Facebook could be one of the next major tech companies to proclaim its support for Next Gen Skill’s campaign to modernise ICT teaching in schools.

The social media giant is expected to announce its backing for Next Gen Skills, an industry campaign to promote the skills needed for hi-tech growth in the UK.

Next Gen Skills also aims to develop computer science courses for schools that are relevant to industry.

The news will be welcomed by SMEs, who often complain that school-leavers and graduates are not equipped with the real-life skills in areas such as web design to help them drive their businesses forward. A modernised ICT education should help to change this situation, equipping businesses with the workforce they need to compete in the 21st century marketplace.

Next Gen Skills was created following the Livingstone-Hope ‘Next Gen’ review, which recommended that computer science be introduced into the national curriculum as an essential discipline.

Companies that have already proclaimed their support for Next Gen Skills include Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Talk Talk, Sega and the Guardian Media Group.

Alex Hope, joint author of the Next Gen review, asked for organisations across the industry to lend their support to the campaign in order to help force a new curriculum.

“We want them to join us and to highlight the issue, to get that message across to government and to take the opportunities they have to publicise this initiative and keep the dialogue in this domain. Only by doing that can we see change.”

What must children make of this phone hacking scandal and all the controversy surrounding News International, the methods some journalists use to get stories and the relationship between the media and politicians?

“First News” is a newspaper aimed at 14 to 17  year olds and it’s covering the story in depth with a profile of Rebekah Brooks “the woman at the heart of the hacking scandal”, details of the resignations from The Met and how all this is making life uncomfortable for the Prime Minister. 

BBC Newsround is also covering the story with its usual excellent journalism and although they might sometimes give the impression they’re only interested in mobile phones and hideous music made with auto-tune you can be sure our young people know exactly what’s going on with this.

When I was that age the fall of communism and the end of apartheid were two of the biggest stories. Me and my friends grew up watching the world become a fairer and more open place with the Berlin Wall coming down and the release of Nelson Mandela having a massive impact. Both these events were considered impossible just a few months before they happened.

As a result my generation grew up taking it for granted that no-one would be discriminated against because of the colour of their skin.  While some parents and grandparents remember a world where certain words and attitudes might have been tolerated or even acceptable, for the vast majority of us, it’s cut and dried and we quite rightly have zero tolerance of racism.

So what do changing attitudes and the current scandal mean for newspapers?

Well, they face a battle to get children to read them in the first place because the whole concept of buying something that contains stories that don’t interest them is entirely alien to young people. But even more than that I believe the adults of tomorrow will place a premium on honesty and take it for granted in the way I take it for granted that no-one should be discriminated against because of the colour of their skin.

This is a generation of people prepared to share everything about themselves on Facebook. They’re growing up expecting everyone to know where they are, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, even when this ends up causing them embarassment or gets them into trouble.

Yes, some will hit 18 and “clean up” their on-line profiles; in fact there’s evidence some of the recent Facebook profile deletions may be students coming out of their degrees and panicking about what potential employers might discover.

But overall young people are developing an expectation that they themselves, adults, businesses and most certainly the media should be absolutely honest, fair and totally open and transparent at all times. In short, it’s getting harder to lie.

The latest crop of music stars like Jesse J, Rihanna, Adele and The Wanted have their own websites and are highly active in social media which means they communicate direct – and sometimes even one to one – with their fans. This means speculative stories about them in tabloids and magazines are worthless.  Why would a 12 year old Nicki Minaj fan bother reading about a relationship she may or may not have had when they’ve already got the official version of events?

Young people aren’t daft – they’re taking all this in and it’s affecting their view of the world.  No longer is the media a big booming powerful influential voice that tells them what’s going on. Instead, it’s considered something slightly grubby and imperfect that they expect to be able to interact with and shape to suit themselves. They want to make it better.

I think there’s an opportunity here for mainstream media businesses to engage with young people now. Think beyond specific publiations or programmes for “kids” or focus groups trying to anticipate what the future’s going to look like. Ask the people who’re going to be calling the shots. Find a group of responsible teenagers and let them get involved in the production of the newspaper or broadcast news bulletins now. Ask what they think of the stories you run and the methods used to generate them. It would make for a highly engaging school project and give you valuable new ideas. You could change the particular young people involved every couple of months.

Better still – and this applies to all businesses, not just the media – why not consider doing something revolutionary… and put a 16 year old on the board.

If the very thought of that just made you scoff, ask yourself why.

And the answer, I suspect, will lead you to discover what you’re doing wrong.

So a thin but energetic Steve Jobs came off his sick bed on Wednesday to launch Apple’s “blockbuster” new product iPad 2.

The up-graded but thinner and lighter version of the device now sports 2 cameras, a faster processor and comes in a choice of white or black. If you pay extra you can add a clever looking cover which doubles as a stand.

I was invited on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss it (click here to listen) and as is the case EVERY time I mention the iPad someone responds with “I’m not sure I see the point in it”.

There’s clearly demand for tablets – more than 15 million iPads have been sold since April – and Motorola, HP, Blackberry and Samsung are all launching rival products with Sony rumoured to be planning its debut before the end of the year.

But many consumers can’t justify the expense or don’t know what they’d use it for. I’ll be honest with you, that’s how I feel. I haven’t discovered that killer application that would turn the device from something I admire (and sometimes even lust after a little bit!) to something essential that I’m prepared to buy.

It’s been interesting to read the recent press coverage about Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, which has given an iPad to every pupil.

Tabloid coverage has stirred things up and suggests an embarrassment of riches in this privately funded school at a time when the public sector is making painful cuts. Opinion is divided. Some people are appalled, they see iPads as glorified toys, think the pupils are spoiled and claim education’s gone mad.

Others look enviously while moaning about woeful IT provison in state run schools and ask if you can afford to send your child to a school with better equipment, then why not?

For an in depth account of how it’s being used used at Cedars School this article  is worth a read.

I’ve got two problems with all this.

First, in my opinion, the iPad is the wrong tool to be giving out in classrooms.

I can see the value in teachers not having to worry about handouts and books and pupils being able to e-mail homework so it can be marked while the teacher nips up to Glasgow on the train in the evening (although I can’t imagine my wife EVER doing that if her pupils had iPads!).

I’m against them being handed out to every pupil because I think they actually LIMIT children’s imaginations.

Watch the video to find out what I mean…

There is a huge debate to be had about IT provision in schools (actually I’d prefer action rather than more talking) but focussing on whether pupils should have iPads won’t help.

There’s a massive job to be done with infrastructure. Better broadband speed is essential. Crippling security controls that means English teachers can’t show scenes of Romeo and Juliet on YouTube is another issue. The GLOW system which gives every pupil and teacher an e-mail address and allows for on-line sharing of resources is great but lacks storage capacity, gets clogged up and grinds to a halt if it’s being run on PCs that only scraped through the Millennium Bug compliance test.

There’s a lack of joined up thinking and that’s causing increasing frustration. There are many people within education who see IT as an expensive nuisance. I believe there’s a risk technology could get squeezed out of the curriculum, just at the time Scotland desperately needs to develop these skills.

Literacy, Health and Well Being and Numeracy are the 3 big areas the new Curriculum for Excellence revolves around. Are technology and creative industries going to have to make do with a wobbly table at a careers fair once a year?

Scotland has a vibrant digital sector which is doing well against the odds. To get to the next level we need young people to come out of high school buzzing with ideas and excitement. Companies like NS Design and many others are ready and willing to get involved and work with local authorities who want to increase what their schools offer in this area and make best use of the resources available.

My message to young people today would be this: Forget about the iPad. Develop your imagination and concentrate on how technology can solve people’s problems.

And to parents, teachers, politicians and everyone in the industry, I’d say “Give them all the encouragement and support you can”.

What started out as a normal Wednesday morning resulted in being anything but.

Over our usual morning cup of tea and banter, the subject inevitably came around to the pending papal visit the following day.

Being web evangelists (aka geeks) here at NSDesign, we jokingly imagined creating an “alternative” version utilising the PayPal branding but without the distinguishing “Y”.

To be honest, that part wasn’t a terribly unique idea, people were already referencing it on Twitter, but on a whim, we took it that bit further. We decided it might be fun to do a little social media experiment where the objective would be to start with nothing and see how we could build awareness and generate interest in a site which was literally minutes old.

If it did work, then perhaps some of the lessons learned could be applied any online marketing strategy.

By eleven we’d registered the domain. After noon, we’d thrown a quick site together and started to promote the site via a few pointed “tweets” just after 1pm.

Below is how the site looked not long after launching: very basic but still funny enough to get people talking…

(Screengrab: www.paypalvisit.com)

Within minutes the traffic started to arrive and the re-tweets began…

(Screengrab: Real Time Google)

As the day went on, we added more content and images and posted the link on Facebook walls.

SOME 48-HOUR STATS:

The unique visitors were just short of 2000.

Page views came in around the 3500 mark.

Our whole point wasn’t just to drive traffic in a call-to-action format, it was to reach a s wide of an audience as possible thus building brand/site awareness.

Through tools such as TweetReach* – we were able to ascertain how far our “reach” was.

Tweet Reach: Nearly 75k

On Twitter, according to our full TweetReach report*, shows we had a potential reach around 75,000 people – which rather ironically is more than actually showed up to see Pope.

On the day of the Pope’s visit, “day two” of our  humourous project, we posted various topical updates throughout the day.

The page grew and grew more graphics and with tongue-in-cheek reports.

(Screengrab: Susan Boyle Double Booked!)

Those, too, were tweeted and re-tweeted throughout the day. (We caught a few people out with that one…)

It was all done in good fun but yet there were things we could take away from this humourous experiment.

A FEW THINGS WE LEARNED:

1) Anything topical you can tie in with your own expertise, and be a part of the buzz creation by contributing something valuable to the buzz,  you’re on to a winner.

2) Anything that is unique with humor (bearing in mind everyone’s humor is different) is also an added bonus in experiments like this.

3) We added the Facebook “Like” button and the “Tweet This” button – quite late in the game on day two – which indicates had we’d started off the project with that we might have pull back our marketing push and let the visitors of the website spread the message directly. Nearly a hundred people indicated “liked it” in just a few hours and thus spreading the message directly to their own wider networks.

4) Understanding who your champions are is very beneficial. For instance, you can see who’s mentioning it – using Google Real Time – you quite quickly see who the main influencers are.

In theory, you could almost be clever and target the people who you want to be spreading your message – and tweet them specifically in the first instance.

5) On the down side…while this experiment actually resulted in gaining followers, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t admit we’d have lost a few in the process.

After all, we broke the cardinal rule of overusing one subject in tweets – which, at times, may have been viewed coming across in an overly saturated and spammy sort of way.

Anyway it was a really fun and interesting project. We hope you who viewed the page enjoyed it as much as we did creating it.

****
SEE: www.paypalvisit.com

(*Note that link only shows 50 of the total Tweets – you have to buy the full report to see all of it – which we did…)

The word Webinar is a portmanteau of web and seminar, and as the name suggests, enables multiple people to have a group discussion on any given topic. They are one of the most social ways to conduct business on the internet, as they rely on real-time, face-to-face interaction and have become increasingly popular as the recession has restricted marketing and travel budgets.

Webinars differ from web conferences mainly in scale. On one level the terms are largely interchangeable, but industry experts tend to define web conferences as smaller, more intimate meetings between two or three parties – akin to a team chat in the office, or a one-on-one client meeting.

On the other hand, webinars tend to take on the role of industry conferences. There are several types of format, but generally there is a keynote speaker who delivers a talk before opening the floor to questions via email, text and chat. Any number of people can log onto the webinar, although access can be restricted via the usual security settings.

There are several instances of webinars being used successfully for internet marketing purposes, putting clients in direct contact with the key people behind your business. They are a cost and time-effective way of connecting with a wide number of people and companies who currently host frequent webinars include Cable & Wireless and Emap. Aims vary from training, allowing employees across an international company to receive training simultaneously, to marketing, by creating a new channel to market.

Webinars tend to be suitable for most businesses and open up a whole world of communications possibilities, enabling you to interact, internally and externally, in ways not previously possible.

We’ve been fortunate to have Sean Forsyth with us this week – on work experience from Gryffe High School.

I asked Sean to sum up his week with us, and am delighted he’s letting me share it on the Blog:

I have really enjoyed my week of work experience here at NSDesign even though at first I was not sure what to expect. I feel like now I have a greater knowledge of the web design business and would like to follow it as a career path, although I still have a lot of learning to do before I can do anything that all the staff here can. Also I am very interested in other parts of the business too like ‘Embrace the Space’ and never realised how Social Networking sites could be used for business purposes and so effectively. Everyone at the office has been very helpful in getting me started and making sure I get the most out of my week. I thank everyone here for making the effort to give me the chance to work here as I’ve had a great experience!

On behalf of the team, I’d like to offer a big thanks to Sean for all his efforts this week, and we hope to keep in close contact as he continues his career.

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture to some students from the School of Computing and Creative Technologies (CCT) at the University of Abertay in Dundee.

The focus of the talk was on the highs and lows of setting up and running your own business, drawing on experiences and “lessons learned” since founding NSDesign over 10 years ago.

All in all – a really good afternoon, for me, and also (from the great feedback) for the students also..  always inspiring to see them asking some good questions, many of them tied to the current economic issues we’re all facing today.  And of course – always nice when a few of them ask for jobs!

So thanks to everyone who attended, and for the many that have since follwed me on twitter.