Is time an issue in adopting new technologies

[Gill Clough]

Our group is now discussing all these technologies: twitter, Facebook and social networking sites, live blogging. Steve is making the point that you can only cope with so many things and Chris has pointed out that he has to be selective about what he spends his time on.

Steve finds the Knowledge Network really useful as a resource at the moment.

Twitter was hardly used at IET last year in October, but since then lots of people have discovered uses for it.

What is it that causes us to use or not to use these technologies?

[Doug Clow]

Time management is a huge challenge, and I can't say I get it right. Even at the micro level in meetings like this ... should I be listening just now ... or tweeting ... or liveblogging ... or what?

[Anesa]

Definitely ... time is a problem ... particularly when you're thinking about probably my time would be spent better doing something productive (such as writing my thesis!) - but indeed I think one of the things that we have to consider is what is productive? Using social networking site and putting updates that might refer to a problem you're having - a person might decide to help you out and hence increase your productivity ...

So, I think it all depends on how we measure productivity ... I guess.

[Chris Jones]

I introduced the borrowed term 'attention economy' and my concern is that we all have limited time and we have to select what we can pay attention to. What is the tipping point that moves an individual to using a service or a device and is this related to tipping points in groups as the 'importance' in an attention economy of one thing may come from its use by many others.

We also looked at iGoogle as an example of bringing things together and lowering the threshold of using single service by aggregating them in one space.

[Anesa]

I think also one of the problems is that as an educational technologist you want to keep ahead of the game and know all of the technologies, but how can you? When there is so much ... and how do you know which ones would be effective?

I think this is the attention economy that Chris is speaking about - choosing and deciding. I agree with Chris, with an aggregator such as igoogle for widgets, this reduces the time spent on each individual application, but can be seen all at once, and perhaps the attention economy is reduced through these kind of aggregators.

[Patrick McAndrew]

The attention issue is certainly true - but I am not sure that this is isolated to the new tools. For example email and word-processing are also time sinks. I see a few possible gains from social tools:
- their use in micro-breaks
- persistence of ideas and conversations that are transient
- alternatives to something else that takes longer (time spent on video v report time)
- a way to keep interest

[Denise Whitelock]

I agree with Anesa that technologies are developing apace but these sorts of tools help you gauge what's growing and declining and with informal comments you can often see quickly why certain applications are in favour.

[Ann Jones]

Yes, time definitely an issue - so I might manange twitter as its really short - I will experiment and see - but unlikely to start and sustain other new things unless there are definites paybacks.
Also, I try to use the same password but sometimes there are constraints - and so if it turns out not to be my usual password and I then have to reset it and restart , just that extra time is a real disincentive.................