I HAVE A TREASURE trove of artefacts waiting to be found. Some of those artefacts lie in a drawer in my home office, secreted inside mini discs, fat USB keys, 3.5" floppies and cassette tapes. Others sit unopened for years on the hard drives of old laptops. One of those laptops is a IBM Transnote, a touchscreen laptop with Windows 98. I'd like to restore its power supply and also pull records off it from 2002, my second year of blogging.
A little record-keeping exercise I started suggests I am carrying around a stash of stuff waiting to be found, like in the things I've snapped in the photo (above right). I have gigabytes of audio files, including years of interviews, ambient soundscapes, and mash-ups produced by creative multimedia students. They sit unarchived on my Sony ICD MX-20 and I have to do the right thing and harvest them immediately.
BECAUSE MANY GOOD THINGS START in garages, shops or hangars, I'm exploring derelict stables near the Tipperary Institute campus in Clonmel. I did a walkabout with Ben Hennessy today and pulled the blue door of one stable (at right) off its hinge so I'm not off to the best start. In my mind, I'll convene several class meetings every week in the Amish-friendly abandoned stables of the old Watson estate as students create video responses to deep readings about emerging trends on the internet. We'll stream some of those video responses over O2-Ireland 3G masts using Online Meeting Rooms, training students in how to run a standard definition feed across a live internet connection, using only battery power on the camera and the laptop. Something about the native environment--cows, flowers, bales of hay, derelict equipment and rolling pastures in the Golden Vale of Ireland--transport me to a special mental place. I'd like to pull students into that same space, recording the learning experience along the way.
WHILE IMMERSED IN A three-year-old's birthday celebration, I thought I'd create something that extends beyond the day itself. So after the birthday girl retired, I pulled three gigs of HD video and another gigabyte of photos from her cousins (images like the one at right) and burned a birthday DVD for her in 22 minutes. It's something that caps our family gatherings lately, made possible with a true multimedia laptop running Windows 7 Professional, palm-sized HD video recorders, Sony, Xilisoft and Adobe software, and blank DVDs. I pre-cache the historical footage and an assortment of stills on an Iomega USB drive (or 8 GB thumb drive) before converting the collection on a kitchen table. One cuppa later and we have a birthday DVD, complete with intro by the birthday girl herself. It's hard to see how I could do this one-pass production with a rolling storyboard that I keep revising in my Moleskine and a lightweight laptop. I wish I had a birthday DVD for at least once every decade. The background images and hairstyles provide a valuable creative context that help explain what forms personalities.
What did you make today?
Sent mail2blog using my Nokia E90 O2-3G Typepad service in Drogheda, Co Louth, Ireland.
POUL HOLM gave me my first understanding of Trinity's Long Room Hub today as I listened to him offer an insider's view of the processes involved in "unmuting" different parts of Trinity's faculty to facilitate the convergence of digital technologies in the humanities. Holm's presentation occurred during an e-learning week session run by the Dublin Region Higher Education Alliance in DIT. The Long Room Hub has become a strategic objective of TCD. Complete with its own YouTube channel, The Long Room Hub could evolve into an all-Irish initiative for digital arts and humanities. That's been mooted at Farmleigh by luminaries who discussed how to elevate Ireland's creative economy on the international stage. The Trinity initiative has a very creative and reflective component and if funded (around 12m euro is needed), new content would emerge by connecting data points that will produce highly engaging experiences.
DOPPLR REMINDED ME that I'm in Dublin today (see above for the view in Google Latitude) to look at graduate work in both the National College of Ireland and the National College of Art and Design. I tell American friends that June is one of the best times to visit Dublin because of the graduate art exhibitions on display then. Since moving out of the city, I've failed to get to all the exhibits every year so I'm trying to correct that shortfall this week.
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