No sooner do I declare it a slow technology news week than this story comes out. Finland has declared access to the Internet a basic human right. This is the most recent news in a growing number of countries, backed by the UN, making such efforts.
From a training perspective, this is another barrier to web-based training knocked down. If Internet access (or more accurately, access to the information on the Internet) is a basic human right, so is access to online training and other organizational programs.
Although I wouldn’t expect that such efforts would necessarily lead to Internet-in-every-household, it certainly encourages such a movement. And the closer we get to having such consistent access to and familiarity with the Internet around the world, the less trouble introducing any online program will be.
It’s been a pretty slow news week in technology training, so I thought I’d briefly comment on the new printing of the APA Style Guide – the handbook of rules and guidelines for writing papers in the style mandated by the American Psychological Association. This is the how-to manual for writing academic papers, both for students writing in social science classes and professors writing in academic journals. A new edition (the 6th) was released in July 2009.
I can hear you now – “what a boring topic!” And true, arguing the finer points of writing style is not terribly interesting itself. The interesting part is the controversy that has erupted due to the recent elease of roughly nine pages of corrections to the guide, spread quite obnoxiously across four PDFs labeled Errors in APA Style Rules, Errors in Examples, Clarifications, and Nonsignificant Typos. With some critics demanding free reprints and others suggesting dropping APA in favor of Chicago or MLA styles, this has in turn drawn even greater scrutiny on the rules contained therein.
I think the most interesting tidbit I picked up from the various debates is this comment on Inside Higher Ed from Bill Dockery on the change from single- to double-spaces after complete sentences:
Is there experimental evidence for this “double-space” rule after periods, or are there just some social scientists who can’t shake the influence of their high school typing teachers?
Modern editorial practice demands only one space after periods because most texts are transmitted (and edited) electronically and the double letter-space after periods, etc., can introduce typographic complications. That’s been common knowledge for only the last quarter century.
(And are social science editorial boards STILL working with hardcopy submissions?)
All I have to say is: “Ouch.”
An article in ITPro discusses a study by research firm (and apparently futurists) Gartner suggesting that businesses will have dress codes for their employee’s online avatars by 2013.
Avatar isn’t defined by the article, so it’s unclear what kind of avatar this research was investigating. When logging into online discussion boards or social networking sites, users often choose a small picture that will always be posted next to their name – this is an avatar. When using a virtual world, users create 3D characters to represent themselves – these are also avatars.
My guess then is that Gartner is not really predicting the organizational regulation of avatars, but instead, the regulation of online personas in general. When employees speak for the company in real life, the corporate argument is that these individuals have a responsibility to make sure they represent the company as it wishes to be represented. When employees have the freedom to represent themselves online however they wish and then represent the company, that image may not be maintained. I can imagine some of the weird avatars people choose to adopt in Second Life at a business meeting and cringe.
None of this is particularly surprising. The interesting part is the timeline – if organizations find business-dealings-by-avatar to be important enough to have regulations about them, then that implies Gartner believes such online negotiation will be common by 2013.
I guess that gives me a pretty good deadline for when all this virtual worlds research needs to be finished, eh?