Home Schooling ICT, part 1: e-Safety.

My eldest aske me to give her lessons about ICT (Information, Computing and Technology) because she wanted to take her school lessons further. So I developed a 10 week course that covered the topics that she wanted, and the topics that I thought were important: e-Safety, Office Apps, Researching on the Internet, and using her Raspberry Pi. It’s been a really interesting learning experience for me: which topics to choose, how to pitch the topics to the right age and ability, how to deliver the topics to be engaging. I’m going to post how each lesson went.

Lesson 1: Staying safe on the Internet

Objectives:

·       Identifying safe and unsafe behaviours

·       Playing nicely online

·       Understand what to do if unsure

1.     List of 5 favourite online activities

2.     http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/5_7/

3.     Follow links, read and discuss

4.     Watch a cartoon from Hector’s World

5.     Search for <me> online. Follow the links, and write down all that you can find out about me.

6.     Critical evaluation - have I been safe online?

My approach was to highlight how her online behavoiurs could be easily misinterpreted because there are no contextual cues. And these contextual cues help to identify undesirable people and their undesirable behaviours. The analogy I used was the school playground – a behaviour that would be mean in the playground would also be mean online.

My eldest told me that her school had already played some of the “Hector’s World” videos, so these topics were familiar to her. The task to search for me online was quite surprising – apparently I may have a criminal record in the US! But it nicely highlighted that relying on the Internet was itself an unsafe behaviour (more on that in a subsequent lesson).

She was more engaged when the activity needed her to click or type or write, rather than reading  or watching or listening. Her attention span also dropped to almost completely distracted just before the hour mark – must make sure I pace the lessons carefully.

I think she enjoyed the lesson, and I certainly enjoyed giving it. We’re both looking forward to next week.

More in this series: part 2.

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Key messages for the cable industry.

I was at the annual cable industry conference last week, Cable Congress in London. For those who don't know it, it's quite a small event, but it is attended by many CxO from the cable industry in Europe, so it's a good barometer of how the industry wishes to portray itself. I was struck by how bullish the industry is feeling. I hadn't heard such optimism and swagger since the days of the last telco bubble. These were the key messages from the conference:



1. Cable has a strong future even if it stays still: Analyst numbers released during the conference show good growth, and show that more customers are taking bundles. Furthermore, in many EU markets, it shows growth potential in converting analogue to digital, and further penetrating broadband. In other words, many EU markets can achieve good growth by maintaining current operating strategies.

2. Simplicity: The value proposition to customers needs to be articulated in a very simple way: faster broadband speed, free WiFi on the underground, easy to find favourite shows at any time. Not a menu card of broadband speeds and download caps, nor paid-for WiFi bundles, nor carrying full range of direct-to-consumer "over-the-top" services. Furthermore, the propositions need to be communicated through a conversation with customers, using methods that ways customers like: post and response on Facebook, IM chats, informative Twitter feeds. 

Finally, the same approach of simplicity as used in business-to-consumer, should be applied to business-to-business offerings too, as business increase their internal use of social media.

3. Complete connectivity: WiFi is becoming an important connectivity technology for cable customers, so cable needs to offer wireless connectivity alongside its wireline in order to stay relevant. Cable needs to move from triple-play to quad-play. 

Direct competition with mobile operators is likely in the future, once 4G prices reduce. There are also opportunities to partner with mobile because cable has already deployed the infrastructure, e.g. backhaul services (national high-capacity fibre), enabling small cell infrastructure (national coverage of cable street cabinets), as well as white-labelling WiFi access (domestically-deployed dual SSID cable-modems).

4. Improving utilisation and monetisation of bandwidth: Two points here: More bandwidth can be provided to customers, at acceptable price points, than customers can use. Cable must deploy value-added-services that increase utilisation, or risk customers using over-the-top services that disintermediate cable from the value chain. OTT TV is the first and most common, but will be followed by Connected Home OTT services. 

The second part is that a few content services take up the majority of bandwidth. This is an opportunity to monetise bandwidth more, following the example of broadcast carriage deals. However, such strategies need to be wary of net neutrality legislation.

5. Customer service challenges: Cable is reaching further into the customer home at the same time as home IT becomes more complex, at the same time as customers have higher expectations of service from their experiences in other industries. The challenges are therefore: customer support needs to become more sophisticated to support complex service offerings; customer support needs to support third party complex service offerings; each customer touch point needs to increase the customer’s perception of value of the service offering. 

The fourth challenge is that customers are unwilling to pay extra for best-in-class service. Cable companies cannot price it into the products, as companies such as Apple can, therefore the final challenge is how cable can fund this transformation in customer service.


To put the sentiment into perspective, it's helpful to look at Liberty Global's recent acquisition of Virgin Media. This is the largest cable acquisition in terms of value of customer base, size of debt to finance the acquisition, and market capitalisation of target company, since the telco bubble. So the cable industry clearly feels that the good times are back, even as the rest of the country disagrees.