Nicholas Craig column

Mar 2 2007 By Nicholas Craig, The Journal

Blogs, wikis, podcasts. The internet is spawning a strange new language. More importantly, it is also freeing up old ways of working and learning.

I would never call myself an email evangelist, but the ease of working thousands of miles from my desk astonished me while I was abroad.

Effortless communication by emails made New Zealand a very pleasant hot desk location. Some colleagues and clients still have no idea I was anywhere else than in Newcastle.

America is looking further than simply changing working practices. A million children in America are now enrolled in virtual schooling. They complete some or all of their classes online. The schools still get the funding and the teenagers appear to be progressing as well as those in classrooms.

Another American unveiled the world's first wind-up computer this month. It costs £50.

It will be distributed free to pupils in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uruguay and Thailand. You power it up a bit like a mini-lanwnmower, by yanking a ripcord or winding a handle. It could open up online communications for millions of people in developing countries as it rolls out.

I may have moaned, Meldrew-like, in the past that instant communications are an intrusion because we are now always "available". At work, home, on the train, in restaurants, in the street, where we used to be able to switch off, we can no longer do so.

The advantage of 24-hour availability is that it offers the opportunity of a new way of working. If we can be contacted wherever we are, we can operate from a much wider choice of locations than the office.

The information revolution gives us a multitude of ways in which we can have the knowledge we need at our fingertips. My one niggle is one of balance.

We need to include old-fashioned face-to-face communication alongside our time at computers. The million schoolchildren completing their schooling by computer are missing out on classroom interaction, which prepares you well for the next step of life, however useful the computer.

Our ability to assess, understand and respond to situations by listening and watching people cannot be learned by computer.

Log off and look around you - there's more life out there than on any online source.

Nicholas Craig is a partner at Watson Burton LLP.