Sunday Newsletter (No. 10): Our new virtual lives
Here’s my take on a few things in tech and science that have been happening recently:
This week’s newsletter is focused on our new virtual lives created by the coronavirus pandemic. In-person human interactions have now been replaced by Zoom meetings and FaceTime dates. Several start-ups have emerged to help us navigate this new world. It’s possible that technology can effectively replace face-to-face interactions, but perhaps the more important question is should it?
Virtual water cooler moments. Like many people, I’ve been working from home since March. While there are undeniable benefits to this situation (such as eliminating my 90 minute a day commute) and my team’s productivity seems to have increased, I do miss the spontaneous interactions with my colleagues in the office. Teemyco is a Stockholm start-up aiming to re-create these moments digitally by setting up a virtual office space - creating an opportunity for less formal video and audio calls and allowing you to “work next to” a colleague with a walkie-talkie feature for quick conversations. While these features are handy for the remote working world, allowing more effective collaboration, I don’t think that the psychological and physiological benefits we gain from human interaction can be obtained in a virtual room. Dopamine is commonly linked to reward mechanisms in the brain, but this isn’t its only function - it’s also involved in motivation and learning. I certainly get a dopamine hit from interacting with others in the physical world, and I’m fairly convinced these simple moments of casual conversation and laughter in the office help to keep me motivated and encourage creativity in my work. For many of us, a return to the office is still a while away - companies like Google and Facebook have extended their work from home policies until summer 2021. Will we be able to replicate the happiness associated with real-life interactions virtually, or will we become less and less inspired and energised by work as WFH continues?
Links:
Teemyco creates virtual offices so you can grab a room and talk with colleagues (TechCrunch)
Riff raises $1.5M to revolutionise remote team communication through voice-first chat tool (Seedcamp)
Virtual babysitting. We know that video calling tools are being used for work meetings and university lectures, but in some countries other activities have now become virtual, such as babysitting. Women working at a Japanese restaurant in Rwanda are now babysitting Japanese kids online via Zoom, after the restaurant had to close to customers due to the coronavirus. The women play with and sing to the children, keeping an eye on them while their parents work. This is an interesting example of cross-cultural pollination. However, it does expose the economic disparity between the countries: the women are paid just $28/month. I’m not sure how expensive babysitters are in Japan but I’ll venture to guess they’re nowhere near this cheap. Our new virtual world provides an opportunity for more such cross-cultural connections - if you are interacting with someone from across a screen, it doesn’t really matter what country they are in. An interesting example of this appeared in the UK back in 2014 with a programme called School in the Cloud, where volunteer “grannies” interact with children in poor areas of India, reading them stories and chatting to them, providing a friendly and encouraging environment. Rather than being taught lessons, the purpose of these sessions is social interaction - it help the children learn English, which allows them to then navigate the Internet and access English language learning materials, and provides a supportive space conducive to self-learning.
Links:
Rwandan single mothers turn to online babysitting of Japanese kids (Kyodo News)
The 'granny cloud': the network of volunteers helping poorer children learn (The Guardian)
Virtual education. This week, children in the UK went back to school after several months of remote learning. For some, this meant online classes, while for others this meant not learning at all due to lack of access to internet or laptops at home. With social distancing and other virus prevention measures in place, the school experience won’t be the same as before. However, this doesn’t need to be a negative - perhaps the pandemic is the push to change that our archaic education system needs. Copious education-tech companies emerged during the pandemic to improve the online learning experience. I think the next step will be to combine these advances with changes to the in-person learning experience to create a new era of schooling. It seems like learning facts, which is a large part of traditional schooling, is something could be done asynchronously and individually. With social interactions now being limited, they should be used wisely to develop children’s creativity and interpersonal skills. We should also think about how we can make teachers lives easier, allowing them to use their time for the most valuable activities. Partnerships between start-ups developing these tools and schools will be key in creating the education system of the future. Kami is an app already doing this in the US - it is currently being used in over 17,000 school districts to help teachers digitise learning materials.
Links:
Digital classroom app, Kami, announces new integrations for the fall (Tech Republic)
The future of edtech: How Abu Dhabi is leading the way (The New Statesman)
This is a newsletter of a three things in tech and science that I've found interesting this week. It's a 5 minute read on a Sunday, in which I’m hoping you’ll learn something new.
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