Improve the health of our relationship with digital technology, and I believe we can change our lives, and by extension, make the world a better place. At 2gether08, The Digital Health Service will bring us back home to where digital technology brings well-being to the people of the planet.

What is digital health?  Read the rest of our post over at 2gether08. 

Please excuse a bit of backwards blogging here (and there's more coming up about our National Youth Theatre workshop last week so prepare your expectations of not-so-instant news gratification).  I've finally obtained a few pics of the NESTA Innovation Edge day from Mr Mark Champkins over at Concentrate (yes, he was on Dragons Den) who we share a studio with and also from Nico McDonald's photostream.  We met lots of great people, gathered a ton of cards and heard from Gordon Brown's flying visit that We Are The Future.  Cool huh?  Enjoy!

A busy week last week for the Digital Health Service with our second workshop for The Learning & Skills Council as well as exhibiting at NESTA's Innovation Edge expo on Southbank.  While the Nina manned our stand at NESTA I was off on a fast train from London bridge to LSC Towers in Croydon to be part of their Learning At Work day (which seemed to also consist of a wine tasting session later that evening - wish I could have hung around!).

We got right in there and got the day started talking through strategies for emailing, information diets and the pros and cons of transparaency of working styles and selective ignorance for the future of the knowledge worker.  Phew. 

Email was top of the list yet again for exploration in the Digital Health Landscape excercise, closely followed by Blackberrys and then Facebook.  We saw some very positive use and love of Blackberrys - it's good to remind ourselves that technology can be a real benefit to our work lives if used in an aware and controlled way. 

Facebook caused a real split with the 'I'm not going near it in a month of Sundays' group facing off the 'Yea I know it's a bit of a pain but I find it quite fun' group across the digital health grid.  The tension disappearing magically when the groups explored how they'd be using it in future - not many were still using it to arrange their social lives.  Each workshop I do there appears to me more and more bordom with Facebook.  Sea change?
  

After the pleasing success of our Wiki and RSS dramatic explanations (imagine a real time CommonCraft show) we'll be adding further how-tos and tips to the next workshop as requested by a the LSC participants.  Thanks for the feedback guys and many thanks to Debi and Bek for arranging the day.

Myself and the lovely Miss Nina Gritzke are exhibiting at NESTA's Innovation Edge conference on Tuesday at the Royal Festival Hall in London, which is all very exciting.  If you are heading down there drop by and do say hello. Bob Geldof will be there. I saw him in a coffee shop about a month ago.  Is he following me?  I think so.

Check out Iain Tait's experience of Mental Detox Week.  My favourite parts:
 
"I’ve been scared of the telephone for a while. I feel more confident writing things down in emails. It gives me a chance to formulate my thoughts and arguments a little better. Phones always smack of having to think ‘in real time’ which gives me the fear.

But you know what. Phones are good. You can get things agreed in one conversation. Conversations on the phone can be finished in just minutes! The conversation goes back and forth really quickly and you can get to decisions much faster. Plus you don’t have to deal with any tyrannical cc’ing."

And:

"But what happens when you leave ’stuff’ for a while? Mostly it’ll still be there. But sometimes it won’t. I think mainly the fear was just that there would be too much stuff when I came back to it. I knew that I’d have to just ditch loads of unread RSS feeds. Which effectively meant that I’d missed out on all those things.

I just had to realise that it was OK to miss out on all that stuff. My life didn’t change in a bad way. Really. Or did it? Now I’m not sure. Maybe there was a blog post or a something that could have changed my life irreversibly.

The point is that there’s too much stuff and I have to learn to let it go. There’s stuff going on everywhere the whole time. Most of it I’ll never get to see. Even if it was all on the internet and all being fed into my brain I wouldn’t be able to cope.

I learned it’s OK to miss stuff."

 
I've been on an information-diet of a similar nature for a while and have been discovering very similar reactions so it's great to read this parallel experience.  Thanks to Matt Weston for the link and to Iain for sharing.