Inside View

Learning while social hiking

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Map from ShareYourAdventure.

WE SPENT THE DAY making and sharing rich media points of interests while creating a public map at ShareYourAdventure.com.

We learned some things about geotagging while watching tweets, photos, audio clips, and Foursquare check-ins populate our public map. Not all social networks have precise geolocation capabilities. Specifically, Twitter's GPS functionality spoofs easily (annotated as "bogus point" on the screenshot) while Flickr's machine intelligence appears rock-solid. After all, Flickr has been doing geolocated photo services for the past decade.

After six hours of walking through a variety of places that should complement a campus tour, I've started to think it might be more worthwhile to focus on snapping well-composed photographs accompanied by informative captions. The captions could serve as microblog posts. The images could be saved in a curated and syndicated set. They could be shared later as embeddable content.

I plan to interview several people who created parts of the social hiking map to learn techniques they refined in making the project work.

Thanks for Sharing Adventures

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Social hiking is part of the creative multimedia programme taught at the Limerick Institute of Technology. This blog post was created in the field and sent mail -to-blog from my Nokia Lumia 820.

Bonus Link: SocialHiking on Twitter.

Irish Flour American Flour and Scones

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | My photo of a Bake House scone.

I ENCOURAGE people visiting Ireland to try a different Irish scone every morning mainly because Irish flour differs from American flour.

I listen to Caítríona, an Irish food and parenting blogger, describe how she cleverly sources and astutely makes food and after a solid year of her podcasts, I yearn to attend a day-long seminar on "Irish Ethnic Baking" where secrets of the scone get discussed. I've discovered some already during scone-baking sessions with Busy Bees. The best sessions are the messiest. 

Here are some secrets I've uncovered.

Going for Vibrant Moleskine Colours

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Image from Notemaker.

OUR 5YO HAS VOTED for something other than black in our Moleskine line.

We've shown her how to safeguard her emerging artistic talent between the hard covers of Moleskine notebooks but she is getting bored with black. You can't say the same for the market, however.

According to The Economist, Moleskine is worth at least €424m and it is offering some of its shares to the public. Trading in the shares should begin on the Italian stockmarket on April 3, 2013.

I started using Moleskines in 1997, two years after several Italian businessmen resurrected the business. According to a little insert that comes with each Moleskine, the notebooks enjoy a long pedigree that extends to writers and artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. Sales, margins and staff numbers have all risen fourfold since Moleskines started appearing next to iPhones. Moleskine made a net profit of €13.8m on sales of €67.3m in 2011, up by about 60% from 2009.

Rolling Through Patrick's Day in Cashel

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Photo of rolling stock.

ST PATRICK'S DAY in Ireland passed under a light rain in the sunny southeast and I reckon a third of all the entries in the local Golden Pages rolled through Cashel as part of the annual parade.

We walked through the town square and made a short Audioboo of the traditional music playing there and then stood near the crosswalk we use with our favourite Chinese and Italian takeaways. The position gave me a clear shot at the 20-minute parade. I created a seven-minute YouTube clip with my Sony Xperia phone and included some local shots of green that give Cashel its character throughout the year. You can watch the video below the break or listen to the audio version by clicking on the player.

St Patricks Day in Cashel

More Proof St Patrick's Day is Mainstream

Bernie Goldbach's screenshot from Hashtagify.me

IF YOU EVER NEEDED PROOF that St Patrick's Day is an occasion with global reach, look no farther than the hashtags connected to #StPatricksDay. You'll spot several strong clusters of sex memes connected to the celebration, proof-positive there's vibrant industry endorsement (or brandjacking) of Ireland's national holiday. 

And if you follow the Technorati tag clusters below this blog post, you'll discover interesting food choices for an authentic Paddy's Day experience.

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I use Cybranding's Hashtagify.me dashboard to follow memes and influencers as part of the Web Analytics module on the creative multimedia degree programme at the Limerick Institute of Technology.

Big Data and Edchatie

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD Clonmel | Data from Hashify.me

BIG DATA INTERSECTS Irish educators in several places like the Monday evening #edchatie discussions.

Inspired by Simon Lewis, I looked at who is most influential during those recurring discussions. At least two of the most influential plan to attend the annual ICT in Education Conference in Thurles. With a little prodding, perhaps more than half of the most influential Irish Twitter voices in education will meet up in May on the campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology in Thurles.

In the meantime, I have 30 Web Analytics students drilling into the #edchatie transcripts to document the share of the voices, engagement and impact of embedded placement in the cross-talk. And the Irish government is interested in making these kinds of analyses more sophisticated as funding comes available for big data programmes.

Data Analytics

Limerick Lifelong Learning Festival Next Week

Bernie Goldbach in LIT | Logo from Limerick Lifelong Learning.

I HEARD ABOUT Limerick's annual Lifelong Learning Festival via a direct message on Twitter and a text last year. I heard about it running this year via RSS and we're going.

The festival has been running for several years and it is chock-full of  interesting events [23 page PDF] that most of my local Facebook friends have never seen. We're going to several events this year because the topics intrigue me and our five-year-old daughter.

Twitter v Facebook or Not

I SPEND TIME in both Twitter and Facebook but have discovered the real world constrains deep engagement in both.

Every year that I teach creative multimedia to college students, I test awareness of several different social networks. Most students dive in for a semester but two years later, I see different patterns of engagement. The pressures of academic work constrains how far students can spread themselves. They cut back on public posts and leverage direct channels effectively.

In practical terms, this often means I will see people sharing tips late at night in Facebook groups. Twitter's direct messaging also proves handy when trying to get things done.

During academic lectures, I point out how some companies and government agencies block access to social media, so it is important to have more than one lazy web channel if you depend upon collaboration. I also explain that when people chatter away in the open, some supervisors think it is unproductive.

Since showing my first students how to discover free online tutorials in 1995, much has changed. Twenty years from now, when I'm retired, I'll be interested in seeing what my son and daughter use for online collaboration.

Google Plus Coffee in Ireland

Bernie Goldbach in Limerick Open Coffee with a spent cup.

WE ASKED FOUR people at Limerick OpenCoffee about whether Google Plus fits into their mix of online tools, then shared the feedback with the For Immediate Release business communications podcast.

I get a lot of value from Google Plus, but that's probably because I've slotted the iOS app and the notifications towards the top of my workflow. I consistently get more per scrolled screen from Google Plus than I do from Twitter but I know my measures of merit (long form reading suggestions, announcements of product enhancements, links to hallway conversations at major events) differ from other long-time social networking advocates.

Both the five-minute FIR segment recorded and produced by Mark Lynch and the 10-minute expanded answer to the question of how G+ works for small companies deserve playback and commenting. I put the expanded version into the Audio Community on Google Plus because that group of people have extracted a lot of value from multimedia elements inside and outside of Google Plus.

Google Plus Coffee in Ireland

Android Game Development on Campus

Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Click the 5yo to see video.

ONE OF THE MOST clever evolutions of the creative multimedia programme in the Limerick Institute of Technology is how it has started to poke into app development. We're doing user testing with junior infants on an Android game that's currently in alpha.

You can click on the still image of this blog post to hear Mia's opinion about the mathematics game and the Space Junk game (her favourite). The games are the brain children of Ross Bolger, Patrick Broder and Edgaras Zvirblys on the Clonmel campus of the Limerick School of Art and Design. I like what's evolving with the game.

Mia, the tester, used a Motorola Media Tablet to evaluate the immersive game. One handy thing about the game is that its APK file can be emailed to anyone and it they're using Android, it just works.

We'll have an update about Space Junk and two other games as the Spring 2013 semester winds to its conclusion.

Review of Space Junk

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Watch on YouTube or listen on Audioboo.

Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia to students at the Limerick School of Art and Design.