Inside View

Using Art as a Community Forum h/t @clionama #cong19

CLIONA MAHER KNOWS how to channel voices from marginalised community members. She explains in a 28 minute congversation how she encourages expressions through effective uses of art.

Cliona Maher: Art in Communities

First Facebook Live Stream from Irish College Campus using #nytvr

I'M WORKING WITH a cadre of clever creative multimedia students and today we spent part of a lab session making a live Facebook Stream on The Gathering Table just outside the entrance to our campus in Clonmel, County Tipperary. This might be the first instance of a live Facebook stream on an Irish college campus: https://youtu.be/jcfZgiMk7i4

With a Portfolio and a Love of Animation

Photo from The Sunday Times.

THE SUNDAY TIMES has a lovely article about the Irish animation industry today [1] and it caused me to think of the lovely work Cartoon Saloon has put into its artful productions.

Hands-on with @sway at #ePortfolioHub16

I SPENT THE AFTERNOON in a computer lab with teachers, lecturers and trainers during the third day of ePortfolioHub16. One of my happiest results came at the end of the day when I clicked into the co-authored Sway produced by those attending my workshop.

Learning @UsePencil with 8yo @miarosegold

BECAUSE OUR ENERGETIC daughter wants to share stories with friends, I showed her Pencil on my Android phone and she made a story. Then she tapped into the UsePencil site on the Surface Pro 2 and discovered it was much easier.

I think we have a winning workflow here that starts with Mia snapping photos and screenshots of things she enjoys. Then she makes a little storyboard in a pocket-sized Moleskine where she tries to write captions for each image. And finally she creates a draft inside Pencil's easy-to-use platform.

Meeting Kelly Gray #ictedu h/t @beckwurd

Illustration by Becky O'Regan.

THE FACE OF KELLY GRAY sits on my Surface screen as we continue planning for the day-long ICT in Education Conference on Saturday, April 23, on the campus of LIT-Thurles. Kelly is a character developed by Becky O'Regan, an animation student studying on the Clonmel campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT).

Time to #create with @sway

Watching a dozen students co-author with Sway.

WORKING ON A CAMPUS that is served by a full suite of Office 365 products, I try to leverage tools that sit in students' app launcher. Sway is one of those tools and I'm happy to see how robust it has become since we first started using it in 2015.

Creative with Sway

 

Getting Student Feedback on @sway

Camera work by Thomas Lonergan.

I'M TRYING TO create a mechanism through which my third level students can co-author a summary of every major topic on their syllabus of instruction. After several dozen practical sessions, I can recommend Microsoft Sway as a tool that my creative students use without major snags.

Sway is an online cloud service run by Microsoft and available as an app to students in the Limerick Institute of Technology. At set intervals, I ask students an overhead question relevant to the items being taught. During the final hour of our classroom work, those students add a slide to the daily Sway. It's a simple way of getting 360 feedback from students. I plan to continue using the Sway cloud service and hope to see its editing power on handsets. It works a charm on iPads and student laptops.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia to third level students in the Limerick Institute of Technology.]

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Geometric Portrait #ID2015

This guest post by @Marty_2k12 features an image that has attracted dozens of creative students walking the hallways of LSAD-Clonmel. You can see this photograph and enjoy hours of animated content during DesignFest during the third week of November 2015.

This portrait, built from triangles and quadrilaterals gives a new meaning to portraits. Its geometric design with distinct architecture in the background help to break down what makes up a face, shapes, in fact it is what makes up the world.

Open Note to Ireland's Dept of Finance

THERE APPEARS TO BE a real misunderstanding in Ireland's Department of Finance about how to drive real entrepreneurship. I wish everyone with responsibility for setting private investment policy would set aside time to listen to the motivations of entrepreneurs. If that happened, perhaps in a takeaway restaurant like Hillbilly's (shown), I believe there would be more forward-thinking treatment of Capital Gains in Ireland.

Hillbilly's. Where I've met dozens of entrepreneurs.

The Finance Bill is currently making its rounds and it contains a requirement that beneficiaries of capital gains tax relief must be company directors. If a founder sells her company and the board wants her to step aside, she will get slammed with an inequitable demand for tax. If her co-founder is allowed to continue as a director, he gets to keep around 30% more (lower tax) in the business deal. In one fell swoop, Irish tax law works to reduce the incentive to expand a business by stifling the incentive to sell.

Colm Lyon's submissions to the Department of Finance appear to have gone unheard, causing many in Ireland's startup communities to believe a disconnect exists between public policy makers and entrepreneurs. The current capital gains structure is punitive, signalling to high potential startup founders I know that they need to set up their new businesses in England or the States.

I wish the civil servants in the Department of Finance had a requirement to attend events like Limerick's Startup Weekend because they would meet entrepreneurs at the coal face who--unlike politicians or government workers--can't charge the public purse for subsistence or mileage claims while scraping together their startup vision.

[Disclosure: Bernie Goldbach worked in three start-up ventures in Ireland and paid Revenue before closing down each time.]