Inside View from Ireland

Hangouts FTW

I USE GOOGLE HANGOUTS and chances are you don't. The technology exposes personal constraints.

Most people I know don't want a video element in their collaborations. In fact, because of a video camera used during intra-campus meetings that I attend, some people give the meeting a miss. Or they sit obliquely to the camera's viewing range to ensure no face time in the meeting. Personally, I don't mind those videoconferences because they save money. And because there's often a meeting set to start close to the running time of the videoconference, the video-assisted meetings hold closer to their agendas.

It's worthwhile having a look inside how Google is nudging video conferencing towards a mobile experience. I've hung out in three handheld video conferences during the month of May 2012 by using my iPod Touch and a 3G O2 Hotshot in Ireland. These have been easy and seamless. They require less overhead than any other kind of virtual collaboration I've used. They also require an awareness of light, noise, camera angles, back channels and running notes.

If you're a road warrior who needs to hook up with home office, your family, potential clients or casual friends, I recommend buying a smartphone that has a front-facing camera. You need that capability to use Google Hangouts in your pocket. Actually, I recommend buying an iPod Touch because its implementation of Google Plus is as good as Steve Jobs would've specified. If you're always caught in a bad hair day or if your connectivity is choppy, you can kill your video and just hang out with an audio feed from yourself while watching and listening to others.

Chunking

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Audioboo/Topgold clip

MY LIFE GOES SMOOTHER with chunking. And elegant chunking helps produce compelling multimedia.

This is a topic that will evolve in greater detail throughout the summer, then will appear in several places in our creative multimedia degree as part of a production process.

Chunking starts with a scribbled thought in my Moleskine notebook. Those who read me regularly know those written notes become Evernotes. Some germinate as blog posts, video clips, audio moments or content that sits inside Kindles or iBooks.

Chunking will feature as a key term during my afternoon presentation at the 2012 e-learning summer school (#elss12) in the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Chunking

And chunking helps keep my focus on the real world, the one crawling at my feet at home.

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Bernie Goldbach curates links about GTD.

Co-Creation in the Verge

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Image of Puppy Flowers

I AM MENTALLY SPENT on a sun-split day in Ireland, thinking about co-creating things in the verge of my virtual life.

I gained some inspiration from a Dashboard item that percolated onto my Dell laptop via Evelyn Rodriguez from Teilhard de Chardin.

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe."

Photocopying Guidance

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Image from Flickr

I HAVE A LICENCE TO COPY. The Licence permits the copying of extracts from all books, journals and magazines published in Ireland (with some listed exclusions).

I can copy up to 5% of a published volume or issue. But I'm also limited to reproducing only a single chapter from a book or a single article from a journal. And I cannot copy more than a single short story or a single poem exceeding ten pages in length from an anthology.

I generally identify all copied work with details of the author, title and ISBN/ISSN at the foot of each page. It's good practise to attribute source material. I look for Creative Commons material when building printed products for my academic courses. And I know the limitations cited in this blog post are the same ones under consideration by second level teachers who are trying to convert some printed material into epubs and Kindle content.

My Monday Action Step

Bernie Goldbach at #ictedu | Image is KT Tunstall's boot

THE ANNUAL ICTEDU Conference ended in Thurles with a call to action for Monday's #edchatie and mine came into focus during a workshop by Mary Loftus.

I want to inject more multimedia into my lectures, not as content but as pause points for meaningful discussions. Mary Loftus has perfected the process and its one that will take some re-rigging of the seating plan in the main lecture hall used on our LIT-Clonmel campus but the result makes the effort worthwhile. Seating arrangements featured throughout the day-long event, starting with the opening session when people were invited to sit down in front of the auditorium to share thoughts by writing on tables.

It will take a month of education conferences before I unpack all the thoughts arising from the eighth running of the annual #ictedu event. When it first ran, most of the conference dealt with electronic plumbing. By 2008, tweets were coming out from the event but nothing was reverberating back into the conference via social media. In 2012, twice as many people were following the day's events at a distance, using Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, and the live video stream. It's reached a point where a virtual conference facilitator should be empowered to bring the outside comments into the main floor, similar to the role a studio wrangler performs for broadcasters.

Black Horse and Cherry Tree

I brought several lovely tracks from KT Tunstall onto my phone during the conference, inspired by the video below the break.

Friendship as its own reward

Bernie Goldbach reading Fortune | Image from book promotion

TONY HSIEH, CEO OF ZAPPOS, has advice I respect about treating people right.

He shares a story with Ellen Florian in Fortune Magazine about joining Zappos with Fred Mossler in 1999, relating how hard it was to get brands to sign up with Zappos. Tony thought he should ruthlessly negotiate. Fred offered other advice--to build relationships.

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.

Zemanta Inside Typepad

Bernie Goldbach testing 11890 | Screenshot from my Typepad

AT THE END OF every academic year, I look back at where my virtual footsteps have taken me because it was the summer of 2003 that I walked into Typepad along with James Corbett and Keith Bohanna. This year, my Typepad footprints find me as I type my blog posts.

That's because Say Media have integrated Zemanta into the "compose" window of the online posting experience. I heard Michele Neylon talking about Zemanta on a Technology.ie podcast with Conn O Muineachain, then started using its plug-in. The plug-in generates recommended links for blog post, just like in the screenshot above--but in fairness, the recommended links are a lot more diverse than what this navel-gazing screenshot suggest. After a few short weeks of beta testing by Say Media across Typepad, users inserted thousands of Recommend Links into blog posts.

Front and Rear USB Charging Points

Bernie Goldbach in Limerick | Photo inside a Mini

I think all new cars should come with USB charging ports in the glovebox, near the dashboard, and in the back seating area. I found a handy USB charging port in a 2012 Mini that I used to recharge my Nokia N8.

We carry six devices that often reach the end of their duty days before we park the car on weekend drives. On many occasions, I've just toggled off the data services on the handsets and that keeps the phones running for days. But sometimes you need data to see things, like with the Hauwei pebble that makes our car a wifi hotspot. It would be nice to connect that little device to always-on car power. David Savery has done just that, respecting the different colour codings on the device cabling.

Savery used a USB socket, a fuse, a switch and a 7805 voltage regulator which turns the nasty 12-14V output of a car's electrical system into a smooth  5V at up to 1A. That's good enough for most portable electrical equipment but might not be strong enough for an iPad. Savery notes "an input of about 7-35V DC will produce a nice flat 5V output with a current of up to 1A which is twice what a normal computer USB socket will output." He also installed a heatsink to absorb the warmth from the regulator when it pushes out 200mA.

If we keep our current car for another year, one of these USB charging points is going to appear in the glove box.

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David Savery -- "The in-car USB charge socket" on the R2UK blog, February 28,2010.

Instructables -- "How to Make Your Own USB Car Charger", 2006

Bernie Goldbach curates DIY links.

Simple Scrivener Notes

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Logo from Simplenote

THANKS TO SIMPLE note-taking that syncs Scrivener to Simple Note on my laptop, iPod Touch (something I use more than my laptop) and Nokia Lumia, I have doubled my daily writing output.

David Sparks on Macworld suggested that might happen and he is right. It's largely because Simplenote (Scrivener's erstwhile companion) moves ideas onto my screens faster and more efficiently than anything I have ever used before. I use Simplenote on iOS and Simple Paper by Li Xu @devlix42 on Windows Phone alongside Syncpad in my Chrome browser to tie things together with tags and filters.

Scrivener is particularly good if you already have an organized workflow. For example, you could take the outlines and mindmaps built in other apps and import them into Scrivener. Scrivener then creates a hierarchical set of binder items matching each outline or map, making it easy to jump from the planning to the writing stage. This is a lot mor horsepower than I need for run-of-the-mill blogging but I use Scrivener binders and the related meta data to set up the pedagogy in academic modules.