Inside View

Web Writing Thrives

ALTHOUGH STATISTICS SAY that the numbers of online visitors to personal blogs are declining, there is still a lot of interest in well-written web content these days. Rewriting content for clients is a regular commercial imperative. Public service agencies need to keep their events announcements and calls for consultation updated. That means someone has to write the content. Several times a month, I'm asked to provide a news story or permission for my content to be piped into a syndication newsfeed. While most of those syndications fail to pay, standard rate cards are bantered about as starting points for paid placement. At the moment, I'm explaining to first year writing students at Tipperary Institute how all these paid content streams work. It would be delightful if some of our Labour Market Activation Programme students got meaningful rewards for the targeted messages they are creating for academic credit.

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Thoughts from Portland

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I'M LEAVING BEHIND many must-do items in Portland, including unfulfilled hours seated in the reading chair (at left) of the Ace Hotel. I really like that place because it has a vibe that we tried to inculcate into Arthouse 15 years ago. The crowd gives the place its Ace attitude. Most days, I'd pass four open Mac laptops before I got to my stairwell. On the busiest day, I counted 22 people seated or standing, two dogs sleeping, three bikes parked in the lobby, four Macbooks, two PC laptops, one iPad and two Kindles. That's about the kind of creative expression that we should have in Tipperary Institute, where I teach creative multimedia. Outside the hotel is a bike lane painted to take up nearly an entire car lane. A combination of very efficient buses, inexpensive train service and respect for cylists means people don't have to own cars. That's a worthwhile goal for Dublin, a city where it rains nearly as much as Portland. We're coming back for another visit, this time in a sunnier month.

Audiomo-16

 

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Learning about Ireland from NYT Coverage

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I'M SPENDING A WEEK in the States and I'm seeing Ireland from the other side of the Atlantic. If the friends I have are any indication, Brand Ireland has a lot of promise during the austere decade ahead. Some of that comes through the New York Times but currently, you can feel the Irish financial tension on the financial pages of leading broadsheets in America.

News through the New York Times

Respect 50

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I MET 50 CENT through the boom box of a neighbour who was a taxi driver in Kilkenny. Even though his lip sync is a little off in this video short, I think it's heart-warming and worth watching Keenan Cahill in action with 50 Cent in his bedroom. I bought Jeremih's track because I liked the song.

Down on Me

 

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Travel Kit

I LAID OUT my major travel kit on my bed in Portland's Ace Hotel because there are some things I've discovered about making multimedia postcards while traveling. A quick cameraphone is essential and my old reliable is my Nokia N86. It had a single bar of power after my 22 hr travel day yesterday. I carry extra earbuds for listening to tracks on an iPod Touch, a SonyEricsson X10 and the N86. The big black Moleskine is my tray table. The number 3 is on a Mifi dongle that DOES NOT WORK when roaming with my O2-Ireland SIM in areas of 2G coverage. A well-thumbed journalist's Moleskine keeps my working notes. I prefer the robust Sony ICD MX-20 to any other audio recording device because of its durability and adaptability. I have power cables not shown in the accompanying photo and use the small cable to recharge my Nokia E90 from friendly USB sources (my laptop). I also record HD clips on a JVC Everio because of its small grip. It would have cost €1950 to buy all this gear new. You should be able to find all of it on eBay for €750 today.

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Sent mail2blog using Ace 6 Nokia E90 free wifi in Portland, Oregon.

 

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Crossing the Atlantic

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THERE IS A FAMILY WEDDING 21 hours away from our home in Tipperary and I am making the trip out and back on my own. As on all trips, I'm flight-testing my communications gear while underway. I used my preferred cameraphone (Nokia N86) to shoot a view outside of seat 11H to observe my seventh hour of travel to the States knowing my ride back will be cramped in the middle of row 43 (my most-despised airborne seating). I realise I won't get my main N86 memory cleared out because I've drained the phone's battery with 34 minutes of talktime and 492 minutes of podcast listening.I am glad to make this trip and want to go west to Pennsylvania some October to see the autumn leaves change.

Airborne

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Sent mail2blog using N86 Verizon service after landing in Chicago.

 

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#tippfood and Great Wine

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WE GRACIOUSLY ACCEPTED an invitation for a private tour of Red Nose Wine today and listened to Gary Gubbins describe three superb choices of wine to accompany different recipes from Pat Whelan's An Irish Butcher Shop. It's less than a 10 minute walk from the creative multimedia studio at Tipperary Institute in Clonmel to the Red Nose Wine Headquarters. That's handy because there's always an open bottle for sampling when a special group arrives. We'll be back for more because all diligent first year multimedia students know that practise makes perfect. This YouTube clip is one-pass video production by several students and I think it has whetted their appetite for more action with the Tipperary Food Producers' Network.

Red Nose Wine

 

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Pat Whelan -- An Irish Butcher Shop ISBN 9781848890596

More: Book Review by Susan Cloonan.

Tipperary Food Producers Christmas Food Extravaganza

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Vinyl Rising Again

MY BROTHER-IN-LAW sells vinyl records every week via eBay. My Delicious buddy Derek has spotted vinyl records among the cropped tops and high-waisted Levis as parts of pop culture coming round for a second time. I can see why. It feels natural to hold onto something big and chunky instead of hearing music through thin pocket devices and tiny wires. Nearly two dozen students in my current first year of creative multimedia at Tipperary Institute completely missed out browsing through big records in music shops. When you buy those large vinyl records, you can't easily skip around from track to track. You can't depend upon some electronic mix master to create your playlist. Instead, you have to physically move the platters, spin the turntable and create the music. I grew up on warped vinyl records. I'm still mesmerised when watching a record spin on a turntable and I still hold my breath when dropping the long, fragile needle into its groove.

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Derek Baird -- "Trend Watch: Vinyl records back in vogue among teens" on Barking Robot, 9 November 2010.

Christina Seminara -- "Vinyl in vogue among teens", Buffalo News, 4 November 2010.

 

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Effective Content Creation for Digital Communications

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AFTER SPENDING A DAY inside an Apple multimedia production process in hopes of making some new video content that would easily port to several podcast channels, I emerged believing mobile video content will be default for third level education materials before the end of the decade. Some of the educators in the hands-on session may believe mobile-optimised content will pre-empt Powerpoint slide decks within five years but I think there aren't enough touch screens at second level to justify that happening. Instead, we will see educators rewarming lecture notes for another 10 years while forward-looking staff take the initiative and begin producing for a generation of smart devices that get less expensive every Christmas. I often wonder if it's worth the effort of re-engineering our content production workflow if no more than a third of our students have the resources to download and interact with content designed for iTunes U. But then I see the vast repositories of free materials available from generous professors online and I realise that part of the reason more Irish students are signing up for the Young Scientist exhibition is due to the easy availability of these creative university courses online. Knowing that I might encourage a young student to learn more than I did in my first year of college inspires me to develop more effective content creation for digital communications.

Audiomo-from the venue

 

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Sent mail2blog using a mobile screen designed by Nokia and piped by O2-Ireland. Photo of my iOS4 playing back some iTunes content.

 

 

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Watching Apple Content Creation

TODAY OFFERS ME A chance to watch Apple's trainers explain how to efficiently produce content for handheld devices. While that workflow might be useful to me, I'm more interested in discovering efficient ways to leverage my current laptop set-up in converting third level educational multimedia for trackable use on all sorts of pocket media platforms. I teach in a third level classroom where fewer than half of my first year students have played a video on their mobile phones. Fewer than 10 per cent have listened to downloaded audio on their phones. Until this year, none of my 61 new students had browsed to a link list containing lecture materials using just their mobile device. Learning how to serve this kind of third level cohort by providing rich media in students' pockets means I'm targeting a group of students more than two years away. Simply put, my students have neither the money for the upgraded handsets nor the motivation to use them to consume essential learning materials. I hope both of those factors change so I can provide an enhanced learning environment for the 2020 workplace. But I actually believe I'm that far away--it will be 2020 before a majority of my newest third level students arrive on the first day of the term with upgraded pocket media and the desire to want to leverage that gear for best effect while immersed actively in education. In the meantime, I'll train for the future, using The Gruffalo, some sketchpads, designs scribbled in Moleskines and a few artists' pencils while learning how to produce things the Apple Way.

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Audio: Learning the Apple Way.

Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service while meandering towards centre city Dublin, Ireland.

 

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