Wundering in Ireland

Scraped from Share Your Adventure.

THE FIRST WUNDERING MOLESKINE took its very first turn and shared its adventure via a social beacon that ended up on a Google Map. This means a community-based project proved we can connect the creative art of primary school students to a global mesh of social networking.

Another Semester with #icollab

Screenshot from the iCollab Google Map

NEARLY 50 STUDENTS in the Limerick School of Art & Design will work with the #iCollab project during the spring semester of 2014. The project offers an excellent working model of Alternative Pedagogies with some excellent background information on the iCollab blog. [1]

Teaching Tools and Tracking Thought Leaders

Image from Mitchell Levy.

CREATIVE MULTIMEDIA STUDENTS in the Limerick School of Art & Design will set out to find and learn from thought leaders this semester. Along the way, I believe they will enjoy listening to thought leaders on the FIR Podcast Network.

Misogyny on the Curriculum

Screenshot from PSmag.com.

I PLAN TO REWARM the topic of misogyny in a social media module I teach, hoping to discover techniques that work for creative college students. I have a family reason that motivates me.

I want to ensure my six year old daughter can handle the anxiety that bubbles alongside the social media streams many women navigate in their lives. It seems grossly unfair to have women expect to encounter raging misogyny as part of their online lives. And it's excepti0nally troubling when their complaints are easily dismissed by law enforcement agencies.

Amanda Hess writes a compelling piece for the Pacific Standard, laying out a chronology of abuse she has encountered online. She isn't the first to raise the issue in a prominent way and I know others will have similar stories to tell this year and next. Perhaps by spotlighting the issue on a third level social media module, I can squelch some of the undesireable behaviour before it ramps up in the workplace. 

Misogyny

  Download epub Readings on Civility

[Bernie Goldbach is the senior creative multimedia lecturer in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]

Blind Referees and LinkedIn

Lumia Screenshot by @topgold

IF COLLEGE STUDENTS expect to get meaningful endorsements from blind referees, then they should set up a LinkedIn profile and keep it updated.

Because I've more than 10 years inside the LinkedIn ecosystem, I get direct requests from recruiters, company directors and senior staff members of various organisations when they consider employing one of our graduates. In many cases, I haven't worked directly with or taught the job candidate but LinkedIn shows me on the faculty of a relevant educational institution. Sometimes I'm asked to to verify the syllabus that the candidate completed. Other times, I'm asked about the kind of group project work the student finished. I am asked to serve as a reference by prospective companies more than students ask me to list my details on their CVs.

We count on LinkedIn to help improve the opportunities our students have to complete three month periods as interns with creative companies. It's relatively straightforward for the companies involved to see the kind of academic programme I represent and to make a quick determination about the level of proficiency our students might have at various stages of their education. Thanks to LinkedIn, I can generate placement opportunities for students faster than a full-time student services staff member.

Learned After Teaching Twitter for Seven Years

Screencap from Twitter in its early Irish days.

SEVEN YEARS AGO, we brought Twitter into our Tipperary college classrooms. Back then, the largest concentration of people tweeting in Ireland lived within 10 miles of each other near Clonmel.

I spent a few minutes thinking out loud about the main points I now teach when unpacking Twitter for academic credit in the Limerick School of Art & Design.

Learned While Teaching Twitter

Twitter High Water Mark

Screenshot of @topgold's Twitter screen on Lumia.

IT TOOK ME seven years of tweeting to hit a new high water mark with Twitter. I'm starting to poke above 5000 followers on my main Twitter account while simultaneously throttling back my use of Twitter.

Most of my energy today is split across several social networks because those other networks reflect where our potential students and potential employers reside. Incoming students are more likely to be listening to YouTube music or using Facebook. Potential employers are either following a flow on LinkedIn or they're inside a Google Plus Community. And although many of my long-time associates bounce around all of these places, I have to be ruthless and limit my time tweeting if I expect to hit our metrics.

We're looking at ways to continue increasing both our enrolled students in South Tipperary as well as enhancing employment prospects of students who complete their Level 7 and Level 8 creative multimedia degree programmes with the Limerick School of Art & Design. I'll be curious to see what kinds of online interaction we use in 2024.

Life with the Twitterbots

Image from Digital Breezes.

ONE OF THE BEST time-wasting values of Twitter comes in the form of Twitterbots who follow me. They bring equal measures of absurdity and serendipity while reminding me the Twitterverse never sleeps.

Twitterbots are also one of the most public manifestations of creative creative programming. A clever Python coder can recycle ideas that can be leverage for-profit or for charity. Year ago, people might have moaned about getting spam in their e-mails but I don't hear the same strident objections from people when they glance at their timelines and see a few Twitterbots chatting at them.

In fact, I think you might conclude Twitterbots are merely evidence of modern automation. They show up when you're talking about coffee, holiday destinations or software. They are as harmful as graffiti sprayed on the side of hoarding alongside a busy highway. 

I'm sure Twitter will start to figure out ways of blocking the bots because in their current form, today's Twitterbots are riding inside the mainstream without paying for advertising time. But if Twitter starts to clamp down, they risk making this online conversation pit into a quieter, gentler place. And who wants that when you like bot such as Mark Sample’s My Favorite Things, which substitutes random words into Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics while still keeping the song’s rhyme scheme?

Tweets Reveal the Real You

 

[Bernie Goldbach asks, "Strange midsize amateurs, loomed up with sites? These are a few of my favorite kites".]

Rob Dubbin -- "The Rise of the Twitter Bots" in The New Yorker, November 15, 2013.

The Oxford Lane Snippets

Photo of Oxford Lane by @topgold.

I GOT A GLYMPSE of Oxford Lane and several interesting snippets along a laneway that remains invisible to Google Street view. I'm indebted to Liam Daly for sharing.

Until Liam sent me a Glympse of his Oxford Lane studio, I didn't have the Glympse app on my Sony Xperia phone. Years ago, I watched Liam cycle around Ireland, using Google Latitude to view his progress. Latitude has been relegated to a function inside Google Plus and until Glympse, I didn't have an easy way of seeing and sharing collaborative locations.

Latitude, like Foursquare, connected me to a smaller, tighter circle of people who shared with a focus. In my personal case, Latitude let me see how close I was to people and that facilitated real-time meet-ups. It had its weaknesses but worked years on Symbian before any related location apps emerged on iOS. I'm glad there's a fall-back in Glympse.

Then there is the real touch point of truly social meet-ups. Liam and I have watched the online social scene morph and change in Ireland. As Twitter approaches its IPO, we wonder what comes next. I think the next communication medium must be standards-based platform services as functional as e-mail. And I'm curious to find out if a follow-on Oxford Lane conversation might specify how that new communications plumbing will evolve.

[Bernie Goldbach snapped Oxford Lane and published this item with his Nokia Lumia while listening to chatter from #DalkeyOpen.]

Deconstructing Messaging Fundamentals

Photo of written work under @topgold's old electronic kit.

I HAVE A LONG relationship with a process that helps me create essential messages, starting with a simple black Moleskine and assisted by clever one-pass technology. I try to share the fundamentals of that messaging process with university students every autumn.

This year, I'm making a short Slideshare that builds on a metaphor of old skool (Ham Radio) messaging dynamics. I've a license from the FCC to operate upper sideband and single sideband in aircraft along with practical experience with the same. Running a message flow through new media isn't much different, if you break down the component parts. I hope my current crop of Media Writing students take my process to heart as we begin a fresh semester of work writing effectively for new media publication and syndication.

There's a short 20-minute presentation included with this blog post and the 33-slide deck flicks through several main points, exposing my preference for online tools such as Tumblr, Flickr, Audioboo and Google Plus.

To each, their own.

Messaging Fundamentals