JoelFoner.com

Is Offshoring a Race to the Bottom or Race to the Top?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Nov 16 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Is Offshoring a Race to the Bottom or Race to the Top?

The debate about offshoring, the practice of moving jobs to other countries—usually with the objective of lowering costs—raises consistent and harsh debate. There are arguments about whether offshoring is “good” or “bad” and whether it creates problems or enhances the local job market. A presumption of many is that by offshoring lower-end jobs, this will be a race to the top for the country sending work overseas, as more people can focus on the higher value “race to the top” jobs. Others claim that this is merely a short term gain which will generate a “race to the bottom” globally, leaving a wider gap between rich and poor, and further centralizing power.

Is offshoring a race to the bottom, or a race to the top? What will the short, mid and long-term results of continued globalization and offshoring look like?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Aug 9, 2010 – added links:
NY Time Op-Ed by Timothy Geithner “Welcome to the Recovery”
CS Monitor by Bill Bonner “Welcome to the Recovery? No, Mr. Geithner, the Twilight Zone.”
Human Capital League by Gautam Ghosh “10 Ways Work will Change over the Next Decade”

Why is the “Economic Recovery” of 2010 Jobless?

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This Tuesday, Aug 10th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Why is the “Economic Recovery” of 2010 Jobless?

The “economic recovery” of 2010 has been good for Wall Street and the financial markets, and essentially non-existent for jobs, housing valuations, foreclosure and personal bankruptcy rates. Unlike recent recessions, where job recovery lagged, but could be measured in months, predictions suggest that a return to previous unemployment levels will likely take years.

Why is this recovery jobless in a long-term, persistent fashion that has not been seen for decades? Pointing at one symptom or cause at a time makes good press. It makes good politics. It is also a highly simplistic view of the problem .

What are the key trends and drivers for the jobless nature of this recovery? What part of the jobless nature of the recovery is due to offshoring, technology, global wage and cost inequity, politics, the behavior of financial institutions or are the key drivers elsewhere entirely?  Is the current state of the job market an indication of a very slow recovery, or of the start of a double-dip? Will the jobs lost be recovered, or is job recovery based on creation of new job markets (that themselves will not be supplanted by technology)?

Some commentary points to the elimination of middle class job opportunities as an outcome of current trends. If that is the case, will the restructuring stop there, or is this the start of a continuing erosion that will wipe out jobs at ever-higher levels of the work complexity and skills pyramid, until only a small fraction of careers are left?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Read more…

Social Media Applied – How to Get Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 3rd at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Social Media Applied – How to Get Consulting Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

Techniques for finding consulting projects and full-time jobs have changed radically in the last few years. Some of the changes have been driven by the emergence of social media. Others have appeared through changes to recruiting and hiring processes (for full-time positions), changing beliefs and strategies employed by hiring organizations, and large dose of new recruiting automation technologies.

While plenty has been written about social media marketing for products and services, little information is available to help job seekers understand how these changes affect what it takes to get found on this new playing field.

The number of applicants for any project or position outweighs the number of available opportunities by a wide margin (in recent times this number has been as high as 6:1, and is still almost 5:1). The large gap between supply and demand, coupled with new, advanced technologies, have changed the landscape of recruiting and seeking work in fundamental ways.

There is good news. Once you understand the new recruiting model, how the “recruiting ecosystem” fits together, and how companies, hiring managers and recruiters look at the process today, you can change what you do and obtain better results.

Instead of submitting your resume to job boards and wondering why you can’t get any results, you can know which possibilities to focus on, and how to get recruiters and hiring managers to start sending you messages asking if you’re interested in what they’re offering!

Moving from blindly submitting resumes, and getting no response, to having an inbound queue of recruiter and client requests is not instant. It does not rely on magic. It does not rely on luck. Each step is fairly easy, although some of the pieces involve new skills. There is real work involved, but this work can be done bit by bit. These new skills will pay you dividends for the rest of your career – so now might as well be the time to learn them!

Our session this week will be a slightly different format, in that I’ll start off by presenting some techniques and approaches developed and proven from experimentation, interviews with recruiters, and discussions with hiring managers and consulting firms, followed by a group discussion about how to best get from “Where do I start?” to fielding regular inbound queries asking “Are you interested in this opportunity?”

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

2010-07-19 Added reference link to blog post by returning Second Life CEO Philip Linden “Update on Strategy”

Virtual World Success and Failure Factors – Past, Present and Future

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This Tuesday, July 20th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Virtual World Success and Failure Factors – Past, Present and Future

Virtual worlds grabbed the attention of marketers, companies and educational institutions several years ago, in no small part driven by the fast growth of Second Life™ and offerings for younger children such as Disney’s Club Penguin and many others. Some predicted that virtual worlds would “replace the 2D web.” Over the course of several years many competitors appeared on the marketplace. Today it is far less clear whether this evolutionary replacement will occur in the mid-term, if ever.

In this discussion we will analyze three phases of virtual world development, using the Second Life environment as a model for discussion (since it is the one that most participants in this group know the best).

We will look at Second Life’s initial strong growth phase, discussing which factors seem to have driven and limited growth even during that fast adoption period.

A second phase appeared, in which more targeted uses of virtual worlds appeared, although also through this period usage growth appeared to have stalled, and in many ways retrenched (from public data, it would appear that concurrency has fallen to levels roughly comparable to two years ago after a peak in early 2009). Although on a typical day about 10,000 new registrations are logged, only about 2% of these registrations result in active users (from data presented in a public forum around the launch of Viewer 2).

The third phase has yet to unfold, as we go forward to some form of global financial recovery (with or without jobs, a related but separate topic). Will this third phase look like continued decline for virtual world use, or growth, and what drivers will determine its shape?

We will discuss the corporate model, technical, community, marketing and external cultural and business/financial drivers for the growth or lack of growth through these phases. Is there a path that would result in strong future growth for virtual world technologies, has the market splintered in a fashion that reflects strong but less visible growth, and under what conditions would a system such as Second Life return to strong growth, or has it reached its ultimate size based on the number of people who are interested in its philosophy and concept base? Will virtual world concepts become dramatically widespread, but in some other form than a single-vendor connected system? Are there drivers that indicate that the concepts must evolve to be of interest to a dramatically larger audience?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

The Massachusetts Cape Wind Project has been in the news this week, and listening to the debate has got me thinking that there is a part of the picture that seems to have been left out of the discussion.

Wind power sounds like a great deal. It is renewable. It doesn’t rely on exploiting oil, coal or other physical reserves. The on-going costs are mostly hardware maintenance.

At the same time, the engineering part of my head keeps whispering “Hey! Energy doesn’t appear from nowhere!”

Wind holds energy. The atmosphere circulates this energy in weather systems. Wind farms generate electricity by pulling energy out of the air, which removes energy from the atmosphere.

This leaves me with a question that I have not heard discussed. What will large withdrawals from the atmosphere’s energy reserves will do to the atmosphere, our weather and our climate? Maybe the effects are invisible while we still have very few wind farms. What will happen if the numbers of wind farms grow dramatically?

I am not suggesting that wind power is a bad idea. The tradeoffs may be far better than those involved with oil, coal and other non-renewable sources. At the same time, I think we should try to have an understanding of what the side effects are pulling our energy “out of the air” will be, since it doesn’t actually come from nowhere!

What do you think? Do you know anyone who has solid background in this area, or have you seen any research on the topic?

The Changing Employer-Employee Relationship: What is a Career Today?

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / SL time

This Tuesday, Apr 13, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

The Changing Employer-Employee Relationship: What is a Career Today?

The concept of career has changed dramatically in our lifetime. For our parents, a career was often a single track kept throughout your working life. It was common to have a job working for one employer for years and sometimes decades. A 2008 data release from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the average worker aged 18-42 held 10.8 jobs. On average, workers now change jobs every 2.2 years (from data that precedes the recent severe recession, which has likely further altered these numbers.)

Where companies used to take care of their employees based on an unwritten contract of long-term responsibility, the contract, if it exists, has dramatically changed.

What are the expectations of employers towards their employees now? How do current hiring practices, on-going management practices and release practices illustrate new employer beliefs? What are the expectations of employees towards employers? What are best practices for finding and keeping jobs in a world in which increasingly the employee’s first interview is with a machine?

How have these changes altered the nature of work and of the career concept?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon Pacific/SL time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

Trends and Ethics in Image Enhancement and Alteration

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every Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / SL time

This Tuesday, Apr 6, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Trends and Ethics in Image Enhancement and Alteration

Advances in image manipulation and enhancement software have made it ever easier to enhance, or modify, images in ways that look natural and would not be noticed readily as altered. This trend is not new, however the technologies for manipulating images are getting radically easier. “Normal people” can now seamlessly alter images in ways that used to require significant expertise in advanced tools. One example of the new tools generation is the “Content Aware Fill” feature that is bound to ship shortly with Photoshop CS5 (linked below in the reading links section). This tool has now made it possible for almost anyone to make major structural alterations to images no more effort than selection a region of the image and clicking a few checkboxes.

How will ever-advancing image manipulation capabilities, and the drive to provide these as consumer-easy features, change our views of the world? Legal challenges and discussions of ethics continue to multiply as these capabilities appear. Will image modification become “the status quo” for every use, or will news, reporting and education resist these temptations? Major publications  have answered ethics challenges with the comment that they just exercised industry standards of image manipluation. Does this mean that extensive image manipulation is now the norm across industries? Are attempts to contain image manipulation based on ethics arguments too little, too late? Where is image enhancement and alteration headed, and how will ethics of image integrity and enhancement change to keep up with these changes?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

Does Global Social Communication Cause Bad Behavior or Reveal It?

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This Tuesday, Mar 30, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Does Global Social Communication Cause Bad Behavior or Reveal It?

This week’s news of serious threats against politicians, after passage of the U.S. health care bill, got me wondering “Are the Internet, the media and video games the causes of increased bad behavior, has bad behavior actually increased, or has global instant communication revealed the reality of the human condition more clearly, in a way we were not expecting?”

Many articles (and people) proclaim that the Internet, the media and video games are the primary causes of increased bad behavior. It is easy to rationalize increased bad behavior based on exposure to the environmental messages from the Internet, media and games, however might not be the case. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that a seemingly obvious conclusion does not explain the nature of human behavior.

What is bad behavior, in the context of global social communication? Is it taught and learned? Is it different, and if so, how is it different than bad behavior in face to face and non-online settings? Do parts of our social belief systems encourage or support the on-going existence of bad behavior “by design”? Is it important to us for bad behavior to be present (just throwing out a random hypothesis here…)? Is there value in bad behavior, or can we extract value from it? Has bad behavior increased, or are we just now able to see the scope of it more clearly? What are the causes, can we determine them, and what, if anything can be done about it?

This week we’ll discuss the nature of “bad behavior” in this context, both to better understand what it is, explore the causes, and see what may lie ahead of us as global social communication continues to develop.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

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This Tuesday, Mar 23, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

How has our Networked Society Changed Personal and Business Relationships?

Today’s society has changed, and been changed by, the emergence of systems and tools that have provided a near real-time communications fabric that connects us individually and collectively in new ways. They expose our social graphs, encourage us to explore each others’ social graphs, enable us to meet new people and re-connect with people we’d lost track of, all with speed and a level of ease and fluidity that was unheard of a few years ago.

It is easy to find commentary denouncing these systems as the emergent cause of the downfall of individual relationships and society in general. Is it really all one-sided? Are there advantages and positive changes brought on by our new socially hyper-networked world, as well as some risks and negative implications? We are in the midst of an evolution that is only enabled by technology, but is far more about us and how we relate than the technologies themselves. A while back I wrote a post The Networked Audience is Here. Now. Are You Ready? That post focused on professional presenters, but the true impact has much wider reach. This week we’ll explore the effects of these changes on our relationships in general.

How has the emergence of our networked society changed the way we relate to each other, the way we communicate, the way we create and maintain relationships? Have we started to change the nature of human relationships—what it means to be social, what it means to be part of a society, or what culture itself means?

Much of the literature on the web about the impact of networked society on relationships focuses on personal and intimate relationships, and this bias is reflected in the reading links below. That being said, the same issues apply to many types of relationships, including family, purely social and business relationships, so please read them in that light, as we’ll be discussing this larger view of the topic.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and Read more…

Is it Time for a Disruptive Solution for Modern Education?

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This Tuesday, Mar 16, at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic: Is it Time for a Disruptive Solution for Modern Education?

A Caveat

You may be used to quick discussion starter posts for We Are The Network sessions. This is not one of those posts! I sat down to write this, realized that many threads wind together to create context for this discussion, then figured I should try to get them into written form. I hope this is interesting. Research for this session also turned up a number of interesting web references. Please feel free to add comments with relevant references. Thanks in advance for reading, and for being part of We Are The Network – here we go…

A Personal Experience with some nice results

This weekend I presented three different topics at the Virtual World Best Practices in Education 2010 conference:  ”Creating and Adapting Educational Curriculum for Virtual World Delivery,” “Delivery Skills for Connecting with Today’s Digitally Immersed Students in Face to Face, Social Media and Virtual World Settings” and “Adapting Agile Scrum Project Management for Face to Face, Social Media and Virtual World Education Projects.”

The conference included 176 presenter sessions in 48 hours, over 1000 pre-registered attendees (I’m still waiting to find out the total number of participants), and an enthusiastic, global audience. I presented some challenging material, and received comments from participants that the sessions interesting and highly engaging. A few said they were trying to multi-task but kept being drawn back – which was really a nice response!

…And Then the Big Surprise

There was, however, a big surprise. In the view of some participants, the learning received was better than had it been delivered in person! Although some of this result is based on the platform, my belief is that a large part of these successes were based on the use of a non-traditional instructional approach. I’m pretty certain that the same results could be generated in a pure face to face setting as well, and now know that virtual delivery works just as effectively with these techniques. As a result of these sessions I’ve been approached to deliver virtual sessions (some live video with bi-directional remote, to an international conference, and some in virtual world settings) at other conferences.

Are we on The Brink?

After years of work in face to face, online, mixed reality, social media and virtual world settings, this experience really got me to thinking. If these techniques and platforms have gotten to the point that some think they’re equal to or better than an in-person experience, are we on the brink of the disruption of another industry—one whose basis has been beyond question for years?

Research for this week’s session turned up many interesting findings, including Read more…