk about how all generations have turned into sheep and a vocal audience member with the age of somebody from generation Y, but the mind of baby boomer. All in all Michael Wesch could have gotten some great cultural anthropological material for research on weird group interactions.

Jay Cross

Language is still our prime tool for learning. I find language a fascinating subject and noticed a couple of things about language during the Online Educa.

First, Jay Cross. He was a panelist during the Battle of the Bloggers session. One topic they discussed was the financial crisis and how it could affect our profession. Jay said that if you are currently a Director of Training it would probably be smart to change your job title to something like Director of Sales Readiness (“we can’t let the director of sales readiness go…”). I think he is right. Language changes perception and a change in how you call something can significantly alter people’s behaviour. This is also the reason why I don’t like to use the Dutch word “allochtoon“: I think it has an unnecessary connotation of exclusiveness and us versus them.

Jay was very insightful about the other topics too, so I decided to go to the front desk an buy his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. I like how he consciously has put “performance” in the title of his book. That way he instantly disarms any suggestion that informal learning is just a pet topic for educational scientists. Instead, it directly addresses the issue that is central in the corporate world: “executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance.”

The ability to adapt your language to the language of the client is one of the skills that any good consultant should have. Ton Zijlstra had an interesting take on this. We met at an Edublog dinner and one of the things we talked about was how he uses del.icio.us to find people who bookmark the same sites as he does, but who do this using different tags. If they use different tags for the same concepts it means they are in a different community or network. That is interesting, because they could be starting point for a whole set of new connections.

Reichstag, Berlin, photo by chris-dcx cc by-nc-nd

This evening I had the chance to go to the Reichstag in Berlin. This incredible building currently houses the German parliament (the Bundestag).

Admission to the magnificent dome is free. The last people are allowed in at 22:00 and are then allowed to stay till midnight. I hope our Dutch public institutions will take the Reichstag as an example.

The view of Berlin at night was impressive. Walking up the spiral (which is separate from the downward one) make you see the full panorama about three times.

The dome was designed by Norman Foster and built to symbolise the reunification of Germany. When you look down towards the inside you can see the seats of the parliament which get direct sunlight reflected through the mirrored cone in the centre of the dome.

Looking at that mirrored cone I suddenly realised Foster’s brilliance: the cone not only allows sunlight in, it also must allow the people sitting in the parliament seats to oversee all of Berlin when they look up. To me this makes the dome a wonderful physical realisation of a metaphor for not performing omphaloskepsis, but instead looking outward to the world at large.

A great city, Berlin.

Norbert Bolz

I am the Online Educa with Stoas for a commercial purpose: we have a stand with four European Moodle partners and are trying to talk to as many people as possible about Moodle

This means that I have not had the opportunity to really go to any of the sessions. I did manage to go to the keynotes of the first day though, so I would like to write down some of the things that I have noticed there.

Just like Wilfred Rubens I had really looked forward to hear Michael Wesch speak. I should have known that I would have been disappointed. This had nothing to do with Wesch, who is an insightful and entertaining speaker, but with the fact that I already know what he does. He focused on the lowest common denominator in the audience and that wasn’t me.

I guess you could say that he suffered from the exact problem that he is trying to solve in his educational practice: how do you stay significant when you stand in front of an audience in a design built for non-participation. The title of his talk “The Crisis of Significance and the Future of Education” is highly relevant. I thought it was unfortunate that he only focused on the first part of his title and did not talk about recent educational projects like his World Simulation Project.

One slight disappointment was followed by a very pleasant surprise. The Berlin based media scholar Norbert Bolz gave a slide-less talk titled “From Knowledge Management to Identity Management”. This talk was highly conceptual and sociological (if not philosophical).

He talked about five Internet related phenomena and what kind of effects these are having on society:

• Serious play or the “paradise of work”. Bolz thinks there will be less of a difference between work and private time. Successful people will be absorbed in their work. The software tools that we buy are also toys. We should learn how to play with these tools (just like with toys) to use them effectively. Younger people are naturally the avant garde of this development.
• Self design, also known as branding yourself. Personal brands are humans who have learned how to catch people’s attention. He described a progression from broadcasting to narrowcasting to echocasting and considers Youtube to be a prime example.
• Identity management has to do with social wealth. He thinks we are living in the age of reputation and recommendation.
• Attention management is about the interrelation between ignorance and trust. To know more is to also know less. All our options are disproportionate to our available time resources. Attention should be considered a naturally scarce resource. There is huge battle for this resource in trying to grab our attention.
• Linking value is the most surplus value add in this century. This is because of the logic of networks. Bolz referred to Granovetter’s “ground breaking essay” The Strength of Weak Ties. Old social networks have strong ties, whereas the current social network have weak ties (e.g. a Facebook users with 2600 “friends”) . Networks with weak ties are more information rich while the information flow between strong ties is very small (he gave the example of how lover’s communicate).

All of these are topics which invite more exploration. I am looking forward to doing that over the next couple of weeks and will start with Granovetter’s essay.

Tomorrow is another day. I am hoping to see another keynote session and go to the Battle of the Bloggers (with Jay Cross, Wilfred Rubens and Stephen Warburton; looking forward to the strong language!).

The most Deceptive Sign in LA

Warning, this is a bit of a rant…

I hate false advertising. That is why I was delighted to read that Apple had to pull an iPhone ad recently (see: What the banned iPhone ad should really look like).

I am currently at the Online Educa in Berlin where Fronter is the Platinum sponsor. I found their brochure in the conference bag and was appalled by what I read.

Fronter has decided to adopt the discourse of open source software without actually delivering an open source product. Recently, this has been a strategy for many companies who produce proprietary software and are losing market share to open source products. This is the first time that I have seen it done in such a blatant way though.

Some quotes from their brochure:

The essence of Fronter’s Open Philosophy is to give learning institutions the benefit of an open source and open standard learning platform – while at the same time issuing guarantees for security, reliability and scalability, all included in a predictable fixed cost of ownership package.

And:

Fronter’s Open Platform philosophy combines the best of two worlds; innovation based on open source, with guarantees and fixed cost of ownership issued by a corporation.

Finally:

Open source: The Fronter source code is available to all licensed customers.
Open guarantee: In contrast to traditional open source products, Fronter offers tight service level agreements, quality control and a zero-bug regime.

I am sure the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) would not appreciate these untruths. So let us do some debunking.

The term open source actually has a definition. The Open Source Definition starts with the following statement: “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” It then continues by listing the ten conditions that need to be met before a software license can call itself open source. Many of these conditions are not met by Fronter (e.g. free distribution, allowing distribution of the source code or allowing derived works).

These conditions exist for a reason. Together they facilitate the community based software development model which has proven itself to be so effective (read: The Cathedral and the Bazaar if you want to know more). Just giving your licensees access to the source code, does not leverage this “many eyeballs” potential.

I really dislike how they pretend that open source products cannot have proper service level agreements or quality control.SLA’s and QA is exactly what European Moodle partners like eLeDia, CV&A Consulting, MediaTouch 2000 srl and my employer Stoas (all present at this Educa) have been delivering in the last couple of years.

What is a “zero-bug regime” anyway? Does it mean that your customers cannot know any of the bugs in your software? Or is Fronter the only commercially available software product in the world that has no bugs? I much prefer the completely transparent way of dealing with bugs that Moodle has.

Fronter people, please come and meet me at the Moodle Solutions stand (E147 and E148). I would love to hear you tell me how wrong I am.

Properly designed software shouldn’t need any instructions let alone require a training on how to use it. Designing software properly is actually a hard problem. We are getting better at it slowly.

Nintendo is the leader of the pack when it comes to designing software in such a way that it needs no instructions. I have had a Nintendo DS for a couple of months and am amazed at how excellent some of the Nintendo titles are. I consider a game like WarioWare: Touched! to be a work of art. The amount of creativity and wackiness that is encompassed in these mini games in unrivalled.

On the Wii I have been playing the best game of my life (my gaming history started with Sopwith and Frogger): Super Mario Galaxy. Please watch the trailer of this game:

Watching the video you will have noticed the complex manoeuvres that Mario does. He swims (on a turtle-jet of course), he walks on a ball, jumps of walls, rides a stingray, makes back flips, does double jumps, flies like a bee, etc. As a user you do all these moves with nothing more than the joystick and a single button. You don’t have to read a manual to start playing.

What design principles make this possible? In Mario Galaxy I noticed the following five:

• Progressive revelation. The game starts simple. All the levels only require a very basic mastery of the controls. As the game progresses you will need to learn more and more controls.
• Just in time delivery of an explanation. The game doesn’t teach you all the moves in one go (through some sort of tutorial). Instead it will have a pleasant little creature who will be there to explain a skill right when you need it. These creatures are very unobtrusive (unlike Clippy) and are only there when you need them.
• A safe environment to practise. The first time you need to learn the new skill you will be in an environment without any adversaries and without any time pressure. This way you can focus on what you need to learn.
• An obstacle. You will only be able to finish the level if you learn the new skills. This way the game ensures you will be able to progress later on and will not get frustrated.
• Repetition with variety (sometimes getting gradually harder). Doing a particular jump once could have been an accident. The levels are designed in such a way that you will need to show your mastery of the skill multiple times.

It will not be easy to design all software according to these principles. A program like AutoCAD doesn’t have a quest or levels and is arguably much more complex than a Mario game. Even though it is hard, it is possible to radically change the interface of these programs and enable people to be productive without much training on how to use the program. Instead you could spend more time focusing on how to be creative with the software. Take a look at Google SketchUp as an example:

For learning events it is much easier to take these principles into account in your design. We are currently probably pretty good at progressive revelation, at repetition and maybe at building in obstacles. We do not focus enough on delivering just in time and on providing a safe environment for our learners.

Please be inspired by Nintendo!

The Spy in the Coffee Machine

Slightly over a year ago, I had a conversation with Erik Duval about privacy in this digital world. He basically argued that losing privacy is not a problem as long as the transparency is symmetric. This is basically the point that David Brin writes about in The Transparent Society. The conversation started my thinking on this topic. Was Bill Joy right when he allegedly said “Privacy is dead, get over it”?

I was hoping that O’hara and Shadbolt’s The Spy in the Coffee Machine would give me some new perspectives on this issue.

The book opens with a chapter on the “disappearing body”. We have less and less face-to-face contact and more and more phone, email and Internet (IM, (micro)blogs, social networks) communications. A physical presence leaves behind few signs, whereas information is persistent.

When the prophetic but currently unfashionable Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would soon be living in a global village thanks to new technologies and media, most people took that to mean that travel would be straightforward, intermingling of diverse cultures frequent and influences wide and strong. But one other property of a village is the absence of anonymity and secrecy. Privacy is at a premium, and that is another aspect of the global village with which we will have to come to terms.

In our society we have a very hybrid view on privacy. It isn’t a value neutral concept. Some cultures regard privacy with suspicion. In “the West” we have a positive opinion on privacy and see it as something to be protected by law:

But on the other hand, many use new technologies to expose themselves to view to a previously unimaginable degree. Webcams and Big Brother provide almost unlimited access to some exhibitionists, while very few people will pass up the opportunity to appear on television. [...] Most academics would kill to be interviewed about their work, even as they cling to the copyrights of their unread articles.

The book then provides a comprehensive overview of current technologies and how these relate to privacy. They do this in a matter of fact, objective and entertaining way. A couple of examples:

Moore’s law makes it trivial to search extremely large datasets (the end of practical obscurity) and is especially interesting when it comes to personal memory:

The amount of information that an ordinary person can generate, and store, is now colossal. It is possible to store digital versions of life’s memories in increasing quantities. As human-computer interaction specialist Alan Dix one playfully noted, it takes 100 kilobits/second to get high quality audio and video. If we imagine someone with a camera strapped to his or her head for 70 years, that will generate video requiring something of the order of 27.5 terabytes of storage, or about 450 60gb iPods. And if Moore’s law continues to hold for the next 20 years or so [..] we could store a continuous record of a life on a device the size of a sugar cube.
The ability to record memories, and store them indefinitely in digital form in virtually unlimited quantities has been dubbed the phenomenon of memories for life. This is an important area of interdisciplinary research; we will need to understand how it will affect our social and political lives, and our psychological memories.

Web 2.0 mashups allow you to easily bring multiple public resources together. By combining different databases you can now easily see where in your area all the sex offenders live (see Megan’s law):

In a clever demonstration of the dangers of mashups, consultant Tom Owad mashed up book wishlists published on Amazon with Google Earth, but with a twist. The Amazon users leave a name and a home town, which was often enough to locate them via Yahoo! People Search, at an individual address, of which Google Earth would hold a detailed satellite image. He also filtered out most of the books, to leave only those who read subversive literature. The result was a map of the world with readers of subversive books located upon it; click on the location of such a reader, and get a high resolution satellite image of his or her house. Of course, Owad was merely demonstrating the principle, not building a usable system for genuine deployment by the Thought Police. But ….

There are also technologies that could help in keeping us empowered. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project for example “enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents”.

The Panopticon is here according to the authors. They use the final chapter of the book to finally give some of their own opinion about whether we have a worrying future ahead of us. They take a very balanced viewpoint: these new technologies also solve many problems and have big advantages. At the same time we should never forget that bureaucracies are information thirsty and that function creep is a reality:

The struggle for personal space between the individual and the community takes place on a number of fronts, and we should not expect sweeping victories for either side. There will be small advances here, mini-retreats there. In the background, the astonishing progress of technology will keep changing the context.

As I finished this book I read about the premiere of Privacy Matters‘ (Dutch spoken) film about the importance of privacy. They do not allow the embedding of their video so I will link to a version on Youtube:

The production quality of the film is incredible and the special effects are great. The final message of the film makes sense: stay aware. However, I found the tone too fear mongering and paternalistic. It made me averse to the video and left a sour taste in my mouth. Where is the constructive look towards the future?

For me this post about privacy is an unfinished conversation. There are lots of things to think about and I guess we should keep paying attention. Privacy will be one the many sociological concepts which will get a completely different meaning over the next decades. What are your thoughts on this topic?