Jesse (00:13): RNZ National. It's Tuesday. It's Tech Tuesday. And time to welcome Daniel Watson from Vertech IT services. Hey there, Daniel.
Daniel Watson (00:21): Good day, Jesse.
Jesse (00:22): I've realized I have my best ideas in the shower. My wife thinks it's because it's the one place there's not any noise around. I think it's just the one place where I don't actually have anything occupying my attention in front of me. For you, you have your best ideas jogging?
Daniel Watson (00:36): Yeah, that's right. I think it's a combination of getting out there, exercise and fresh air. Working your body hard enough that anything that's cramping your mind, like the worries as anxieties, have no room to breathe.
Jesse (00:49): Right.
Daniel Watson (00:49): And then when you ease into it, that's when your mind can wander a little and that's when some interesting ideas pop up.
Jesse (00:58): And so during a recent jog, you were thinking about educational sites as a topic for Tech Tuesday today, and what's on your mind here?
Daniel Watson (01:06): Okay. The internet is not just about cat videos and listening to great podcasts from radio stations that we love. It can be enormous tool for up-skilling yourself. Right. And I was thinking about the ones that I've used over time and I thought it'd be worth sharing them.
Jesse (01:24): Yeah. Are you talking for adults or children here?
Daniel Watson (01:26): Both. It's kind of like, when it comes to learning you don't just stop when you leave school. Well, you shouldn't do. It's one of the greatest joys in life, right, is figuring out new things. The world is an immense and deep and enormous well of information.
Jesse (01:41): Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Daniel Watson (01:42): It's great to find out a little bit more about how the world works. Okay, but if I was talking about kids, because everybody has different ways of learning, one place that I've come across is called the Khan Academy. You know, the...
Jesse (01:55): Yeah. We discovered this on lockdown.
Daniel Watson (01:58): Yeah. So Khan Academy, it is from primary school, right? Level instructional videos. Right? And it's very straightforward and it takes you through it step by step. And if you don't get it, you can always flip back and run it again. And it does it topic by topic and year by year through primary through to about year one, two university type topic topics.
Jesse (02:26): Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Daniel Watson (02:27): Across all the maths, all the sciences. A lot of it is a bit American based, so you can ignore their American history stuff. But there is some really good things in there about economy and economics and accounting and stuff like that as well. From a business side of things for adults, two sites really come to mind, there's one called Udemy or Udemy, U D E M Y.
Jesse (02:53): Right?
Daniel Watson (02:54): They've currently got a special on at the moment, which I think is 13 US dollars, which is about 22 NZ. I use them within our team here cause we're an IT company and there're loads of qualifications you can go for. And often the vendor's material is a bit dry, but here you can find an instructor that works for you and you can buy one of his courses or you can buy a slew of them.
The great thing about it is I recently passed a certification where I just had my phone playing in the car, like it was a podcast. And I played it at 1.5 times speed because I already had a bit of prior learning. I was just trying to find the bits that I didn't know, and that covered across all the topics on it and got it done. And then I bought a subscription for the whole business. So the whole team has unlimited access to all the material on there, which is very good.
Jesse (03:48): Yeah. Interestingly, my daughter's got interested in coding and I see that I'm just on the Udemy website now. They do, for example, a bunch of courses on learning a particular type of coding, Python. I could imagine paying 14 bucks and leaving her to it.
Daniel Watson (04:04): Yep. That's right. And you've got it forever. So it's kind of like, I don't want to bash in universities. I know I spent a lot of time there and I didn't come out with any qualifications. But I did meet my wife so you know, comme si, comme ca.
Jesse (04:04): You did better than I did. Right.
Daniel Watson (04:26): There's probably an argument if you know what you're interested in and you've got some certain amount of discipline you can just pay equivalent of a few hundred dollars to get access to a stack load of courses, which be very specific for the kind of skills that you want to acquire. And you can do that online because a lot of the software out there that you might need for certain IT related stuff is like... There's a free tier.
Jesse (04:52): Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Daniel Watson (04:53): So you don't need access to a lot of equipment. So a cheap laptop and you're good to go. LinkedIn has a whole bunch of learning options in their LinkedIn learning, in the business space. If you haven't got your CV converted onto LinkedIn, you're missing out because I don't even use business cards anymore. I just use LinkedIn to connect with people. And then I don't have to lose the business card and wonder where it's gone if I meet somebody we're really interested in talking to in the future.
One of the other ones that is very good is Skillshare. Okay. And Skillshare is more practical hand-on classes for creatives and they'll take you through it step by step. Whereas Udemy is more technically orientated, Kahn Academy is more academic, Skillshare is very much showing you how to do things.
Jesse (05:48): Right.
Daniel Watson (05:49): And I think that's really cool.
Jesse (05:50): Video. Yeah. I see. They've got fundamentals of DSLR photography, for example, or a beginner's guide to painting the natural world and watercolors. So it's a bit like YouTube.
Daniel Watson (06:01): Yeah.
Jesse (06:02): But maybe a bit more formalized. Right?
Daniel Watson (06:03): Exactly. Yeah. And of course, there is YouTube, which you can get an instructional for anything.
Jesse (06:08): Yeah.
Daniel Watson (06:10): If I'm taking apart a motor or something like that, I'm going to go to YouTube and try and put the product idea of that in there and see what pops up. And there's people who just take things apart, put them back together, and put them on YouTube. It's like useful for that.
But flipping over to the other side of online learning. Right. So there's a lot of people out there who are like, who are interested in using the internet to try and find ways of making money.
Jesse (06:31): Yeah.
Daniel Watson (06:32): Okay? And sooner or later, they will have ads pop up into their social media feeds because when you go searching for this kind of stuff, you leave a trail and people use that trail to advertise back to you.
People who say they're gurus in making money, whether it's in real estate or Bitcoin or NFTs or sales and marketing gurus, there are legitimate ones. And then there are what are called the contrapreneurs. Right? And one way of identifying them is that, well, there's actually several signs, right?
There's the relatable. It usually comes in a pattern, the relatable backstory, a personal success story, the promising extraordinary results. And there's a heavily discounted product. Right. "Normally it's 25,999. But just for this short time only, we're going to offer it for $2,597 a month for six months." Right. "But it's only available in the next week." So those fake availability and time limits. Right.
But generally a lot of the stuff may appear like it's a live webinar that you've registered for on how to bear success in property development. Right. But it's a pre-recorded webinar that just goes out there and it's re-rolled and done repeatedly.
And the only people who are really making money about on it are the people who are offering these courses. And the reason why I think it's a big con is because generally if people have been a success in that kind of thing, then in order for them to make more money, they just keep doing what that is. Right.
They'll keep doing the property development until they get to the size where they feel like actually they can hand something back to the community. And then they generally offer free talks on podcasts and things like that. And they tell you how to do these things. A lot of people who are successful in business are very open to sharing their knowledge.
Jesse (08:28): Yeah. Funny.
Daniel Watson (08:30): Yeah. So somebody's offering you the secrets to stock market trading for this one small time fee per month, they're not making any money off the stock market. They're making money off of you paying them money. Right?
Jesse (08:46): If you're so good at it, mate, what are you doing here on the internet yourself?
Daniel Watson (08:51): Yeah. Do it yourself. That's right because all that information, you could go onto YouTube, you can go onto Skillshare or whatever, and you can find out that information, how to do it. There is no quick formula to success. Every billionaire on the planet has exactly the same 24 hours per day that we're all allocated. Some of them are very focused and...
Jesse (09:10): Okay, so the message is use a reputable site. If an offer is too good to be true, it probably is. And just sow caution when someone is offering to offer you the secrets to success. Do a bit of investigation and don't just part with your money easily.
Daniel Watson (09:31): Yeah, that's right. There is also a chap on the internet who deliberately signed up to all of these contrapreneurs and fake guru's courses, just so he could critique them. If you Google Mike Winnet, he's a funny bloke out of Warmington in the UK. Yeah. He's very interesting.
Jesse (09:54): And by the way, if we are going to these sites that you've recommended, Udemy and Skillshare, is that pretty much a good way of avoiding these contrapreneurs or do they pop up even on those sites?
Daniel Watson (10:04): No, the only time that those contrapreneurs might turn up is when you are going to like a free course and there might be ads played on the side or something like that.
Jesse (10:17): Got it.
Daniel Watson (10:17): That's kind of how these things get associated because a lot of those ad feeds are syndicated. The website itself may not have an option to choose what ads pop up. But generally if you're starting to Google this stuff, then the algorithms start feeding in these things. And these guys are paying good money to get your eyeballs on their ads.
Jesse (10:39): Ah, yeah. And that's good advice even for news sites, right. To learn the difference between a news article and an ad that looks like a news article. We've heard in the past, on the show from people who say, "Look, I saw this article in the Herald about some celebrity investment and I went along with it and yeah, that wasn't an article. It was someone who's done a very good job of looking like an article."
Daniel Watson (11:01): Yeah. And the best sites will have something that indicates that this is a paid advertisement somewhere on there, but it is a hard, hard line. I think I remember one of the teachers that I had at one point pointing out, what is advertising? What is actually news? And that's going back 40 years ago, right? I wonder if the schools are actually doing that now to help our kids in actually make the distinction and decide for themselves.
Jesse (11:34): Great advice, beware the contrapreneur, but really appreciate those links and suggestions as well. So they were Kahn Academy. Udemy, that's U D E M Y. Skillshare. And if you want a bit of entertainment about taking on the contrapreneurs at their own game, Mike Winnet, W I N N E T, was the guy that Daniel suggested. Thanks, Daniel. Great to chat to you.
Daniel Watson (11:55): No worries. Catch you later.
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