Inside View

Teaching Evernote My Handwriting

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Photo of the pages I snapped.

I SPENT AN AFTERNOON listening to nine teams of third level students present ideas on their major creative multimedia projects. As I listened, I snapped my handwritten notes into Evernote.

I am trying to relearn better printing skills and believe those skills are directly related to holding black nibs comfortably. I believe the barrel of my current Cross pen is too slim because I have to work at producing letters slower.

I've shared this blog post to the Evernote Community on Google Plus and into my Audioboo stream. I hope to attract feedback from other Evernote users because I need to do some things better.

Evernote and My Handwriting

 

Five Highlighted Burcher Passages

WE COMBINE READING about Nick Burcher's view of paid, owned and earned media with in-class discussions about the most-highlighted passages of Burcher's book for discussion.

-- The brand effects of Adwords. A 59% increase in unaided awareness occurs when users visit the promoted website.

-- Engagement today isn't just pouring a message on their head and hoping they get wet. It really is understanding that you must be present on a conversation when they want to have it, not when you want to.

-- Owned media has the most control but smallest reach, followed by paid, and them earned, which has the least control bit the highest potential reach.

-- Designed cleverly enough, market research surveys will answer any question you can think up. But they can't tell you what you never thought to ask.

-- Robert Cialdini posits six principles of influence, including "social proof" about following others. Social proof can be used to stimulate a person's compliance with a request by informing him or get that many other individuals, perhaps some who are role models, are of have observed this behavior. Social proof is most influential under two conditions-- uncertainty (when people don't know what to do they will look to follow others) and similarity (people will follow those who they believe are similar to themselves).

We look at these common highlighted passages in the Web Analytics module during the creative multimedia degree programme in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

---

Nick Burcher -- Paid Owned Earned: Maximising Marketing Returns in a Socially Connected World ISBN 074946562X

A Consistent Conversation

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Screenshot from Statcounter.

I HAVE A BLOG that I am using to show creative multimedia students lessons in consistent viewership.

A lot of things have changed since 2002 on my blog. The biggest change is fragmentation in readership. When I started a daily online journal on 1997, I didn't track the analytics on my stuff but a small snippet of code from Radio Userland told me I got at least 100 visitors a day. When I switched over to MovableType in 2001, daily views climbed over 500. And when I joined the Typepad community in 2003, I had more than 1000 page views every day. Things have gone back to the days of MovableType for me because there are so many ways of grabbing a peek at my blog now and those methods don't involve an actual visit.

On an average day, 735 people read my blog in a newsreader. They get a textual experience with an image but not the sidebar, comments or banner image.

Most of the comments for my blog appear as cross-talk on Twitter. And depending on how I share a post, I get meaningful commentary from Facebook and Google Plus.

But there are ways of defining a set point for minimum page views and then executing a strategy to deliver on that goal.

That is what I'm discussing with creative multimedia students who ate completing assignments as part of this level modules involving an exhibition, social media for business and web analytics.

---

Bernie Goldbach teaches web analytics as part of a creative multimedia degreee programme in LIT-Clonmel.

Related articles

My Move to the Cloud

Ten Years Blogging

Typepad Blogiversary

My Eight Year Typepad Experiment

Movable Type 5.2.2 has been released!

Facebook for Art

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Photo by Nicola Corboy.

ALONG WITH 35 creative multimedia students, I have embarked on marketing our annual artistic exhibition through Facebook, Google Local and standard media channels.

We have a standard Facebook page for Pen & Pixel but its Facebook Insights show serious shortcomings in its promotion. It needs engaging, succinctly edited activity on its timeline and regular posting of high-quality images. This kind of content suits our student cohort well.

During the next 10 weeks, we will develop the Pen & Pixel brand through illustrated stories. We will share our Insights and our work flow. I think we will have a case study that would benefit anyone trying to promote the arts through Facebook.

---

Bonus Link: Facebook for Art (31 slides of our first steps).

Related articles

Planning with a Word Cloud

Surprising Traction Deep Inside Google Plus

Educasting from Ireland: Five-word Google identity

Social Media in Irish Education

Reading Screens Before Reading Words

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Kids with Xoom.

I REMEMBER WHAT was on the floor of my childhood living room and the highest tech item was a record player. I watch our kids walk and crawl among 21st century gadgets and wonder.

I wonder what it will be like for them to discover the knack of turning over a cassette to play the other side. What it will be like to place a needle in the groove of an album. How they will react when they see needles and dials in their first ride aboard a single engine aircraft. How they will describe the sounds of a modem, a rotary dial phone through its earpiece or a traditional automobile engine's throaty roar through a Holley Four-Barrel carburetor. All those sounds filled my days before I left college.

The Essential Evernote Routines

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Screenshot from my iTouch.

I HAVE SQUEEZED a lot of productivity out of daily routines by using Evernote in the background as well as toggling into Evernote at set times of the day. I'm writing this post to see if I can get feedback on some of my methods from the Evernote Community on Google Plus.

-- Running Everclip as an iOS background task. This app copies things I select and adds them into Evernote where I tag and relocate the items.

-- Running Evernote Clearly in my Chrome browser. Not only does this extension facilitate clipping of web pages, I have discovered that it loads some pages much faster when I'm limited to slow over the air Internet connections.

-- Sending interesting items as direct messages to @myEN on Twitter. I often pull those direct messages into a working folder for upcoming blog posts.

-- Checking the Activity counter inside Evernote on Windows 7 to see if anything has been added to shared folders by students or collaborators. Shared folders offer clever ways to enhance business intelligence, often without the scrutiny of web proxy filters.

-- Diving into Evernote at low energy points of the day to reorganise items recently added to the pile of things to do or read. This is sometimes problematic because I have to use a clear head if I intend to shovel Evernote items into my GTD routine.

Like anything else, your mileage will vary with these tactics. I'm very interested in what Evernote power users might think of the way I use the most useful application I have on my touchscreens.

---

Bernie Goldbach is the senior creative multimedia lecturer at the Limerick School of Art and Design.

Related articles

How I Learn from Unruled Pages

My Life Is Better With Evernote

The Essential Evernote Routines

Evernote Blog | The Benefits of Public and Shared Notebooks

Change Happens Best If You Track It

Six Years Since My Dedicated Desktop Passed

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Photo from my last desktop usage.

THE LAST TIME I USED a dedicated desktop computer was when I won an award from Damien Mulley in 2007 and started using a shotgun mic (in photo). By late 2007, I removed the hard drive from that computer and I've been truly mobile ever since.

I'm part of a demographic that Microsoft needs to attract in order to boost software sales in a new era of tablets, cloud computing and mobile gear. I want to make a standard practise of snapping a screenshot my screens because there's a lot to be learned from the icons that people give pride of place. My Windows desktop is as scattered as my daily workflow so it's significant that I've started cleaning up the icons, one by one. All of the icons have stories, if only stories about why they're now orphaned in my Recycle Bin.

But the biggest story of my desktop passing is in the process of shared cloud workspaces that evolved, far removed from the ethernet-powered silos that still remain under the desks of many of my work colleagues.

---

Bernie Goldbach lectures in the Honours Degree for Creative Multimedia at the Limerick School of Art and Design.

Related articles

Mikogo Launches First-Ever HTML5 Cloud Desktop - A Personal Computer in the Cloud

Flickr's Long Tail

Peripherals in my pocket

Hoping Tablet People Pay

How to Add Desktop Shortcuts for Removable Drives Automatically

Planning with a Word Cloud

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Wordle Generated the Screen.

MORE THAN 60 third level students are working collaboratively to plan and present the biggest creative multimedia exhibition in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. It's remarkable that one-third of this large team will never meet in the same physical place before the main event.

We are planning this major activity with the help of very focused students who already know their way around intelligent shareable services like Google Plus, Flickr, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Scrivener. My job as a creative multimedia third level lecturer is to ensure nobody inadvertently blows up files that are already finished by another colleague.

Every week, I intend to present a Word Cloud from Wordle.net to the outside world in order to discern the main messages of the working committees. A word cloud from Week Two accompanies this blog post.

Creating Meaning from Word Clouds

Lessons from Junior Infants

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Photo of Mia.

"TODAY MY TEACHER wanted to take some things off my iPod."

At first we thought that meant Mia had kept her mom's iTouch out on her desk but that wasn't the case. No, Mia was being asked to describe what she used on the little screen so the same apps might be put on the primary school's iPads. Mia has watched us move files around with cables and Bluetooth. She wondered if she might carry a white cable in her pencil case so she could swap things around on the iTouch like she sees me do with our laptop and peripherals. It's not that simple, we told her.

The concept of cloud storage, file permissions, digital rights management and incompatible formats will wait for another day. We mark today as the significant first time that our junior infant was asked for advice by her teacher. At least it felt that way for our five year old daughter.

---

Bernie Goldbach contributes items about parenting to Audioboo.

 

Related articles

Young and Precocious Storyteller

Inside View from Ireland: Growing up Pinch-and-Zoom

Digitising our Junior Infant

OperationCookie12

10 Foot Lightning to USB Cable for iPhone 5, iPad 4, iPod $8

Reading Habits Explored

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Photo of Niall Condon's iPad.

THE READING HABITS of creative multimedia students have changed during my past 11 years in the classroom. They're almost exclusively electronic now.

I asked a small group of fourth year students on campus about their reading habits, following a set of questions that emerged on Audioboo. Although I could have predicted the overall answers, I'm fascinated by (1) the need for quiet or intimate space and (2) the lack of electronic note taking while reading. Both of these reading patterns earn my respect because I now know without a doubt the length of time a well-focused mind takes to truly make a deep dive into long form reading. In my own life, if I expect to comprehend and remember more than half of what I'm seeing on a screen or on a page, I need to carve out time and place to read, really read.

You can hear what my students think about this idea in the audio clip they've made for this blog post.

Reading Habits Shared

---

Listen to "Reading Habits Shared" on Audioboo. Bernie Goldbach is the senior creative multimedia lecturer in the Limerick School of Art and Design.

Related articles

Sharing my #eprdctn workflow

Inside View from Ireland: My Fourth Summer of Boos

Hyperlocal Notes from Emigrants

Surprising Traction Deep Inside Google Plus