Inside View from Ireland

Our Pinch and Zoom Back Seater

OUR FOUR YEAR OLD can touch, tap, swipe and pinch. But she isn't unique.

Her cousins and several friends in her creche form part of a newly-emerging Touch Generation that has developed a clear expectation of how computing technology should work--by touchscreen.

Mia saw us working with our phones and just took things from the point where we handed her our iPod Touches. It was easier for her to locate video files by swiping and tapping a single icon instead of trying to move keys on an old Nokia phone where Peppa Pig also resides. Like other two-year-olds, she liked getting a vibrant, colourful reactions to her touch.

Fighting the Digitally Stubborn

I FACE OFF against recalcitrant students every autumn who do not want to wade into the waters of connected communities and I dig deep to impose my will upon them.

When I face these kinds of struggles, I look around and see people like Donal O'Mahony explaining that it's not just me who has a posse of digitally unaware students. Across all of Ireland, second and third level institutions teach bright students who have never been introduced to the world of digital media for learning. In fairness, my cohort may distinguish between social learning and online education--they may judge the collaboration I want them to try as being too much of a distraction from their graded assignments. But I've concluded that knowing how to manage the flow, being able to control the distractions, and leveraging the tools of social software will bring a result. Those results may be two or three years down the road of academia but I believe they return a multiple of the time invested in learning to share and collaborate.

If this semester holds true to the schedule I've scratched out, students will be distilling twitterstreams and producing blog posts that summarise major lectures. The result will significantly improve the teaching and learning effectiveness of Educasting.ie, the classroom blog I'm trying to reignite.

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Donal O'Mahony -- "Digitally Unaware" on his eLearning Island blog, September 17, 2011.

learning

Ireland Needs More Mathematicians in our Algoworld

IRELAND'S NEXT COHORT of college students receives Leaving Certificate results this week and the numbers don't bode well for third level lecturers like myself who need to work with young people who love algorithms.

Today's future-proofed web developers live and work with algorithms. As an instructor aircraft commander, I flew inside algorithmic traces and I loaded 35 tonnes of material behind my seat according to an electronically-inspired algos. If you watch Kevin Slater below the break, you'll recognise the screenshot of the awe-inspiring mountain range in my blog post--it's actually an ossification of stock market shifts. Slater follows a line of mathematicians that have solved proofs from giants like my ancestor Christian Goldbach and they can see algos playing with the sensibility of truth and the physics of culture. Bin-packing algos are the inspiration behind destination-control elevators. Black Box Trading algorithms provide mathematical market analysis that can be applied to a dynamic environment where millions of shares change hands at a time. We need smart Irish graduates to provide the Department of Finance a greater understanding of trades, exchange rates and leading indicators that affect our pensions, our mortgage interest rate and the entire stock market. Slater gives quick views of Knife, Carnival, Boston Shuffler, and Twilight algos playing in today's financial markets. You can find algorithms wherever you look. But you need a mathematical mind to recognise what you're seeing and how to articulate it. For Ireland to truly contribute to a world filled with fast-moving data, second level schools need to produce high-quality mathematical minds. And that means primary schools must teach a love and use of mathematics to children as young as 10. There is a lot of work to do in that regard.

Kevin Slater on Algorithms

 

 

Kindle Gives Me Culture Back

READING MORE AND READING FASTER. 

Those are the two biggest facets of my Kindle ownership. Amazon's hardware is set up to help me read the moment I slide the power switch to awaken my Kindle. I hold it and flip its pages one-handed. That's helpful for me when I feed an infant. 

I feel guilty sliding onto Amazon.com and purchasing books without thinking about the follow-on cost. It's simple with Kindle--one click when I've the description of the book on screen and my credit card pushes the title to my Kindle within minutes. I've spent more on books during my first two weeks of Kindle ownership than I've spent on apps during a year inside iOS. It's no wonder Steve Jobs wants iBooks to gain traction. 

I need to offset my paid purchases with free titles.  I know there are more than 36000 free classics online at  Gutenberg.org and I know that Calibre can convert my gray files into e-book format if I take the time to review the work. I've also listed a dozen free watering holes for e-content below the break.

Marshall Kirkpatrick Illuminati

I LISTEN TO MARSHALL KIRKPATRICK a lot (he's on the audio file attached to this post) and thought he had insightful knowledge about Google Circles when he broke the story months ago.

His Read Write Web scoop was debunked by Google and a lot of the tech press. So when I stumbled into the G+ ecosystem a month ago, I start following Marshall's journey with this new enabling technology. Like Marshall, I've cut back on tweeting and pulled back my time on Facebook. It's a matter of what works best for the time available. One of the most illuminating things I've learned by following Marshall is the importance of stating things in public if you want to get a conversation going. That's counter-intuitive because the concept of Google Circles hits you all the time when you're inside the system. You might think that you have to build a circle of friends if you want to converse but the reality is you need to be inside circles built by others if you really want to have easy exchanges of views. I enjoy good cross-talk with Google Plus--much better than Facebook or Twitter--because of threaded comment strings that happen naturally with thoughts shared to the public side of Google Plus. I've also had some very meaningful exchanges with small groups of people, knowing the Google Plus privacy controls prevent the small group sessions from going public.

Markshall Kirkpatrick on Google Plus

 

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Oregon Public Broadcasting -- "Think Out Loud on Google" with excellent comments, August 1, 2011.

I'm http://glus.to/topgold on Google Plus.

google

More Viewing on iPad

WHILE HOME FOR MOST of the summer, I have discovered our three-year-old prefers to watch videos on the "Big Dora Phone" (the nomenclature earned by the iPad) rather than using the kludgy 32-inch television set in the sitting room.

Mia's personal viewing habits (seen at left) could be an economical step because they suggest that when she's out on her own, she won't need a television antenna and could escape the annual TV License Fee. Fortunately for the Irish Exchequer, TV won't die off during the lifetime of the next generation. However, the way people view TV segments has changed already. I suspect that the RTE Player is serving as many views of popular shows during the week following initial broadcast as the shows get in live viewership. According to research by Magnet Networks, 71% of Irish people now watch TV programmes on their portable mobile devices and desktop computers, with one in five doing so regularly. This figure rises dramatically to 89% for those aged 18-25, with 58% regularly watching TV on their computers. In Mia's case, her preferred gateway to Ben and Holly, Charlie and Lola, Peppa Pig and Dora the Explorer is through the touchscreen that she can carry from room to room. In a perfect world, her personal viewing preference also works while underway in Ireland. That is proving to be more of a challenge.

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Digital Times -- "Rapid Changes in TV Viewing Habits" on the blog, May 11, 2011.

television

History of Rap, Part II

THERE IS SOMETHING hilarious about two white boys singing the history of rap in a five-minute Double Vanilla medley. My dream is to get 30 Rock tickets on the night that JT and Jimmy crank out Part III in a live session in front of me--I'd be old enough to know all the songs. It could possibly be thew whitest thing I'd ever see. I think Part II has some bad songs in the mix and that should mean Part III will really entertain when these two Bad Ass White Brothers get rapping again. I've watched this clip five times and I'm convinced JT needs to get his own television show.

History of Rap Part II

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Listen on Audioboo or watch on YouTube if the embedded content doesn't play on my blog. Direct link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDi15u6mQk if you need it.

music

Personal Video Choices

OUR THREE YEAR OLD is growing up around technology and it's obvious that she revels in transmedia. She wants to know that the DVD she watches in the sitting room will run by tapping a key frame on the iPad and she wants to know the crayons she has can colourise her favourite characters in whatever shade appeals to her artistic whims. Currently, Charlie and Lola, characters created by author Lauren Child, are strong facets of her playlist. That means I've got to archive them onto several devices because if Mia has Lola in her hand, all travel times can increase by two hours without any griping. For relatives and distant cousins who are reading this blog post, remember that Mia's birthday is in September and that you can gift her all sorts of Charlie and Lola items.

 

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Watch on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyND7-u9c30 and see the Xperia Arc record low-light video.

transmedia

Gabriel Byrne's Jedward Impression

Watch on YouTube

GABRIEL BYRNE DISSECTS President Obama's visit to College Green, offers a compelling perspective on the role of art and culture in Ireland, and gives an excellent impression of Jedward on the Late Late show on RTE One in Ireland. It's essential viewing.

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Freefi Books

AS A YOUNG teen, I spent a lot of time in our local library. The only problem with it was its location nearly eight miles away. We can walk to the Cashel library but we don't do it often enough. Today I brought Mia in for storytelling and I immediately went back into the zone of exploration that I once knew before I turned 14. The bookshelves here appeal to people under six feet tall because they're shorter than that and that means a young teen would be able to see through or over the stacks. That's how I discovered countless new worlds. But that was last century. In this century, the library has free wifi, plenty of high-speed computers and a patient staff that often walks around making sure everything is alright. From the looks of the content on several computer screens, it appears our local library opens its range of content beyond that seen by the local county council. On one hand, that's refreshing. On the other hand, it means the computers are more likely to be used for recreational purposes and not for discovery or creation. And while the recreation runs full bore with whispered comments and laughs out loud, the books go unopened and the stacks unexplored.

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Sent via free wifi at the Cashel Library from my Nokia E7.

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