Inside View

Collaborating with Content Creators Using @airtable

I HAVE AN OBSERVER (pictured) who watches most of what I create during our emergency remote teaching sessions on our kitchen table. And I have collaborators online who use Airtable while iterating their content into distinct channels. This blog post is my first attempt to see if it's possible to use mobile phones to dynamically track media texts as they evolve from PowerPoint decks to Spotify segments to embedded content on LinkedIn and short videos on Twitter. Along the way the recorded content will percolate up onto YouTube and WordPress for review by a leading author and for reuse by younger students following similar academic programmes.

This is a skunkworks project and content won't be in place until June 3, 2021.

I Keep My To-Do Post-its

I AM TRYING to validate a long-standing relationship I've had with Google Keep because I want to be able to dictate notes and have them appear on my calendars. This has become more important now that my calendar rotates into view on our Amazon Echo Show.

Starting a Collaborative Story h/t @johntierney_ #MyClonmel

THE IDEA STARTED years ago with an email from John Tierney, an archaeologist who thought I might share a passion for exploring the past. Back then, in 2008, we compared notes while visiting the graves inside the Rock of Cashel. More than a decade later, I'm taking those graveside thoughts into a community project I'll follow called #MyClonmel and watch young teens along with third level creative students uncover layers of a town's past.

Collaborating in Irishtown Stories

STARTING WITH A GITHUB GIST, we're trying to see if a simple embed code causes content edited on a desktop to magically appear on a blog page. It works! If you click the image, you get my current podcast subscriptions--I'm leaving them on Github.

Since the Github Gist appears in Markdown (and it doesn't use word wrap), I'll explain what I've written below the break. When reviewing this blog post, I realised I have to change some of the landing destinations to better suit the project.

New Laptop for final 900 days

I NEEDED A laptop to effectively manage three fourth year students and after a two year wait, I finally got a Dell Latitude 5480 that should serve me well for my final 900 days as a third level lecturer. This is the first machine I've used without having admin rights and that's a bit awkward. Here are a few first impressions.

Suir Blueway Project Planning

ONE OF MY MOST favourite activities is walking along the banks of the River Suir (pictured) and I'm happy to watch Claire Butler create clever content that will promote the River Suir Blueway. Claire is in her final year of the Creative Multimedia degree programme in the Limerick Institute of Technology and her work will help an international audience discover some of the special places I have enjoyed while living in County Tipperary.

Kanbans and Trello and Projects

ALONG WITH MORE THAN 50 students, I'm diving deep into several projects that I'm tracking with Trello's boards. And I'm complementing the tick-off lists with audio and video collateral.

Keystrokes and Word Count

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Photo shot on my desk 

EVERY SUMMER I try to get ahead by organising course notes. To stay on track, I need to add words to themes. My current problem is I don't have the themes and memes organised.

I know enough about the creative multimedia modules ahead on the academic calendar to actually write exams before I start teaching so I have started an outline of those exams in Simplenote. Then it's over to Scrivener to flesh out model answers to the questions. I intend to revise 10 PowerPoint lectures for each module and need to publish one Slideshare deck during each of the next 12 weeks so I have materials online before classes start.

In the meantime, it's back to the Moleskines, Evernote, Pinboard and Zoot glue.

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Bernie Goldbach curates links about GTD.

My Zoot

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Zoot Software logo

I'VE DIPPED BACK INTO Zoot XT now that it's a very stable and very fast beast. However, its learning curve can easily intimidate the tap and swipe brigade.

I started out on laptops in the early 90s with AskSam, a flat text filing system. I live in a world cluttered with digital loot (aka zoot in my mind) and that's why I need Zoot XT to handle simple text, RTF and HTML for my feeble brain. Zoot is much more powerful that both OneNote and Ultra Recall.

Four Years of Basecamp

I AM TRACKING several important projects with Basecamp at the moment and believe that if you need a minimalist project management program, you should try Basecamp.

For creative multimedia students who are new to project tracking, Basecamp provides simple e-mail advisories and easy tick-off boxes that require minimal effort to use. I like seeing my Basecamp projects on my Xperia Arc handset and also find the RSS feeds of the projects very helpful. I have seen more complex project management tools before but Basecamp has all the fundamental parts: multiple user management, task management, milestones, message boards, whiteboards and file upload/download. I am currently tracking seven projects within one major tasking. I like the way Basecamp's web-based service works fast and without any sort of software. And I also like how quickly you can leave Basecamp and never get a nagging email trying to get you back on board. That's been my experience after working with Basecamp on and off during the past four years.

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GTD