Inside View

When Social Networking Pushes You Over The Edge

PART OF MY WORK involves motivating creative students to stay the course, so every lost student makes me pause.

Less than two weeks into the new semester, we've shed at least one of our new students and part of the reason for him leaving relates to his perception of the burden imposed by social networking. On the Clonmel campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology, we run a tough Level 8 creative multimedia degree and part of its essence is a challenging continuous assessment (CA) component. Some of that CA is measured by collaborative work. As early as the first semester, I drive students into Google Documents where they can see and comment on the inputs of others. For someone who has avoided all sorts of online networking, jumping into the middle of a collaborative document with 50 others can be daunting. I refer to it as a "Cellphone Amish Tension" because I grew up in Amish country and I talk to the Stolzfus family when I return about how they're allowed to use their mobile phones. One of the rules imposed by the elders requires them to make outgoing calls from a phone box in the shed so they don't intrude on the sanctity of space in the family home. My point is that anyone using new technology of techniques needs to develop a level of comfort before they can feel competent with it. And some new students, who abhor the thought of getting stuck into the middle of social media, can only deal with the stress by jumping over the edge.

In my experience, they don't return.

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The document that caused the stress: http://t9.ie/litmw01

Bonus Link: "What comes after social networking?" by Ade Oshineye, January 23, 2011.

staff

My First Look at Vodafone Mobile Broadband

THE VODAFONE MOBILE BROADBAND USB stick modem gives me a solid first impression--it delivers 3G performance in the creative multimedia wing of LIT.

This means a lot for new students who are not registered on the course but who need to see Google Documents, email and cloud storage. Simply snapping the €40 red and white Vodafone stick modem into their laptops gives them high speed personal internet access to cloud services without having to log into the campus network. Of course, they could also use the white-hot free and open campus wifi if they wanted but having Vodafone Mobile means they can take their work outside onto the picnic tables, work downtown from my favourite coffee shop, or hide in a corner in the student union building. With dependable, high speed and nearly symmetrical Vodafone Mobile Broadband, the real challenge becomes staying focused on to-do lists and not sinking into the distracting void of Facebook during the normal academic day.

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mobile

Sunday News About Local Things

ALTHOUGH IT IS TOUGHER for me to carve out time to produce short Sunday news clips, there are several Irish emigrants who prod me to share my papers across time zones.

I have changed my perspective about how I select my news items because I need to ensure most of the coverage works as inserts to the various creative multimedia modules I teach in the Limerick Institute of Technology. Several of our recurring themes find their way into today's Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post, including references to local food producers. I've developed a personal taste for rashers from Crowe's Farm, chicken breasts from O'Dwyer's of Cashel, over-sized biscuits from The Cookie Jar and fruity whites from Red Nose Wine. It's nice to see coverage of several of those local producers in the Sunday broadsheets.

Sunday News 18 Sep

Embedded video below the break.

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

Going Social With Learning Means Leakage

A GROUP OF CHINESE students (at left) took a briefing about my online  course materials several years ago and if my interpretation of my webstats are correct, students from China continue to sift through my course notes today.

Their interest is global, reflecting an absolute trend towards distance learning and online education. The offerings are compelling. Chinese are registering and attending open undergraduate degree courses offered by Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science. You can also do this course online from Ireland with positive results, submitting assignments and attending online examinations. Finish the taskings and you could receive a Certificate of Attainment at the end of the semester. Stanford has registered more than 100,000 students for its suite of open online education programmes.

Apple, Steve and Me

AS APPLE SHARES PUSH above $400, I realise I've enjoyed riding the wave of disruption that Steve Jobs unleashed upon our culture.

My first colour screen computer was an Apple II GS in 1985. I paid to see Pixar's Toy Story 2 in 1999 and Finding Nemo in 2003. My second MP3 player was an iPod in 2004. I enjoyed poking around Apple's Fifth Avenue store in 2006, feeling empowered because I didn't buy anything on my walk-through. By 2010, we had an iPad and two iPod Touches in the house. And even though I've spent less money on those devices than I've spent using my Kindle, our three-year-old daughter is very happy to hold a TV (the iPad) in her lap as she watches videos wherever she wants in the house. That lovely empowerment from Apple is justification on its own for the new highs enjoyed by the shares.

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technology

Page Views as Drawn Activity

I'M WITHIN A WEEK of observing my tenth anniversary of blogging and noticed that the pattern of declining page views imitates a "drawn activity" curve for the search term "photoshop download".

This means that fewer people want to download Photoshop the program or fewer are looking for Photoshop files to revise on their own computers. I don't know why interest in Photoshop downloads is declining across the web but I know the reasons for my own blog's demise: Facebook and Twitter. I push out my blog posts to both of those services and I can see a steady flow of people coming into my blog from both of those networks. The headline from each of my blog posts goes to Twitter and the first paragraph of my new blog posts often automatically publishes on Facebook. I imagine that's enough content for people so they don't click back to the source. The result is the downward progression of the bell curve illustrated in this blog post.

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analytics

Training People for Jobs That Don't Exist

MANY OF THE STUDENTS who started four years of third level education at the Limerick Institute of Technology this month will land jobs that do not exist today.

Some of those will be positions that emerge as the economy rebounds but historical statistics suggest 10 per cent of the graduates will have job titles or specialisms that are not established in today's workplace. This means that our creative multimedia curriculum is training people for jobs that don't exist. In a quick graduate survey, we discovered that decisions we made in an accredited syllabus in 2004 has helped former students land work doing PHP web development, API calls, social media analytics, and wireframing for handheld screens. I remember defending the proposed curriculum to visiting industry experts and laying out the case for how the smart economy would evolve--all the way down to the kinds of programming languages and the terms of reference for specialist work far over the horizon. History has proven our planning correct through the two major revisions that we have set for our BSc in Creative Multimedia. And history should continue running its course in Ireland as manufacturing opportunities continue to decline and the SME sector grows its influence.

Fewer people relentlessly produce more and better stuff, whether it's barley for stout, stents for health care, or any other physical product. The trend will not reverse in manufacturing. We will educate for the jobs of the future, even though some of those jobs do not appear in any sort of appointments listing today.

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journal

Two Reasons I'm Sticking on Delicious

STEVE CHEN AND CHAD HURLEY are the two reasons I'm still using Delicious as a social bookmarking service. [Image by Jim Wilson/NYT.]

Those two entrepreneurs have a vision that will change the home page at Delicious into browseable “stacks,” or collections of related images, videos and links shared around topical events. That's hyperlocal on steroids for me. They also plan to offer Delicious personalised recommendations for me, based on my sharing habits. At the moment, most of my sharing is among educators. I'm also trying to ensure my most advanced students get into the sharing routine as well because it's a life skill.

Liveblogging Back on 911

I VIVIDLY REMEMBER the hand of technology playing a major part in the memorable events of September 11, 2011.

The Irish Open Mailing List offered the best alternative to modern day Twitter. People like Richie Wilson, Brian Greene, Gaddo Bennedeti, Tom Murphy,Peadar McKevvitt, Fergal Byrne, and Dan King fed information into the list throughout the day. There was no Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook--in fact, Google wasn't even among the top 10 most-visited sites on the internet in 2001. Most of us got the news from a big screen television. My primary info came from a TV set in a pub in High Street, Christchurch, Dublin. I left my IBM Transnote laptop running inside Zenark and watched the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center. I believe I had the only tap screen laptop in Ireland at the time. I could make some commands work by touch but the device needed a stylus to work best.