Inside View

Learning How to Read Better

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel, Ireland

MY TEENAGED DAUGHTER inspires me to read more because I see her perched in the corner with a paperback nearly every evening. She is a smart person because she reads a lot.

There's something about reading that makes you smart but the smartness isn't measured by how many pages you scroll on your Kindle or how many books you buy in the shop.

Simply reading doesn't make you smart.

If you don't think about the words you've read, you don't learn from the pages you've seen.

I can clearly remember the name of the book I've read most recently. It was Tom Crean The Brave Explorer. I read the book with my primary school son. Unfortunately, besides remembering where Tom Crean grew up in Ireland, I don't remember the specifics about his role in exploring Antarctica, a place I supported as a C-141 pilot. (Photo below was taken in Greenland, another cold part of my flying experience.

I've looked into what smart people do when they read. They think about what the author is saying. They take time to reimagine sections of the books they've just read. This is an important process because when you're reading, you're just following the narrative set by the author. You're letting the author offer a mental map but you often don't know where the map is taking you.

At least that's what I think is happening when I'm just flipping pages and scrollling text. I believe to read better you need to read actively.

Highlight as you read

I highlight parts of paragraphs that resonate with me. Sometimes those sections are items that cause me to think. Other times, the highlights are sections I need to remember for classes I teach. I see my daughter highlighting parts of her school books and then using those highlights as points of reference. My highlights often fold into Readwise where they resurface as part of a daily routine.  I get to see the highlights as part of email summaries and inside the Readwise app. I know that this mass exposure effect cannot be used in isolation because simply scannining hightlights doesn't make you more intelligent.

Annotate your highlights

I think it's important to know why you highlighted an item. For that reason, I add short notes to most of my highlights, either when initially saving them in Readwise or when I spot them inside Obsidian, my personal knowledge management system. It's very important to read why you hightlighted an item and then to review the words you wrote about the highlights. Writing in your own words (instead of copying and pasting the original text) forces you to think about ideas more thoroughly. Seeing your perspective about someone else's idea improves your thinking.

Review your highlights

I spend a lot of money on paid subscriptions, e-books, and traditional books. This could easily be money I flush away without even opening the cover of the book I bought. Most of the people I know will at least read cover notes of the books they own but they don't take notes on what they read. That's a recipe for forgetfulness because I know that I need to review my notes constantly because when they resurface, I'm often in a different place or I need additional support material provided by the notes. Reading my perspective from years ago helps me improve my perspective.

 

I hope to improve my reading because I want to develop better and enhance my insights. At this mature stage in my life, I know my notes will never be complete because I can always update and enhance them. Good notes are like green shoots that grow and cross-pollinate. But this growing process never happens if you do not regularly review notes you make from items you read.

I'm looking at a way of being able to share notes that I've made through Craft.do, a top-rated well-designed iOS app that's also on my Windows 11 Surface Book. Click here to see my shared notes about this blog post.  I treasure the ideas I've shared online. I get excellent follow-up ideas from friends who often blast me for my unformed thoughts. The thought leaders I hear on podcasts tell me that they have built their audiences and grown their opportunities by sharing ideas. And I know that oftentimes the most-discussed items aren't original thoughts because well-read people keep notes about things that have evergreen characteristics.

Now it's time for more deep reading and note-taking. And if I'm successful with this goal today, I'll crank out a Topgold Audio Clip to share what I've annotated during today's 100 page reading session.

If you're a deep reader too, let me know if you would add to these tactics that I'm using while learning to read better.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches digital transformation on the Clonmel campus of the Technological University of the Shannon.]

Lovely User Experience with Napkin

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

NAPKIN IS ONE OF THE MOST visually appealing writing apps I've ever used. Its subtle awareness of content that I've saved makes simple work of creating written course material for use by my students.

Getting Paid to Read

I HAVE A 12 YR OLD daughter who reads 300 pages a day because she loves the written word. I plan to pay her a tenner whenever she ploughs through a recommended text that we can use as a springboard for a recorded discussion. We have a big collection of Young Adult titles. I also want to introduce Mia to some selections that show her more about the life I had in the States.

First Touch with Paperwhite #kindle

AMAZON OFFERED REDUCED pricing for the Kindle Paperwhite and I jumped at the opportunity to buy a 32 GB model with its Bluetooth service for the Audible collection I have amassed.

I like the lightweight feel and quick touchscreen responsiveness of the Paperwhite. I don't think I will be using its waterproof capability to read in the bathtub or Jacuzzi.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology. He ports handouts onto his Kindle Paperwhite when sharing those documents across the campus OneDrive.]

Continuing to Watch Disruptions in Publishing

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY I published a blog post about "dirsuptions in publishing" and at that time I pushed the post forward five years so I could see whether my predictions were accurate.

Back in 2012, I was interested in what kinds of disruptions commissiong editor Eoin Purcell was seeing in the print industry. I brought my Kindle (at left) to the table and listened.

At the time, Random House, the USA's largest publisher, was getting 20% of its U.S. revenue from digital sales. Amazon was adding an author a week to its list of million sellers in Kindle e-book sales. Six of  the top 20 titles on USA Today's Best-Selling Books list were e-books. Barnes and Noble was hoping that its Nook would keep the basic business afloat. And back on campus, we were teaching students how to create content with Adobe InDesign and Calibre recipes.

I made the soft prediction that students would like to have as many choices in reading formats as possible and that hard cover textbooks were less important than  e-books whose pages they could   print on demand. I thought that my young daughter would want to continue reading on her iPad and also with an e-ink device. 

New Audible Adventures

Lumia 925 headphone shot by @topgold.

WITH THE SCHOOL year just a month away, our five year old has discovered Audible books and that means she now has another cohort of narrators to read favourite stories.

At the moment, The Famous Five by Enjd Blyton is queued up inside our Audible app and Mia has entered an enchanting world featuring an old house with secret hiding places and underground tunnels. She listens to Julian, Anne, Dick, George and Timmy the dog working through mystery.

I use to listen to audio stories when growing up but they played on LP records and I didn't have my personal headset. Mia knows she is so lucky to enter her private storytelling realm, thanks to the cans she wears on her ears.

(Recommending Beyerdynamic over-the-ear headphones because it's harder to blow out your eardrums with them.)

Learned After 365 Days with a Kindle

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | My photo of Kindle 

I HAVE USED my Kindle for the past 365 days and have learned from the experience. I want my four-year-old daughter to learn from it too.

Unlike a lot of my friends, I use my Kindle at least once a day. The primary reason is I arrange to have new things download onto the Kindle once a day. Because some of the downloads cost me money, I feel compelled to read them. The Irish Times fits into that Kindle category. Then there are new Kindle publications that I buy. I enjoy seeing what passages my friends have electronically annotated. That's possible if you have an Amazon account you've enbabled for sharing highlits and purchases.

I also set up other free content to land on my Kindle (i.e., Google Reader and selected blogs harvested via Calibre). That content grows stale if I don't read it as it lands.

I get a book from Audible around once every three weeks. I extract parts of those books for listening sessions in the creative multimedia curriculum I teach at the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT). The extracts complement supplemental or essential reading by students. I think a Kindle helps you learn because you need to read words to reach a higher level of understanding. Hearing the author speak often motivates students to read whole chapters related to topics that reappear as essay questions.

Sharing my #eprdctn workflow

Bernie Goldbach in DIT | Image from my Slideshare deck

I SHARED THE WAY I produce electronic publications with a rapt audience in the e-learning summer school run by the Dublin Institute of Technology. My slide deck is below the fold.

I teach an e-publishing module in the Limerick Institute of Technology and wanted to ensure it was 80 percent practical and 20 percent theory. I believe my presentation delivers that perspective. Knowing that several students have landed paid positions by leading with "e-publishing" on their CVs makes it all the more worthwhile.

For the time-pressured readers, I've reduced the short takeaway to a few points below and chatted about my thoughts in an Audioboo.

1. Have a production plan with shared assets. Mine involves setting up a Media Tray locally and putting media text (words, images, logos, audio clips, video clips) into a shared Dropbox folder.

2. Test your backup plan at least once a month. I trust Crashplan and am glad I do.

3. Learn to compile your stuff through Scrivener.

Learning ePublishing

Overstuffed Kindle Won't Boot Up

Bernie Goldbach in Thurles | My Kindle My Shot

AFTER TWO SEMESTERS with my keyboard Kindle in daily use, I've pushed its storage capabilities over the top. The little guy won't boot up.

Eoin Purcell suggested I might be walking into this situation when I told him I had hundreds of student-generated Word Documents and Adobe PDF files on the device. That kind of content is like retina screen bloatware on an iPhone. I asked students to send me their work for several assignments since it's often easier for me to flick through Kindle documents instead of reading work uploaded to Moodle, our virtual learning network. I had to keep the student work on the Kindle until last week's visit of an extern, just in case he wanted to see third level assignments displayed on a Kindle screen.

My overstuffed Kindle is also a by-product of my personal data hygiene. I don't delete enough stuff because I have the Packrat Gene. However, I know I need to get the Kindle working so I took a Kindle shortcut with the power switch.

Kindle Publishing at Third Level

Bernie Goldbach in Ennis | Shot while listening to the Small Business Show

I'VE A "SAVED SEARCH" for Kindle in several online tracking systems because I believe that platform's use is growing faster than Twitter. It's certainly growing revenue faster than many social networks and points to job prospects for our third level students in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

I'm interested in Kindle because I teach an e-publishing module in LIT--possibly the only third level e-publishing module in Ireland assessed totally through the completion of Kindle, iBook and PDF documents. The module surveys the challenge of becoming a published author through traditional channels and lays out a process for publishing to both the Kindle platform and the Apple Book Store. Both can result in real money alongside mainstream acclamation.

What's remarkable for me is considering that by teaching this module, we are actually helping students create their own jobs. The curriculum itself is part of a self-published success story along with a story about the evolution of local newspapers that deserves to be acclaimed in the mainstream press this year.