Inside View

Why Friendly Numbers Don't Matter

AFTER READING ADRIAN WECKLER in the Sunday Business Post (at left) ruminate about the echo chamber he found in Google Plus, I realised his perspective is numbers-based, not diversity-aware. And that's just fine.

It really doesn't matter if a boatload of friends swim alongside your presence inside Google Plus. If you play social networking like an extension of a real-life social circle, you need to extend where you hang out in real life. So if you get info about pub crawls from Foursquare check-ins, stick with that. If the news you use crests on Twitter, don't abandon that. If your family exchanges images you cherish on Facebook, why walk away from something that works? So many valid social networks exist today and each has strengths of purpose. You risk information fatigue if you're a mere joiner.

However, you might find something really interesting if you spend time to poke around and engage with the G+ flow that extends beyond the names and faces you already know in other places.

Managing with One View of Simple Tiles

I'M PLAYING WITH A Nokia Lumia 800 and it has elegantly changed the way I see messages.

I can see conversations as they bleed across different networks. So a comment arising in Facebook can morph into a direct SMS message and then become a longer email. All of that message continuity stays clustered together when viewed on the Lumia 800. This makes easy work of going from an emotive comment to a request like, "Send it to me as an email, okay?" And for me, the e-mail laggard, the Lumia 800 saves me from getting into more trouble.

I start a lot of classroom collaboration via email that accompanies a Google Document. Students will engage in that Google Doc directly, then often share thoughts in a Facebook group. What often happens is the answer to an academic question percolates up in Facebook. The Nokia Lumia 800 is set up to see a discussion evolve in the different communications media.

Voice-Controlled TV

BY CHRISTMAS 2016, we will be able to tell our sitting room what to play on the television. Nightly family sessions will feature shouts for channels.

I can do some of this already with my Sony Xperia Arc connected by HDMI cable to a Sony Bravia set. The touchscreen on the phone shows up on the set. I can use the TV remote control to change things on the phone just by beaming an up or down command to the TV screen. When I use voice search I have to use the gesture of the phone to activate the search and that's a bit cumbersome when the HDMI is connected. But it's relatively straightforward to remove the gesture and to activate the search by talking. However, in a chatty sitting room, that could create channel surfing when people started talking. I'm playing with the system now, discovering Google's Mobile app can find my local files. That means I can ask the phone for a photo gallery and the TV set cues the photos for slideshow viewing.

Electromagnetic Pest Controls Driving Our Mice Nuts

WINTER WEATHER BROUGHT three mice that we could see (and probably another two above the ceiling we could hear) so we plugged a Pest Clear 3000 next to our phone and got immediate results.

The little unit sends electromagnetic signals through the wiring of the house and drives out the little field mice who like using our home for their winter nesting ground. The only technical thing you need to know concerns a rotating switch on the front of the device. We're supposed to change the selector from "random" to "continuous" once a week. And the literature says to change the pulse daily if infestation is persistent. We have a mouse motorway entrance under our ground floor toilet where the main water supply enters our home. I clean droppings from that area frequently. But after three days with the electronic pest control switched on, all the droppings have gone away. I'm a happy camper and I'm now considering extending the power cables I have in the garage since and installing an outside socket near the point where our main water enters the house.

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sighting

Distilling DigitalHorizon

I LEARN BY LOOKING BACK and that's certainly true when sifting through a day's notes after the #digitalhorizon meeting in Dublin, Ireland. The accompanying word cloud offers a good summary.

At Farmleigh with John Breslin

 

Getting Generations Connected

TODAY I MEET OTHERS in who also have their fingers in the Irish digital engagement landscape. We meet at Farmleigh with friends of the European Economic and Social Committee.

I rarely attend these kinds of events because they often spend half of their time just defining the landscape. While that's important, many of my fellow collaborators have already done that. We've moved onto the action steps. Today I know fewer than 30 of the people in the 100 who are in the audience and that suggests I will come away with another strategic partner who shares the #ictedu vision of an empowerment through clever education strategies. The image accompanying this blog post reflects the main themes of this vision.

In a nutshell, I bring ideas that could result in sharing valuable content from our third level curriculum at the Limerick Institute of Technology with people throughout the world who want to upskill. We talk about some of these ideas on Monday evenings during Twitter chats (using the #edchatie hashtag), several times a year at CESI Meets, and every May in LIT-Thurles at the ICT in Education conference. All of these initiatives require more time than money. I want to find others in Farmleigh today who share the enthusiasm I have for a better digital future.

Green Glow Train

I CARRIED BOTH A Vodafone high speed USBG modem and an O2 Mifi dongle aboard Irish Rail today for decent speeds in Kilkenny, Carlow and Kildare.

I consistenly got faster than two megabits per second donload service from both of them for most of a suburban rail journey through patches of countryside where I was blacked out several years ago. That's progress in my book. The O2 dongle produced stronger uplink service while the Vodafone signal sometimes delivered twice the download speed of the Huawei Mifi dongle. I like both of these little devices but get longer laptop serivce when using the separate Mifi dongle.

I'm curious to prove that Irish Rail's free wifi runs faster than the Vodafone high-speed stick in my pocket. The Vodafone stick has won the speed test three times on the Dublin-Thurles run this month.

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Shot and sent mail2blog by my Nokia E7 phone.

travel

Building and Revising Content

I HAVE STARTED a process of creating revision material in various rich media channels, hoping to lead groups of multimedia students towards completing work that will improve final exam scores. This is starting to look like an e-learning pipeline.

I start with Google Documents, using a 10-point structure to highlight every academic week. Students respond to those documents and I derive test questions from several distinct points. Normally, I mark the important stuff with the term "revision" so readers can see where they should focus their efforts.

The first major juncture for the Google Doc is a two-part Word Document that we use to generate a final exam paper. The first part of the Word Document is the testable material. The second part contains the model answers. But then things get more interesting, taking me down a pathway involving Delicious, Pinboard, Evernote, Flickr, Basecamp, YouTube, Audioboo, shared documents in the Kindle service, and another Google document to track shownotes related to Educasting posts.

First Use of Sunday Business Post App for my Newsround

I USED THE NEW Sunday Business Post app to help me through my weekly newsround but discovered I can't create a quick video clip on my Xperia Arc without actually holding a paper copy. I will perfect my technique.

The Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post report more details on the austerity measures that will come in next month's budget. Several interesting facets about start-ups, entrepreneurs and the small business ecosystem caught my eye so I made them part of the eight-minute video clip that I shot in my sunny garden with my Sony Xperia Arc. The end of the video below the break includes ten seconds of my current DIY task (laying trace heating around my home's main water supply). I'd appreciate any suggestions from readers about the way I'm thinking about correcting the error made years ago when the builders of our home sunk the water supply less than four inches into the ground.

Sunday News with Cuts Ahead

Learning from the Shared Jobs Story

I GOT THREE COPIES of Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography and along with Neville Hobson I am watching how people share passages from this excellent book.

I didn't expect to get two hardcover books and one Kindle edition but I failed to empty a wishlist and just like that, people dropped me copies. I put the two 600-page tomes on the shelves of the LIT-Clonmel library where they should get ambitious circulation because extracts from the book feature in three different creative multimedia final exams this year. The electronic version is illuminating because of the fascinating nature of shared passages. When the book magically arrived on my Kindle, the most-read passage concerned religion after the book's first week on sale. In that passage, Jobs says, "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery."

But in subsequent weeks, the most-highlighted passage changed.