Inside View from Ireland

Books are alive

KILKENNY -- I have four book sellers to choose from in the city of Kilkenny. Their shops have a steady stream of people selecting Christmas gifts and holiday reading materials. I went looking for The Mistressclass but had to settle for ordering it online because Michele Roberts isn't on the shelves in Kilkenny. Her perspective about books delights me.

Cache of answers

TEMPLE BAR -- Before starting a day of lectures by Finola Jones and Mick Wilson, I just took two Media Studies exams by referring to material cache and stored on my laptop. I used X1 to answer all the questions. This validated an important finding: if my students read their online learning notes, they will pass their exam. Everything needed to answer the (somewhat difficult) questions was in my laptop already. Most of that information was in the form of cached web pages.

Friday Snippets

UNDERWAY -- I have to adjust my moblogging style because I'm without a Nokia Communicator while my three-year-old Nokia 9210i is in surgery. I dropped the long-serving brick and now I'm pecking on a Sony Clie and hope to piggyback on free Wi-Fi coverage in Dublin's Front Lounge to upload some Friday snippets.

Teach them to read

WIRED -- Adam Penenberg publishes a conclusion we observed two years ago but quickly rubbished because of our Tipperary sample set. His conclusion--that young people aren't buying current news magazines--is anecdotally correct in terms of the backpack inventory of many third level Irish students. If you find a magazine in a backpack of one of my students, it's probably more for entertainment, not for education or current affairs. Hence, we have fashion magazines, boy racer magazines, gamer magazines, and when close to project submission time we see an occasional web development magazine. On the balance, we don't see students consuming either magazines or national broadsheets for information. "Dat's wha Google is for, innit?"

Blog Torrent

BOING BOING -- Downhill Battle released Blog Torrent this week. Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol on your PHP-enabled web site. We like this game because it means we can blog large video files and then share them as easily as photos are shared. Blog Torrent lets people create true P2P video networks. I don't think local access rules will constrain this mother-of-all-feeds to the desktop. We like this even more.

Referrer Lessons

KILKENNY -- You can learn a lot of things by studying extracts of referrer logs. We teach this topic in my Media Writing course.  Tonight, I learned that viewers are using the BBC search engine for clues about "puppy poos at night" and I can report that I have first-hand experiene in that area.

Multimedia College Ireland

UPDATED FOR INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS: If you need information about enrolling in Tipperary Institute, please check out www.tippinst.ie/international/ because all the stuff you need to know is online there.

In late 2000, we scratched out a syllabus for a diploma in multimedia studies that later became a BSc in Computing and Communications at Tipperary Institute. At its core sits elements of writing, communications, visual aesthetics, photography, video production and radio. [1] Because it's a Bachelor of Science degree, several challenging computing courses coexist on the syllabus, including programming, database development, computer architecture, and data communications. Because people often ask for details about the multimedia degree programme, I thumbed through part of my collection and assembled a few notes that show more about the people and the projects than would normally appear in a print brochure.

Drivetime Podcast

RUSSELL BEATTIE -- Helpful bloggers have pointed out to Russ Beattie that there are ways to take the edge off the California commute. If you're using iTunes, you can set up a "drivetime" podcast playlist.  The clues come from XML Hacks and Doc Searls:

Learning from Swamp Castle Notes

  Swamp Castle RSS details 4 
  Originally uploaded by jazzmasterson.

FLICKR -- My favourite photo blogging service lets you upload photos and annotate them with notes. This is even more powerful when you consider you can add comments to sections of the photos you've uploaded. The Flickr system will let me snap photos of student journals, then upload them on Flickr where others can add comments in a box below the image or on the image itself through Flickr tools. This is very handy and there's more.

I sent this entire post from inside Flickr itself. For weeks, I've seen the little button suggesting there was a way of posting to blog but I ignored it as just another kind of eyewash. I haven't been successful in using cross-blogging tools before but this little posting shows the Flickr API is quite sweet. In fact, it was so easy to do that I think a technophobe could figure it out as well.

Fall of Berlin Wall

BERLIN -- Fifteen years ago, I drove from Kaiserslautern in West Germany to Berlin in East Germany. I brought along some hammers and a chisel, using them to take down part of the Berlin Wall. I wasn't alone. Today I know that my movements were followed by counterintelligence agents of the US government. My weekend excursion was later wrapped inside a formal investigation that would lead to exceptional scrutiny and the loss of a special security clearance. Those days also left inside me the seeds of a novel that will someday make it to print.