Inside View

Talking to HETAC About Jobs That Don't Exist Yet

WE WELCOME A TEAM of accreditation experts to the LIT-Tipperary campus today as we defend several programmes that articulate the skills of jobs that do not exist yet.

It's always a significant day when we get these meaningful external peer reviews. They are not superficial nor are they cheap. When a HETAC Panel visits, we get a lot of feedback from the entire higher education ecosystem and we often get frank and unvarnished opinions from industry. We also give a lot of insight to team members coming from other third level institutions and from experience we know that some of our insight translates into programmes offered by our colleagues in other institutes of technolgy across Ireland. That's the way the system works and we get everything back in spades, since we also visit other IOTs as HETAC panel members.

Today, some of the discussion may revolve around jobs that don't exist yet.

My Home My School My Place Art

Bernie Goldbach thinking #ictedu | Image by MiaRoseGold

EVERY YEAR WE ATTRACT 80 Irish school teachers to the annual ICT in Education Conference and this year we hope to entice some of those educators to entering the Pen & Pixel Junior competition with other four to 12 year olds.

A remarkable evolution in sharing visual work has evolved during the past three years. People have phones and apps that push lovely, heart-warming visual images to extended family and friends miles away. We share Mia's artwork (sample at right) with cousins on Facebook she has never met. We document the creative process in primary school classrooms, using HD video recorders on smartphones. We snap completed work with the 12MP camera lenses on the phones, getting better results than with a scanner. And as a by-product of this initiative, we're training primary school teachers how they can convert use their smartphones as scanners when they tag and upload the work done by their students.

The current call of Pen & Pixel Junior is following the theme of "My Home. My School. My Place." It is sponsored by the Ballincollig, MPCC and Sarsfield Credit Unions and will involve the work of more than 400 students next month. 

---

Bernie Goldbach curates links on creativity.

Surrounded by 6000 Ghosts

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Image from Topgold

IF I BELIEVE a lot of the tech press, I'm surrounded by 6000 ghosts on Google Plus. And I like it a lot.

I like watching the ghosts stream by faster on my iOS G+ app than tweets scream by on my Twitter clients. I like the images that dissolve in and out of view, faster than I get on Instagram or Flickr. I'm following fewer than 4000 people but nearly 6000 people are following my musings. And that's just fine because I'm getting longer interactions on G+ than on any other network. That's "longer" in terms of word count and "longer" in terms of length of time between one of my posts and a comment from an interested viewer.

I know that people I follow on Twitter and Facebook won't feel any sort of need to change where they meet and chat so most of the people I'm seeing on G+ are outside of Ireland and that's perfectly fine for the extended social media strategy we have in LIT-Clonmel. We need more of an international audience, as potential students, as potential employers and as potential users of an application we're developing.

One Problem win in-app Services

Bernie Goldbach looking at stalled updates.

ONE PROBLEM WITH easy in-app updates or renewals is when you don't pay up your entire device gets locked out of updating. And worse.

I automatically renew my subscription to BusinessPost.ie and you should too. But when Apple pays the subscription fee to the nice Business Post team and then discovers my Visa account is all tapped out, Apple locks me out of updating any of my 117 applications. And when I do the stupid thing of selecting "update all" it means dozens of apps get caught in between working perfectly well and not functioning at all. That's my plight for the rest of the month (click to expand screenshot).

So it's no Business Post and no use of more than 30 apps that Remain caught in between perfect smooth operations and heir updates.

The good news is I was able to buy a very cool birthday present for my wife before Visa discovered I was over my authorized limit. Check back at the end of May and I'll show you why she is so ecstatic. And by that time I should be able to view my Business Post news as well.

---

Bernie Goldbach curates links about Apple.

Wheels of Personal Transport Progress

Bernie Goldbach in Urlingford | Photo from my iTouch

I'M STANDING NEXT TO the big wheel (at left) that transports me to Dublin several times a month and my young daughter sees the trip as something that extends her sitting room. That's because she has an expectation of viewing YouTube all the way.

She has never known travel as anything other than a connected experience. Intel knows this, predicting that by the time Mia is finished as a senior infant, the car will be the third most-connected place in which people spend time.

We borrow cars from Morrison BMW and when we do, we ask for loaners with USB charging points and aux-in ports. But those little features are nothing when considering the in-dash telematics rolling off assembly lines during the manufacturing of luxury cars.

Because of our commuting schedule and family commitments more than 100 miles away, we spend the equivalent of a work week in our car every month. The kids want connectivity and so do I. I suspect we're not alone in identifying the car as the truly mobile device of the future.

---

Bernie Goldbach curates travel links.

There Is Another Twitter Channel

Bernie Goldbach reading the Indo | Photo from my iTouch

SEVERAL TOP-FLIGHT presenters, athletes, musicians and other celebrities have been targeted by snarky, rude, and often downright threatening behavior on Twitter. When this happens, I wonder why those targeted don't set up camp inside Google Plus.

Yeaterday's Irish Independent (shot below) filled two pages with the story, with first-hand accounts of people acting rude, spiteful and intimidating. A lot of the examples would never have occurred inside Google Plus, mainly because it is much more difficult to assume a cloaked identity. And if you're given a red card on Google Plus, you can be blocked from your Gmail, from your Google Docs and from your Google Places.

Google Plus also handles hashtags differently. On G+ a hashtag creates a channel. You can constrain that channel to selected people, creating a live chat zone for people whose identity you have checked. This sort of online dynamic would have prevented RTE presenter Pat Kenny from reading out a bogus comment during a critical Presidential debate.

Back Seat News

Bernie Goldbach in Drogheda | Photo in the back seat

IRELAND LOOKS LIKE going with a "yes" vote in a referendum for a balanced budget, Facebook looks overvalued, and the Hero Go Pro Camera is a winner. That's the thrust of a seven-minute audio and video clip summarising Sunday news from Ireland.

As viewers will notice, I converted our car into a sound booth and made my short newsround under the confused gaze of our 10-month-old son.

Sunday News from Back Seat

Old Coke Nostalgia

Bernie Goldbach in Drogheda | Shot from Irisheyes

AS I APPROACHED a Bottle Bank in Drogheda, I decided to give myself a treat for walking two miles. It was a memorable occasion because I ended up with a glass bottle of Coke (see below).

I have never bought Coke in a glass bottle from a corner shop since moving to Ireland in 1994. I have never seen glass bottled Coke for sale to punters in shops. For months after moving to Ireland from Germany, I resisted buying Cole because it came only in plastic bottles. The same plastic bottles that sea gulls peck before getting their beaks trapped in the plastic. Not wanting to be complicit in the breakdown of a Pacific habitat, I tried to avoid plastic until I found a way to recycle it.

Today, I stocked up on a proper six pack of glass bottled Cole and it feels like a real win. See the 90 cent bottle snapped by my iTouch below the break.

Copyright for Citizens

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Photo by Irisheyes

WHILE GRADING ACADEMIC WORK concerning copyright in Ireland, it's interesting to watch the debate around copyright in Germany restart in earnest, fueled in part by the the weekly newspaper Die Zeit's letter entitled “We are the Creators”.

The letter and the response it generated should be read by Irish Junior Minister Sean Sherlock because the letter marks the battleground of the claims citizens will make about their digital rights. The letter condemns the "profane theft" of intellectual property, characterised as a " great achievement of bourgeois freedom against the dependency of feudalism" and defends the role of the publishers and other intermediaries commercially exploiting copyrights, and decries those who would use the internet as an excuse for "stinginess and malice".

More than 3000 "creators" signed up to the cause.

The Most Powerful Women in Ireland

Bernie Goldbach using Saorview | Screenshot from Google Images

IF I WAS SELECTING the "most powerful woman in Ireland" I think she would be someone who makes things happen behind the scenes. Asking Google for the answer results in a lot of faces from outside Ireland--the same faces I see most often on my Saorview box.

Next month, the Irish branch of the Women’s Executive Network will honour 25 women at a ceremony where awards will be presented to recognise Irish women across five categories: corporate executives, public sector leaders, entrepreneurs, trailblazers and arts and culture. Company turnover, size of team, achievements, responsibility and influence on respective sectors will be among the criteria used to select the winners.