Inside View from Ireland

Tips for 3rd Generation Kindle Newbies

I HAVE USED A KINDLE KEYBOARD to pick up some tips that millions of new Kindle users might find helpful.

Alt+B sets a bookmark. This is a life saver for me because others in my family circle like reading books in my Kindle library. This means I can no longer use the Kindle's menu to go directly to my last-read page. Bookmarks help me keep my sanity. I can view all bookmarks by accessing the Kindle's menu.

Shift+SYM starts text-to-speech. If you press the spacebar, you can pause or resume text-to-speech. I use text-to-speech when driving.

Organizations Don't Tweet

I BOUGHT EUAN SEMPLE'S ebook on the social web because I've been reading his blog and learning how to use the web longer than I've used Google Reader.

In his writing online and in his book, he questions major institutions and how they function. "People are starting to think more for themselves and seeking alternatives to the structure of the organization chart and apparent security of the salaried job for life." This rings true for me and for thousands of Irish civil servants who will discover the pay, perks and security of State employment will erode on the arrival of the winds of fiscal reality. In Ireland, as in many parts of the Western world, there are no jobs for life. This means "more of us are working out how to think entrepreneurially whether inside organizations or not."

This is not a result of the growth of online social networking. Around my desk, we have started thinking differently because we realise the post-industrial age demands it. Our connected world, powered by tools we can use to organize ourselves better, means we are often no more than one tweet away from more efficient ways of getting things done. Euan's take on that tweeting world, one that pulsates outside the reach of an electronic border manager, needs to be recognised inside the executive offices across corporations and governments. I think an excellent place to start is by reading Organizations Dont Tweet: A Managers Guide to the Social Web like me.

---

Euan Semple --"The ebook edition of my book is published", December 19, 2011.

Euan Semple -- Organizations Don't Tweet People Do ISBN 978-1119950554

Bonus Link from David Armano: Demystifying Social Business

bookshelf

Four Months with Kindle

AS I TYPE A FEW WORDS into my blog, I'm listening to I Live in the Future and Here's How it Works on my Kindle. Doing both simultaneously is a worthwhile activity for me.

I do a lot with the Kindle and I use it frequently enough to recharge it every four days. I used to get a week between recharges but for the past two months, I've done a lot of listening with the Kindle and that's putting a greater electrical load on the device. I also use it to highlight and share content onto Twitter and that makes its wifi antenna do more work as well. I grabbed four months of content from my clippings.txt file on the Kindle and ran the result through Wordle in order to produce the accomanying word cloud. As you can tell, I've read about Steve Jobs on my Kindle. I've also subscribed to the Irish Times with the Kindle. And I have a very vibrant Kindlefeeder flow appearing as e-ink once a day. If I could annotate the Audible.com book content on the Kindle, the word cloud would include many selections that I've used as part of lectures in our creative multimedia curriculum. I listen a lot while feeding our five-month-old son and in every case, I've listened to all audible books that I purchased at least twice.

Sketchbooks of Hate

I HAVE READ Tears in the Darkness twice this year. Its moving story of survival on the road to Bataan in 1942 makes any of my sacrifices pale by comparison.

Interspersed inside the book are sketches by Ben Steele, a survivor. The images often come dripping with hate through the pages in his sketchbooks, spanning more than thirty volumes of trials and exercises. The leaves of Steele's sketchbooks hold his ghosts: page after page of prisoners of war and the Imperial hohei who guarded him for one thousand two hundred and forty-four days.

The book reads like a novel and its drawings provide an emotive layer. The sketches of faces followed Ben Steele home from the prisoner of war camps. To see his sketches is to visit the haunted memories of the man himself.

---

Sent mail2blog from my Nokia phone after packing Tears in the Darkness for a loan.

Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman -- Tears in the Darkness ISBN 0312429703

bookshelf

My Lovely Shared Reading Experience

I TAKE A LOT of reading recommendations from people I follow so I am used to sharing books, book reviews and online social tips from friends. But shared annotations on Kindle take me to a higher level.

I started reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson shortly after its arrival via my wireless connection to the Amazon Store. I intend to use the book in conjunction with several third level modules I teach at LIT-Clonmel so that means I will read the whole book. It's easier to accelerate my reading while holding the e-ink version of the biography because I can see dozens of comments from those who have read and shared their annotations. Yesterday, I noticed Neville Hobson was chapters ahead of my pace (see the photo) so I picked up my reading speed in the hope of catching him before the end of the week. I suspect that he might have already finished all 800 pages so I might sneak a peek at Neville's shared library to verify whether it shows he's read the book. However, when I do that, I might end up buying a book that's in Neville's collection. Kindle makes that so easy.

---

Walter Isaacson -- Steve Jobs ISBN 978-1451648539

kindle

Towards Social Literacy

I FOLLOW ACADEMIC BLOGGERS (like Gabriela Avram in the photo) and read books like The New Literacy Sampler because I live for multimodalities in blogging.

Understanding multimodality leads to better creative multimedia. I can see connections in the blogs I read when I trace them with a biro on paper or when I convert them into visual diagrams. In a Digital Design module I teach, simple storyboards help unpack the social interaction and linkages that sustain grand memes.

Some people would say that blogging is a dead pool and that fast-moving currents of social media make Facebook and Twitter the better pathway to online interactions. That may be true but there are very useful perspectives gained by analysing blogs and giving close scrutiny to clumps of text, fonts of type, and operative phrases.

Our online digital lives foster new ways of giving meaning to campaigns and objectives. What emerged first in blogs and now rides strong on Facebook are direct challenges to newspaper editors, politicians with mailshots, and the printed book. In fact, the printed page is less likely to evoke change. The socio-semiotic approach taken by clever promoters today means the greatest influence is made on people (voters, taxpayers, parents) by what is communicated on screens.

Planning in the Stacks

I PLAN TO SPEND more time developing my Educasting site this academic year, including the rich media part of it, so that will mean some of my blogging at Inside View will suffer.

It's also important to recognise that the new academic year brings a shedload of new books to the shelves of our Knowledge Resource Centre, including a half dozen from the bald man in the black shirt. I don't know how alert Mitch Joel's antenna are so I don't know whether he'll spot this blog post and consider beaming into our Irish lecture hall for a natter (go to Tom Murphy if you need the term converted into PR speak) over several selections from his book Six Pixels of Separation. I've listened to Mitch for several years, learned a lot, and vowed to expand my horizons by adding more pinpoint on my map of Canada. I need to expand beyond Labrador before I retire. If you're a Six Pixels fan, I'm taking questions for Mitch via my blog's comment section below.

---

Mitch Joel -- Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. ISBN 978-0446548236

conversation

Growing Faster than Twitter

I FEEL REALLY bad for the small local newspapers because I am caught in a vortex of e-ink devoid of Tipperary accents.

I carry at least 10 unread ebooks with me everywhere. Nestled into that collection are two newspaper subscriptions with content I read and share with Twitter every day. I also share annotations from the books, from course notes, from campus Acrobat files, and from edited correspndence. The e-book industry is my daughter's game and it is running on a fast-paced pitch. The Kindle (pictured) is driving some of this success. But the Nook and the iPad also play their parts. For the first time in 11 years teaching first year students how to slot into a Media Writing world, I can confidently set down a practical assessment that culminates in an e-ink product. Readers of my blog will see the results as early as October 2011 and will be able to be among the first thousand who buy a group product for less than five dollars a pop. Proceeds will benefit the Pen & Pixel Exhibition in May 2012.

---

Robert Andrews -- "Penguin sees 14 Percent of Sales from e-books" on PaidContent.org, July 29, 2011.

Sent mail2blog using O2-Ireland Typepad service on my Nokia E7 from the Riverhouse Cafe, Cahir, County Tipperary, Ireland.

kindle

Kindle Helps Me Learn

THERE ARE MANY REASONS why the Kindle is a helpful tool for learning. One of its handy facets is the Daily Review, an Amazon tool that helps me review and remember the most significant ideas from my books.

Based on a flashcard format, the Daily Review shows me flashcards with either my highlights and notes or the Popular Highlights from one of my books. I have to have marked books as "read" before they show up in the review section. Then, Daily Review takes my through all of my read books, one per day. This is going to help me improve my academic delivery because as everyone know, periodic review of ideas makes it easier to remember them.

Fighting the Filter Bubble

ONE OF THE REASONS I have five Twitter accounts and subscriptions to three Twitter lists is because I think it's important to maintain a sense of serendipity online. Just the opposite happens if I depend on the view of the world that Facebook or Google serves up to me. Because I'm 101 years old on Facebook, I get a distinctly different flavour of information in my Newsfeeds and in the advertisements. Because Google knows where I am and what I've searched, I get information tailored to the expectations Google has for me. Behind the scenes, it's difficult knowing what kind of algorithm I really am in the minds of the big internet giants. That's a strong theme of Eli Pariser as he explains the filter bubble concept. The book comes recommended by Adrian Fielding, a creative multimedia student in the programme I teach for Limerick Institute of Technology. I like Eli Pariser's work and plan to put it on to the fall semester essential reading list for the module called "Emerging Trends and Technology".

Eli Pariser on the Filter Bubble

 

---

Eli Pariser -- The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding ISBN 978-1594203008

trends