Inside View

Promoting Literacy in the Classroom

I'M THINKING ABOUT promoting literacy in the classroom because it's a topic we're discussing in an hour-long #edchatie on Twitter at 2030 tonight in Ireland. I'm very much caught up in the technological dimension of literacy because I teach creative multimedia and the assumption is that our graduates will produce electronic media that is viewable on a screen. A lot of those screens depend on over-the-air connectivity and that means to test the concept, I look at student-produced content through a 4.3" screen connected to the internet via wifi. I also have several practical sessions devised where students produce content in the classroom. These production sessions are synonymous with third level literacy. During these session, students update a group blog, interact with our virtual classroom, make short video clips, produce one-pass audio and follow hashtagged conversation. Because I need to remove all choke points from the production process, I try to create and validate practical touchpoints that fit into your pockets and purses. Convergent devices, like the Nokia E7 that I use, become essential parts of the student experience. But besides essential technological equipment, I've pedagogical imperatives as well. 

Talented Youth in Ireland

SOME THINGS ARE TIMELESS, like my interest in human potential. I am a grateful beneficiary of volunteers who worked with me in my childhood as I learned to swim, identify 72 types of plants, sand and paint a Scout House. I want to give back some of that volunteer spirit by working with a combination of technology, teaching, learning and young teens. So Catherine O'Mahony's cover story inside the Sunday Business Post on Centre for Talented Youth (CTYI) in Dublin got my attention [PDF]. I snapped a few shots of the story and shoveled it over to Google Plus yesterday and noticed how it attracted more interest than the Sunday paper round that I produce each week. I think there's a natural intersection here on my blog for the intersection of fun technology, young adult literature and ideas for talented teens. Expect to see that evolution unfold in the month's ahead.

Pull Quotes About Gifted Kids

 

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Bookmarked GiftedKids.ie. Done.

Dervala Hanley -- "Ambassadors from the future," July 26, 2003.

Download 17kb PDF of the Sunday Business Post article.

Irish Sunday Papers in the Rain

I STARTED READING two Irish Sunday broadsheets outside in the rain today and had to stop three minutes into the flow because the papers started sticking together.

After the pages dried, I thumbed through the Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post and fingered a few issues that caught my eye as an American in Ireland. The little Republic is broke and totally dependent on loans received from the European Union so every week, yet another story emerges to explain austerity in another frame of reference. This week, word comes from Europe to suggest a reduction in the interest rate for Irish loans. But the headline news wasn't actually the debt burden. Most newspapers led with a shooting tragedy in Norway. I simultaneously recorded an eight minute video for Google Plus with an Xperia Arc while making an Audioboo recording with my iPod Touch this week. I'm testing a process that I plan to use next semester in several of the creative multimedia modules I teach.

Sunday Papers in the Rain

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Listen on Audioboo or watch on YouTube.

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Hell in Norway

I FEEL FOR innocent people in Norway, some blown off their chairs by a bomb blast and others who knew those who were gunned down by a terrorist on an island of Utoya yesterday. I put an English translation of a survivor's account below the break.

I've walked through Oslo's central government district several times--and down the main street of Hell (at left)--while visiting Norway to cross-check landing rights at several airfields. That central Oslo district is peppered with broken glass, metal shards and bloody clothes.

Norwegians are a proud people. As an Air Force T-38 pilot, I was in a class two levels below students pilots coming from the Royal Norwegian Air Force for fast jet training. Everybody knew the Norwegians had better hand-eye co-ordination from years of video games. Once airborne, a Norwegian pilot felt more comfortable while upside down and pulling four times the force of gravity. Those guys are legends in my books. They fly across some of the most rugged terrain in Europe and their daily intercepts suggest there is a viable air defence mission to support.

Flying with the Royal Norwegian Air Force with Runar Skjong.

Back When Every Day Went 400 mph

I HAVE FLIGHT RECORDS that describe by numbers the week-on-week routine of living in an office that traveled 400 miles per hour across the Oklahoma landscape near Vance Air Force Base in the early 80s.

I stumbled across the records in my attic and some scrawled notes about a vigorous routine that I would never be able to maintain today. My day often started 70 minutes before sunrise as I mounted a 10-speed bicycle and rode in the dark to the flight line. Once there, my flight commander opened the daily briefing. It would be another 40 minutes before the sun rose.

Comment Spam Round 18

ONCE A FORTNIGHT, I look back at what the process I used to write blog posts and to keep my little patch of the internet free of comment spams.

When I first carved out a space on Typepad, I would face up to nearly 300 spams every morning. By early 2007, Six Apart established tight queue filters. Looking back on past write-ups about fighting comment spam, I wonder if I could remember how to use a manual clean-up routine. The spam I get today is normally prefaced by a referrer string shown in the accompanying screenshot. People are paid to look for parts of a blog's set-up and then they target that blog. In my case, if you find reference to the phrase "Typekey or Typepad account" you can normally assume your comment will post to my blog without any complication. So I'm stuck with cleaning comment spam nowadays that people in small outsourced jobs are doing as little nixers. That's okay with me.

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Previously: "Comment Spam Round 17" on September 29, 2010.

 

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Google Plus at Third Level

I TEACH CREATIVE MULTIMEDIA students on the Clonmel campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology and am very glad to discover ways that Google Plus reinforces a constructivist approach to third level education.

During the current summer break, I've started toying with 12 specific practical uses of Google Plus in a first semester module for new students. You can find me via Gplus.to/topgold. I plan to expand on the 12 practicals during each of the 12 weeks of class during the upcoming fall semester, watching students develop an active learning practise as they unpack various facets of Google Plus. I'm musing over these ideas now, knowing that other academics will read and comment on my blog post as it percolates out into other social networks. I explain more of the specifics below the break.

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

Final Landing

THE FINAL SHUTTLE mission ended successfully at the Kennedy Space Center today and I feel as though a chapter of my own life has closed too. I never wanted to be an astronaut but I trained two pilots who later became NASA pilots. Back in the 60s, when I watched the American space programme take off, I was happy shooting air-powered rockets over our two-story home. Rockets, lunar missions and reusable orbiters sounded far-fetched and significantly more technical than we could comprehend in our rotary phone home. The pace of the technology is what amazes me the most. The idea for the shuttle was pulsating through the ARPANET from its earliest days. If I rewind my own life back to those times, I see life through mechanical camera lenses because CCD technology was just finding its way onto broadcast cameras. Today, I carry an HD cameraphone in my pocket and its mobile CMOS sensor that lets me capture high-quality movies and stills better than early shuttle photo documentation. I had a slide rule and then a mechanical flight computer--and so did every astronaut who piloted a shuttle mission. My head is swimming with all these comparisons because I believe the space programme inspired a lot of what we enjoy in the field of consumer electronics today. With the final shuttle landing and all the high-flying space exploration drawing down, I wonder where all the big spin-offs will arise during the lifetime of my young children.

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Watch a playlist of NASA shuttle missions on YouTube.

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Remembering the Moon

I REMEMBER THE MOON LANDING VIVIDLY because it was simply an amazing achievement AND it was the first time we turned on a television in our home. I was lying on my stomach in a crowded sitting room on a muggy July evening. I had never thought I was missing anything as a teenager before that night. But crossing over into the televised spectrum to see the Apollo 11 lunar lander turned out to be very special and life-changing. I did not realise it at the time, but all the patriotic affirmations coming from my home and a lot of casual contact with friends spurred me to pick up a college catalogue with an American pilot's helmet on its front cover. I found the catalogue while sitting in the outer office of my cross-country coach. I didn't know what was inside the catalogue but it looked space age so I borrowed it and read how I could enter a university where they taught you to fly supersonic speeds just like the astronauts. I ripped out a response card from the back of the catalogue and started receiving promotional material that resulted in me doing what the catalogue said. Along the way, I earned instructor pilot's wings and flew training sorties with the first woman commander of the space shuttle. It's important for me to realise that part of my life's journey through high-altitude technology started while watching a helmet bobble up and down across the lunar landscape 42 years ago.

Man on the Moon

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