Inside View from Ireland

Dialing Down Toddler Coverage

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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.

 

Dialing Down

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John Collins -- "Barney says to share is to care but must it be my iPhone?" in the Irish Times, 27 August 2010.

 

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MP3 Tag Editor

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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.

Unpacking Swag and Planning

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.

Longtable Swag

Joyous Brevity in Video

TWO DAYS OF on-site HD recording has reinforced why I think the best video is short-form video. I get a lot more joy from 90-second clips. No matter how hard I try to compress my video work flow, every minute of work on a remote video shoot requires at least one minute of pre-production later on. So we spent 80 minutes out along Brocka on the Water and my time sheets show 82 minutes pulling the files off the two cameras, dropping them into work folders, rendering them for a preview AVI file and annotating them on a studio worksheet. Because we shot a generous amount of file footage, we have at least four times the running length of the final production. Looked at another way, that's four times the rendering time that the end clients will see. The additional time burden is worth the unbillable hours because the by-product is easily repurposed as file footage. That means it has to be findable and ready to be dropped onto a DVD editing timeline. Now it's back to work to sort all that out.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service while traveling between Long Table venues in County Tipperary, Ireland.

 

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Accredited and Targeting Unemployed

TIPPERARY INSTITUTE offers free places for people who have been unemployed for at least three months. The places are funded by the Irish government on several accredited third level courses during the 2010/11 academic year. I hope we fill 10 seats in our first year multimedia programme with funding from the Labour Market Activation Fund--attracting people who are upskilling for another career. There are real advantages to completing accredited programmes in Ireland. As an external examiner and a member of several interview panels, I've seen questions arise when candidates present non-accredited certificates from training agencies, educational institutions or workplaces. If a reviewing authority can't validate the quality of a programme, it's hardly worth the effort of putting it on a CV for consideration when trying to gain an exemption or a wage review. The HETAC accreditation of the BSc in Creative Multimedia means the programme meets Irish higher education quality standards, that it undergoes rigorous peer reviews at least twice a year and that the overall programme has standing in the commercial market.

My Audioboo Wislist

I USE AUDIOBOO as my primary method of adding sound clips to my weblog and I walked into part of my ghost estate to make a 12-minute clip to outline some features I think Mark Rock and crew should consider with their superb service. As I explain in my Audioboo, I would like to enable all of my first year students with Audioboo so they have a fast and efficient way of sharing social audio in a third level creative multimedia degree programme at Tipperary Institute. After two decades of teaching adult learners to write, I know it's often easier to turn on a dictation device and ramble away because many students can verbalise faster than they can put words down on paper. Audioboo makes easy work of capturing those rambling thoughts, thus making it easier for me to specify a higher frequency of written work.

 

Wishlistboo

Direct link to Wishlistboo

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Aungierboo and More

THE IRISH SUMMER SEASON closed for me within two weeks of passing Milk and Honey in Aungier Street, down the street from the annual e-learning week at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Unknown to me, several people would pick up on the demonstration I ran about Audioboo, the simplest way a college lecturer can effectively produce a podcast. I snapped a shot of the sandwich board outside one of Darragh Doyle's haunts (at left) then found myself inside at a time when Darragh was hard at work around the corner. Two months later, I realise I should start cross-publishing some of my memorable Audioboo moments, so I've hyperlinked some related things onto my Inside View weblog. From the kinds of follow-on questions that I'm getting about my short Audioboo, I realise I didn't cover enough details concerning the simple workflow because people want to know how to leverage the content, how to archive their own work and how to attract more than 100 people to each audio post. I'm saving all those answers for a Social Media module that I teach in Tipperary Institute but I'll share thoughts with Limerick OpenCoffee on Thursday if anyone there wants the inside view on Audioboo.

 

Aungierboo

 

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Direct link to my five-minute Aungierboo

 

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Recommend Iomega Pocket USB Storage

I HAVE USED AN IOMEGA USB-powered 500 GB hard drive for nearly a year and can strongly recommend this pocket-friendly device (at left). My only problem with the drive is that it's so easy to use that I've dumped junk onto it. I don't have enough portable storage. My unhealthy data hygiene means I'm gathering more than 70 GB of digital data every month and that it's getting more complicated managing my data stores. I've used the Mozy Home service bundled with the drive and also increased my Dropbox account to 50 GB but at the end of every semester, I need to archive student work along with my own content in a more findable way. I'm talking to John Jennings, Tipperary Institute's content management specialist, about procedures I can follow to improve my work flow around the consumption, creation and curation of digital archives. But at the moment, I need another USB-powered hard drive to push me through the first part of the 2010/11 academic term. Hopefully, some visitors might leave behind some comments that alert me to better ways of managing my data store.

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Still a burning issue: "Tech needed in my sitting room" from January 2009.

Previously: "Doubling Storage Requirements" on my Inside View Blog, April 28, 2009.

 

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What Tech Transfer Offices Miss

AN INTERESTING PAPER about entrepreneurship arising out of academia points to an element of the smart economy that Irish Technology Transfer Offices might be overlooking. In Ireland, "academic entrepreneurship" is largely based on the assumption that faculty members start businesses by following a path that leads from an invention to a patent to a company. But as Fini, Lacetera and Shane's analysis of 11,572 professors show, a large swath of academic entrepreneurship occurs outside the university intellectual property system. Specifically, about two-thirds of businesses started by academics are not based on disclosed and patented inventions. Moreover, someone who starts a business based on a patent is very different from an individual who launches a start-up outside of this tightly-woven IP space. Ireland needs both kinds of entrepreneurial activity. There's a lot of the Irish smart economy woven into research grants and consultancy contracts won by academics performing service tasks and directed research. These research activities are vital but they often lie outside of formal IP channels that university heads, IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland monitor. Therefore, R&D managers of multinationals in Ireland would benefit from developing direct relationships with researchers, rather than interacting with universities solely through their TTOs. The same holds true for small start-ups inside incubation centres--get to know the people who know their stuff, not just those who have patented technologies.

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Riccardo Fini, Nicola Lacetera, and Scott Shane -- "Inside or outside the IP system? Business creation in Academia", University of Bozen, Italy, May 2010. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2010.05.014 [262 kb PDF]

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Compressing and Backing Up

EVERY SUMMER, a quiet spot on the teaching schedule reminds me that I should clean out my stuff, compress things into neat folders, back up work, and make space on my removable drives. I'm down to my last 10 GB on my favourite Iomega USB drive so the month of July has to help me locate at least 300 GB of portable space in my pocket. My problem is that much of 2010 has been recorded in HD minutes. More than 500 GB of video has occupied much of my scratch space. I have to be ruthless about discarding a lot of that footage because I know I won't refer to the video clips for the year ahead. That's actually the issue--carve out what's needed in the two semesters ahead and put the discarded content on a top shelf somewhere. But that's not really a good strategy for me either because all my top shelves are overflowing with sheafs of paper and evidence of good intentions. It's time to get cracking with burning some DVD RW discs with content I intend to use before Christmas 2010.

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"Back up from CD" on Inside View, 20 February 2007.

"Multimedia River of News", 7 September 2006.

"Fragile Digital Archives", August 17, 2003.

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