Inside View

International Film Festival Ireland on Campus

SOUTH TIPPERARY CULTURE gets a boost with the networking and screening of dozens of films during the International Film Festival Ireland, a week-long event organised by Will Nugent (at left). At Tipperary Institute, several break-out sessions run from 2PM-4PM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. While watching the Tuesday afternoon running, I was impressed with the cross-section of the audience. It stretched from early teens to late 50s. Moreover, the young people listening to the producers, writers and animators were clearly motivated to try their hands at creating their own short video pieces. As a result, we're going to push forward with a series of afternoon workshops for local Transition Year (TY) students. Those in the workshops will learn to write, script, film and post-produce short films. TY Workshops extend the practise of the Schoolworks programme that Tipperary Institute ran successfully since 2005. It's wonderful to discover the creative talent just around the corner from our third level campus in Clonmel.

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More: International Film Festival Ireland (bit it scrolls all over the place).

Photo of Will Nugent snapped in Studio Six while he chatted with Media Writing students a few years ago.

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First Day Back in Class

Useful Collaborative Tech
Originally uploaded by topgold

WE DISCUSSED SEVERAL pieces of social networking technology that might prove useful when collaborating in projects. In Tippeary Institute, part of the BSc in Creative Multimedia involves completing a group project. One important takeaway from the first day back in our college classrooms revolved around a discussion of several time-tested pieces of social networking that might actually prove useful when specifying and completing project work. This short screencast [1 MB MP3 file] exposes those technologies (i.e., Audioboo, change tracking inside Word, Google Docs, twitter hashtagging, 12Seconds.tv, and Qik video clips). Updates will follow as the semester unfolds.

Useful Collaborative Technology

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Project Management at Third Level

THE CLUTTER IN MY OFFICE (see left), on my desk and at my feet remind me that I need to eat my own dog food and learn alongside third level students who will listen to me lay out a module in project management for this semester. We're tied to an accredited curriculum that should help my third year complete their own major projects successfully but I want more. I want to carve out more physical space and I want to arrest the mission creep of academics in my real life. That means following a process online, carrying action items on my person and perhaps engaging a coach as well. For today, I'm bringing part of Manager Tools into the listening space [30 minute MP3 file], hashtagging some content for academic credit [#projmgt], listening to student input about nominated projects, validating effective personal technology that helps get things done, and nominating textbooks. If my cadre agree to the task, we'll shovel the core takeaways onto an iTunes feed and offer relevant revision material as slideshares.

Project Manager Feedback

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Timothy Ferris -- "The 4-Hour Work Week" ISBN 9780091923723

David Allen -- "Getting Things Done" ISBN 978-0142000281

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Sunday Business News from Ireland

BENEATH THE PILE of books (at left) sits the Sunday Business Post, subject of a 10-minute Qik video clip that I made about tech and business news from Ireland. A lot of the paper deals with new taxes, bank bailouts, and declining economic fortunes in Ireland. In my local area (South Tipperary), my kitchen radio hears local conversations from both Clonmel and Kilkenny. South Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath is verbal with his criticism of the current government. "There's a time when he (the current Taoiseach) has to examine his own conscience and say 'I can do this or I can't" and in the minds of many in my housing estate, the current head of government has lost his power to govern. There are torrid times ahead for the current national government. [1] [2] [3] Not all of the paper deals with the possible collapse of the ruling coalition. The Sunday Business Post always offers interesting reviews of technology and tech companies and that fact becomes clear in the MP3 below.

Sunday Business Post 6 Sep 09

Reading the Sunday Times in Ireland

AFTER A TWO-WEEK break, I return to giving a quick look at the Sunday Times in Ireland. The top of that broadsheet has a cover digest look that many blogs should consider. Its top story concerns a loophole that Irish citizens can use to avoid paying Irish tax (i.e., spend fewer than 183 days per year in Ireland). [1] Avoiding tax and getting nice little top-ups is an Irish sport. [2] Paying tax on top of taxed goods and services deserves a little feedback on receipts. [3] So, paying for an MP4-12C would show VAT, carbon tax, and even a rates tax paid by the merchant. That supercar has wifi on board. [4] You wouldn't need wifi to use some of the gadgets in the InGear section of the Sunday Times.

A Qik Flik through the Sunday Times 6 Sep 09

The Very Helpful CCleaner

CCLEANER IS ONE OF most valuable pieces of freeware, used weekly to keep my hard drive churning with enough free space to render video without overheating. It's free, so I didn't expect a sweet user interface and wasn't disappointed because it launches straight away and cleans as much as you trust. If you share your laptop or desktop, you should use CCleaner to wipe away your tracks from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and from various Windows system areas. It also snags and zaps artefacts from Spybot and WinZip. Its Registry-cleaning utility surprises some of my friends because it scans for invalid entries before removing them. More than anything else, I can trust CCleaner to clean up without destroying valuable stuff that I need. I've used it for more than a year and in that time, it's kept me up and running without the need for a scratch installation of my Windows operating system.

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You can download CCleaner from CNET.

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Watching and Hoping for the Long View

I SPENT SIGNIFICANT thought space today alongside 130 other third level professionals listening to important snippets of conversation concerning the prospects of the Irish government continuing to fund the operation and growth of higher education in County Tipperary. Anyone watching reports from Ireland knows the country is borrowing at an unsustainable level, meaning significant cutbacks are on the way this December. In fact, billions of euro have already been borrowed and spent on bailing out the banking sector, leaving less borrowing power for social services. The lack of easy funding reduces most current financial decisions by Irish cabinet ministers to bean counter metrics. Those are often crude measuring sticks, designed to eke out quick results from limited resources. They normally favour developed operations, since those operations are more likely to be delivering results already. In my case, the key metrics are incoming student enrollments and graduating student numbers. If I was playing in the English Premier League, my team would face relegation. Owners of relegated teams often take the long view, knowing that a team's prospects can often change for the better when winning championship matches at a lower level. After an afternoon of discussions concerning possible relegation, I'm left hoping that the owners (Irish government ministers) take a long view of my current team.

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Photo from another meet-up of third level educators in Ireland where we discussed Moodle, an Open Source Virtual Learning Environment.

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Smartphones for Creative Multimedia Students

THE FASTEST WAY we can produce creative multimedia content in Tipperary Institute is by using smartphones that our students currently carry. I've got a few sample phones in the photo at left and the shot reflects the fact that Nokia multimedia phones are the most common model on campus, followed by iPhones and SonyEricsson devices. Smartphone sales are up across Europe and we try to specify the kind of capability a smartphone should have in our third level multimedia curriculum. A 3.2 megapixel camera leads the specification list, along with Bluetooth and Wifi capability. If a student qualifies for a network-subsidised device, we recommend getting a phone that connects over wifi, shares via Bluetooth streaming (A2DP protocol), has removeable memory and comes with a removeable battery or supplemental battery pack. Within a few years, it will be difficult getting a bog-standard mobile phone anymore, since even the iPhone is now subsidised down to a EUR 80 price point. Even during the current recession, 28% of mobile phone sales in 2009 have been smartphones. That percentage will double by 2012, if you believe the cross-talk that came out of Nokia World in Stuttgart this week. That's actually a good trend, and one that universities should consider when setting strategies for better student learning becacuse smartphones are already prominent as the second screen in many college students' lives.

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UK Mobile Blog -- "Rise of the Smartphones", September 3, 2009.

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Circumventing IP-Based Blocks

SAY YOU HAVE a broadcast media show pushing across the internet in a Windows Media Player and you're blocked from hearing the stream when you're outside a country when the source detects you're detected not in the subnet of the place where the show airs. Hope is at hand, if you have shell access in the country where the block is put in place because newer versions of OpenSSH has a built in SOCKS proxy. Just launch Putty, and under its Connection > SSH >Tunnels configuration create a tunnel forwarding source port 1080 to a Dynamic destination. Then launch your browser, pull down tools > Connections > LAN settings > Advanced and insert 127.0.0.1 for SOCKS proxy address and make 1080 the port. If you don't have shell access but you need to see something that's blocked, consider Strong VPN.

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Video Beyond Fred

I DISCOVERED FRED first in Ireland and found Fred in the States. Both Fred findings gave me pause. Fred the first does really good video and his work shows it. Fred the second does really viral video and you couldn't script his viral effect ahead of time. Mashed together, we have Fast Rendered Entertaining Docuclips. Our flavour of FRED is part art-making, part workshop, part portfolio. Teenaged workshop participants will concentrate on illustrations, script writing, storyboarding, recording, editing, and producing. I'm blogging these thoughts for Fred, Mike, Sally, James and Triona.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 free wifi service fromTipperary Institute, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland.

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