Of Germ Pods and Personal Learning Clouds……… two trends of a post COVID future


It is fascinating to see how technologies originate in response to unmet needs and then go on to transform and impact the world in unfathomable ways.

In this post, I look at two such technology initiatives and then explore how they might evolve and impact us.

The first technology initiative is Germ Pods.

It was early April 2020 and the Covid had just started making initial inroads into India with recorded infections hovering around a couple of thousand.  The Government launched an innovative contact tracing and self-assessment mobile App called Aarogya Setu. It became the fastest growing App in the world with more than fifty million downloads in less than two weeks. The App gathered data from positive infection reports on a real time basis and was designed to identify infection hot spots and alert the user about the number of Covid infected people in the vicinity. Government ministries and Indian Airports made it mandatory for all people to register into the App to ensure low risk. Aarogya Setu was subsequently merged with the COWIN portal which was designed to register and update vaccination status at the individual level.

Countries around the world launched similar contact, movement and vaccination status tracing Apps during the pandemic.

As I muse, the import and the transformative potential of the tracing and status app becomes clear. The future would be about a real need to protect and secure the health of oneself and one’s own community. Increasingly, testing for various transmissible diseases, real time tracing and proximity alerts would form the basis of AI based algorithmic analysis to create hierarchies of health risk statuses. In spite of repeated assurances that individual privacy norms would be protected, geographic and digital clusters of such hierarchies would begin to emerge and, in more ways than one, would trample on individual’s privacy and behaviour. These clusters or “Germ pods” would over time become much more than mere health pods. They would morph as digital identifiers of micro-groups displaying differing economic, demographic and social behaviours.  Can you imagine what such identifiers would do in the hands of marketing organisations, Government policy makers and politicians?

What thus started off as mere health protecting ‘Germ Pods’ might become somewhat sinister gatekeeping tools allowing individual entry based on constantly tweaked algorithms; they would actually become functionally invisible to folks who do not qualify. Groups would get shielded from public view as well as from one another, as they get into exclusive symbiotic relationships with marketing organisations and the Government. Overall transparency and accountability in a society relating to spreading of resources would take a hit, further exacerbating the ‘have’ and ‘have not’ divide.

My sense is that in the future, the above transformative technology might usher in a societal problem.

The second technology initiative is Personal Learning Clouds.

 For some years, I have been engaged in training the next tier Leadership for a large business group in India. While the need for Leadership development programs is acutely felt in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environment, the organisation also senses that traditional class room case study-based programs are no longer working to prepare tomorrow’s leaders for the challenges they would face. The training manager thus finds it hard to justify costs relating to such training programs. Last but not the least, the program does not really get ‘owned’ by the participants’ boss and other team members leading to the program learning not getting the needed support for effective application at the workplace.

The pandemic has fast paced the shift of training programs onto Zoom and other digital platforms. My client organisation has started seeing this as a great alternative, cutting down as it does requirements of logistics and physical infrastructure. The participants are able to virtually join in from their work desks or homes with a much shorter lead time.

As I think of the emerging trend, I visualize the birth of ‘Personal Learning Cloud (PLC)’ in today’s rapidly changing and constrained environment. The PLC would be flexible, allowing  24X7 accessibility to learning modules aligned to the need and behaviour of an individual and his team. Over time the PLC would emerge as a networked learning infrastructure. It would not only allow overall lowering of training costs but would facilitate the organisational leadership to offer ‘just in time’ targeted learning experiences for personnel according to his / her role and immediate organisational needs. Finally, the PLC ‘s real time accessibility, relevance and interactive capability would allow the learner’s immediate superior to become an active stakeholder in the process and provide support and accountability.

I sense that over time the PLC would make learning personalized as well as democratized (in terms of access) and would allow organisations a better gauge to measure return on investment and ensure work place application. Something essential to keep the ‘just in time’ PLC based learning relevant in a fast-changing world.

My hope is that in the future, the above is where significant growth and development opportunity would lie.

In learning……….                                                                               Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgement:

  1. ‘After the Pandemic: What happens next?’ – Document prepared by Ayca Guralp, Instititue of the Future, CA, US.
  2. ‘The future of Leadership Development’ – HBR March-April 2019

Does the Omicron variant herald the beginning of the end of the Pandemic?


The newly discovered Omicron variant of the original COVID 19 virus strain is under the microscope of genetic investigation. Initial studies indicate that the variant has a surprisingly high number of mutations ( about thirty) in the spike protein of the virus, allowing it to spread much more easily compared to the other variants. Field reports seem to substantiate this. 

The world is on the threshold of the third year of the pandemic. To try and understand what might happen going forward, we could draw some lessons from the past.

The last major pandemic of the Spanish flu of a century back waned in its third year. We might wonder as to how that happened.  There had been no vaccine then and consequently, the impact of the pandemic had been far more deadly in the initial years. Broad estimates indicate that 500 million people, which was a quarter of the world population at that time, had gotten infected as the virus spread around the globe through ships. Around one-tenth of those infected died which would work out to fifty million deaths! But by the third year of the pandemic, two shifts had taken place.  Mankind had naturally developed antibodies and had to cope with a milder infection with the virus mutating to a much less dangerous variant which has remained with us since.

Now let’s jump a hundred years into the future to the present. The virus keeps on mutating as is its wont. We have been witness to the Alpha, Beta, Delta and now the Omicron variants. To date, the Delta variant, which has been the most aggressively predominant form, accounts for 99% of recorded infections.

But now comes the Omicron. Barely a week has passed since researchers in Botswana and South Africa alerted the world about this new strain. But the variant is already seen in more than twenty countries around the globe. Omicron is seen to have an infection spreading capability of more than three to five times that of the Delta variant. There would be no place to hide from the Omicron.

Today I read in the papers of a doctor in Bangalore, one of the two known infected individuals in that city, saying that ‘apart from body ache and low fever, he felt absolutely fine’. South African doctors too have reported that though the Omicron variant has the capability to evade vaccine induced immunity and reinfect an individual, it creates mild illness symptoms with almost nil requirement of hospitalization.  Clearly, the Omicron is well on its way to displacing the Delta as the predominant COVID 19 spreader. And as it spreads and reinfects more and more of the world population, it also shows us the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.

Why do I say that?

More than one and a half centuries back, Charles Darwin expounded his theory of evolution by natural selection. In it, he said that organisms best adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and flourish. As organisms continue to mutate and have variations, there would be the inevitable selection of those which possess advantageous variations allowing them to multiply and survive.

So, it is in the case of virus strains. That variant which can spread the most and infect the host in a manner that the spread does not get restricted would take over. This is what happened in the Spanish flu pandemic. And my sense is this is what is now happening in the current pandemic with the Omicron taking center stage. Omicron impacts humans mildly allowing it to remain undetected and spread faster and faster. With new cycles of infections and reinfections along with natural as well as vaccine induced antibodies within the human population, the world would eventually reach a sustainable balance between the virus and its host.

If my above surmise is correct, the Omicron variant might just be heralding the beginning of the end of the current pandemic.

In learning…..

Shakti Ghosal

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