THE FIRST FIVE ex-Dell employees are poking around the campus of Tipperary Institute in Clonmel, looking at the Creative Multimedia degree programme. The European Globalisation Fund will cover course fees as these redundant Dell workers start the new semester. They can earn a Minor Award in Web Media for Business after completing an intensive set of practical tasks and third level academic work between September 2010 and May 2011. I expect some of their work will appear on my blog because I'm changing the emphasis of my online space to better spotlight people who prove they have practical web media skills.
SOMETHING ABOUT PAPER.LI works well for me. It might be its layout or perhaps the way it grabs text, avatars, key frames, images and short summaries. It’s one of the most useful ways to elegantly offer news and information that would have passed me by. I set up my daily paper but don't remember what I asked Paper.li to consider when sourcing stories. I know the daily result is often a list of serendipitous short stories that prompts me to read more about those who I follow on Twitter--not because of their tweets but because of their curatorial skills. Paper.li summarises the kinds of content that several dozen people in my own Twitter community find useful or interesting. All they have to do is offer a link to interesting content and those links cause Paper.li to churn away and produce an easy-to-read daily product. In many cases, Paper.li finds things I would like to discover myself but time constraints prevented me from seeing the stories as they broke. Paper.li reaches across more than 2000 people when producing my daily newspaper. It's like getting a daily freesheet but without the Page Three girls. It's like reading news I can use instead of listening to drivetime radio shows about predictable topics emerging in Irish mainstream media. I've received more happy texts from people who Paper.li fingered than from any sort of Follow Friday routine on Twitter. I'd rather follow the AT-links to some of the Twitter followers cited by Paper.li posts because that's actually the way I decide who to follow. And since Paper.li tweets the nics of the first three contributors to each daily newsrun, it increases the chances for others to retweet each Paper.li release, bringing your paper to the attention of the communities of those who retweet. Because I like all of these things, we're going to review the social value of Paper.li in the Social Media module taught at Tipperary Institute.
Neville Hobson -- "Connect your community with a Twitter Daily Newspaper" on Neville's blog, 29 Aug 10.
MARTHA ROTTER HAS DETAILS for applications developers in Ireland & Northern Ireland who want to earn prizes (i.e., sweet cash, Xboxes, and swag). If you want the inside story, you should follow Martha. Don't be shy about asking for gear you need.
WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, my creative multimedia teaching workload at Tipperary Institute will spin up to its normal pace and I'm trying to manage my interaction with the flow by porting as much of it as possible onto a handheld device. The first step involves creating a mobile learning scratch space. I'd like students to access the learning materials on their mobile devices with the minimum specifications being (1) a browser, (2) MP3 player and (3) Bluetooth connectivity on the device. We meet for 12 weeks. I want to beam audio revision notes to the classrrom via Bluetooth. I want to offer an RSS feed that prefaces each class with working notes and follows every class with lecture notes. I may use InsideView.ie as the main hub of activity since the information flow should not bother the long-standing readers of my blog. The photo at left shows one of the views of the project management module. The N86 handset is looking at a working Google Document (bit.ly/tipp-pm) that will be revised during the academic term to show what's up next.
THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE has an interesting feature story about the American artist Spencer Tunick, the guy who "cajoles ordinary folk around the world to get their kit off," according to Katie Glass. The glossy feature shows nude participants, some in rainbow colours, next to photos of themselves fully clothed. Words from "ordinary people" like "joyful," "liberating" and "free" appear in the story. After hearing several Irish friends talk about participating in this art-making venture, I think Tunick's work takes performance art to a new level. I've made a short video that includes the Sunday Times story along with several other items appearing in the Sunday Business Post, Irish Times and Nationalist newspapers. As paywalls start closing down free access to these news sources, home editors like myself may discover a new audience. However, nothing replaces the power and reach of national mainstream journalists.
AFTER SPOTTING A FACEBOOK comment about my three-year-old daughter on the newsfeed of a friend of an extended friend, I realised I have to stop sharing snaps of my toddler. It's something that Mitch Joel or Krishna De would have advised me to consider years ago and something that John Collins might also prefer as a best practise. I think it's delightful to share stories about how children get to grips with technology at the earliest ages. But I don't think I have the right to expose a pre-school child to possible media attention. At least once a month, I know that one of my images gets used in a publication. I'm sure three or four images belonging to me are nicked and mashed up for someone else's benefit. I don't mind as much if it's merely a photo of a thing but when it's a face or a family moment, I start to feel my Amish side. So I'm dialing down the settings on Mia's online presence, slowly removing her from public albums. I can trust Flickr and Six Apart to keep her locked down for "family" viewing only. And when she's well into her teenage years, I'll let her decide what she wants to open up to share. In the meantime, I'm concentrating on US versions of DVDs for Christmas greetings. And I'm also producing a few paper-based photo albums for special collections.
I SPENT A GLORIOUS EVENING mingling with people who appreciate good food and with people who produce great foodstuff. And by the end of the evening, I realised I was complicit in the decline of locally-produced good food. So I'm fixing some things, starting with the way my creative multimedia students in Tipperary Institute interpret what's on their plates. In Ireland, we have to better integrate technology into the promotion of the food sector.
HAVING AN MP3 tag editor is an important prerequisite if you plan to manage an audio library containing more than 1000 files. This should be the kind of personal library maintained by every student in the creative multimedia degree programme at Tipperary Institute. MP3 tagging helps me manage cassette tracks, vinyl samples, iTunes libraries, Sony Media collections, and Ovi Music downloads. MP3 Tag from Florian Heidenreich helps me properly tag MP3 files so that my iPod, X10 and Nokia N86 can simply group and sort files logically and that means I can find the music I need for my mood faster than toggling through Last.fm for the right track. If you've tried different music players, you know that tagging music within iTunes or with Windows Media player does not tag the audio tracks themselves. So when you rebuild your music library with another program, you lose all your track information. That's one reason why I use a MP3tag, a program that makes music management extremely intelligent.
I HAVE UNPACKED AND sampled generous portions from a paper bag of swag (a "goodie bag" in other words) that caused me to think about what we could do in my Tipperary Institute classrooms to boost Tipperary as an iconic food brand. But first, I should disclose that I got a week's supply of lovely ingredients to fill my belly and because those things are so delectable, they have completely biased my perspective. I know think #tippfood is some of the best on the planet. Disclosing that I repeatedly sample the local cuisine, I know readers will take on board my compromised viewpoint.
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