Hi,

My name is Gary and I work for an environmental charity called Changeworks. I am the Information Communication Technology (ICT) Technician, in other words IT support.

2. I’m not too sure what I will gain from doing the 23 things as I work in IT. I am more interested in what my work colleagues will gain from this to get their digital skills more up to date.

3. Currently I have very little digital footprint and I would like to keep it that way. I don’t use social media in any way and have no intention of using it in the future unless I win the lottery and go and live on an island which is unlikely.

4. Having checked my phone app permissions I found no surprises as to what the apps share.

5. Emojis. In my opinion it doesn’t really matter what emojis are available as it’s just human nature to use / abuse whatever is online at any given moment. Cynical I know but that seems to be the world we live in.

6. I used my works website for the diversity and accessibility tool. I found this interesting as it showed our site to be quite hard for people with vision issues to actually read the site. It has made me think about people with disabilities and how hard it must be to use the internet. Our marketing department may be interested to learn this.

7. Twitter. I have never used social media and do not have a Twitter account. Twitter demands you create an account when I use the URL https://twitter.com but I used Google to search for ‘twitter search’ and got in through that. Had a quick search of IT jobs (don’t worry boss I’m not jumping ship) and seen that it’s quite useful for this. Twitter is also a good platform for getting news you may never hear about, especially local news.

8. Facebook. I choose not to use Facebook for personal reasons. I can see it uses for communication for say family members keeping in contact when separated. I really can’t understand people’s addiction to Facebook. Letting strangers know you have been to the toilet or what you had for breakfast I just find a bit weird.

9. Google Hangouts. Although I do have a Google account I do not use Hangouts. Instead I use Microsoft Teams for chat and video. I find Teams easy to use and never had issues with call quality. My work uses Teams to chat and have video conferences. It also gets used for sharing and editing documents but mostly is used for sending gifs!

10. Wikipedia. Spent some time exploring Wikimedia’s range of open knowledge projects. Everyone knows Wikipedia even if it’s just from an internet search as Wiki usually pops up near the top. It’s handy for some information but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything I deemed important. Had a look at Wikiquote but wasn’t impressed. A quote search engine that couldn’t find ‘I’ll be back’ from the Terminator film. Wow!

11. Copyright.

“Computers!” by la_salebete is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Found this image which reminds me of when I first started my job as we were all on Macs. This image has a creative commons license which allows users to share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and also adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material.

“DEC VT-100 Terminal” by vegms is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This is what we use at work these days as it’s better than a Macbook! The same creative commons license applies to this image with the same rights as the first one.

Alas gone are the days when you could just grab anything from the internet and use it for whatever the hell you wanted. Seriously though copyright is very important these days as so much is created online and people need paid or get recognition for their work. Found this quite interesting at work a few years ago when copyright was starting to get enforced. This made presentations harder as you had to find images / video that you could use legally instead of like I said earlier, just using whatever you can find.

12. OERs. I found this on the OER site:

https://open.ed.ac.uk/excelling-in-excel/

Could be handy at work to upskill users (including myself as I hardly use excel).

13. Video. I use youtube to watch video clips. It’s easy to use especially if you have a google account. I couldn’t see an easy way of displaying the video license but if you search for a video and use the filter you can search for creative commons licensed content.

14. Audio. As I never wander around with earphones in blasting my brain out of reality, I never listen to podcasts. If I want to listen or watch anything I always use google or youtube as I’m always at a PC doing this.