Inside View

Smart 8yo with Smart Speakers

I DON'T THINK our 8yo will ever learn to type because he has mastered smart speakers. Dylan (who learned some of his first phrases from Alexa) and I chatted about this during a Topgold Audio Clip that you can hear on Spotify.

Walking Where the Walls and Doors Tell Stories h/t @miralize

SEAN O'GRADY, a creative multimedia graduate from the Clonmel Digital Campus, took a group of current students on a walk-and-talk around the Teamwork.com offices in Cork. We discovered you can learn a lot about a company's ethos from its walls and doors.

Listen to "Walking through Teamwork.com E51" on Spreaker.

Cognification. Happening faster than any other trend.

THE FABRIC OF LIFE is getting smarter every year because our world is cognifying. Kevin Kelly offered this observation more than seven years ago as he started sharing parts of The Inevitable, an essential conversation starter in the Emerging Trends and Technology module on the Clonmel Digital campus.

Today, 2D rigger Jess Cheeseman explains how she has seen cognification affect her life and the lives of her family in Canada.

Listen to "Cognification. Happening NOW. E38" on Spreaker.

The Day Borja Brought Black Mirror into Class

CLEVER CREATIVES like Borja Lopez Montes teach me things I will always remember. Today, Borja revived my memory of scary bees when he brought Black Mirror into the classroom as part of a presentation about "tracking".

Listen to "Tracking With Borja And Black Mirror" on Spreaker.

Content Management and Youth Media

WE HAVE RESTARTED another audio patching task that involves repairing broken audio links on the Youth Media Team website. This is a problem of my own making and one that Pam O'Brien and I will fix through a process of improved content archiving. I talk about it in a three minute Topgold Audio Clip that you can hear on Spotify.

Field Recording about Dark Souls #clonmeldigital

WHILE STANDING at a motorway truck stop, Liam O'Riordan and I discussed how Dark Souls fit into an emerging trend about technology and culture. It's part of an Emerging Trends podcast on Spotify.

Listen to "Cognified Lost Souls E36" on Spreaker.

Field Trip to Microsoft Europe

UPDATED 7 FEBRUARY 2020: This is the first blog post I've made that integrates content from my Github Gists. If I continue this practice, I believe I will be able to reduce the number of dead links on my website. That would be a major win because Github would allow contributors to revise content I've shared publicly. I also discovered that many feed readers don't show the Gist content inside their services. So if I want to pull more people from a feed and onto a website, I could embed some content as Javascript, while pointing out to readers that the rest of the content could be viewed in the browser version of the website.

I ACCOMPANIED 20 game art designers on a field trip to Microsoft-Europe where they heard academic evangelist Stephen Howell explain how cognitive services will provide the next major leap in mixed reality. 

Wishing for Changes in School Runs

I WISH parents with primary school children would shut off the engines of their cars when stopping to drop off their kids. And I hope I never see an unattended car, left idling outside of an after-school facility, jump into gear and hit an unsuspecting pedestrian.

I talk about these things and a few other items printed in the Sunday newspapers in Ireland.

Tragic Death of Kobe Bryant

SUPERSTAR KOBE BRYANT  died with eight others in a tragic helicopter accident along a route I used to travel in southern California. Kobe was a real-life superhero in my eyes. On the court, he always came through for his team. After retirement, he lifted the lives of many others in his charity work.

His death has reverberated around the Irish campus where I work as students express how they discovered the legacy of one of the world's most talented basketball players. I've summarised the research four students did as part of a 30 minute research period we carved out during a part of a Web Content Management Systems module taught on the BSc in Creative Media Design. You can see action figures like the one of Kobe Bryant scattered throughout our Clonmel campus.

My Daily Starts with Listening

I listen to a lot of audio every day. I know I have too many podcasts in my subscription listings, perhaps because I’m pulling down content by using two podcast apps (Pocketcasts and Player.fm).

Here is a look at the top of my podcatcher from a typical Friday morning where two hours of audio content normally appears in the space of one screen one my Samsung Note 9. I will hear these hosts in my earbuds during my morning and evening commutes and their ideas often fill break times throughout the day.

I wonder if you listen to any of these shows.