Inside View

Teaching students employable skills

Click on image to see 360 view (not in Safari).

I HAVE LEARNED a lot while watching young students learning real world skills. While many of my students want to develop skills they need in the workplace, some of these students are not challenged to develop samples of work they can showcase during job interviews.

I think graduates need to be able to point to work they have completed as students. That could be products or services developed during structured work experience, references from supervisors, or eportfolio pieces. As a third level lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology, I am trying to ensure everyone passing through any of my academic modules takes away a useful playbook or a collection of business intelligence curated in a Classroom OneNote (see screenshot below).

Trying to move up from merely converting data formats

MY JOB INVOLVES training students to join a rapidly evolving work force. If I do things right, those students graduate with an awareness that they need to do more than convert data from one format to another. I hope that is happening but I'm very concerned about an emerging trend.

Hands-on #Ricoh360

MY WORLD COLLIDED with the Ricoh Theta S camera and I can feel that using it will take me into an exciting equirectangular realm full of surprise nadirs.

The handiest feature of the Ricoh Theta S is knowing both Facebook and Google understand its image formats. This means 9yo Mia could simply tap the screen of my Sony Xperia Z5 and record the video below. I brought the clip onto the Surface Pro 4, used Ricoh's free software to inject the meta data that told the server it was a spherical video clip and then uploaded it to YouTube (very fast upload) [1] and to Facebook (where it uploaded slower). I recorded at 1920 x 960 in 30 frames per second and that used two megabytes per second of recording.

Discovering new perspectives in the 360 Classroom #ricoh360

IT IS TRUE what some of the most creative photographers say: A well-framed shot is essential to compelling visual presentations. I face very big challenges now that I have a 360 degree camera because everything could be in the shot.

And maybe nothing is in the shot because I can't fathom the lens parameters of the Ricoh Theta S that I'm learning to use. For the moment, I'm going to upload this quick blog post as a marker on my timeline and an announcement to collaborators that we're going to have a lot of fun making 360 degree content in the months ahead.

+++ Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

Behind the scenes with @YMTfm and the Irish Minister for Education

YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE the courage on both sides of an recorded interview when it happens during Feilte, the annual Teaching Council of Ireland Conference in Ireland. This morning, Minister for Education Richard Bruton sat in the hot seat while two teens interviewed him about matters affecting their classrooms today.

Feilte with Minister Bruton

If you click on the MP3 file above, you get a behind-the-scenes audio of the interview with some unscripted comments from the team and the Minister that establish how conversational the interview actually was--without any handlers vetting the questions beforehand and with Minister Bruton trusting the YMT crew with their broadcast-quality equipment.