Inside View from Ireland

Happy Birthday Robert Moog

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Image from Google Doodle

GOOGLE HONOURS Robert Moog on his birtdhay today. His synthesizer marked my entrance to teenaged years when it was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967.

I'm writing this blog post as a reminder to buy Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, a Moog recording that became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era.

The success of Switched-On Bach sparked a slew of other synthesizer records in the late 1960s to mid 1970s.

Live bands like Daft Punk take Moog into modular with their scaled-down, simplified, self-contained musical instruments. That's Daft Punk playing below from the film Tron.

Solar Sailer by Daft Punk (Remixed By Pretty L)

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Bernie Goldbach curates audio links.

Bonus Link: Daft Punk Radio

First Live Hangout by a Chamber of Commerce

THE CLONMEL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE are the first professional association in Ireland to conduct a live Google Hangout on Air. It happened this morning in a social media #protip workshop and the first one is visible below the break.

Before the Hangouts, I heard local businessmen explain how they increase footfall through clever tactics online as Brian Cleary, Pat Quirke and Fergal O'Keeffe explained how social media has changed some of focus for time management in their lines of work. Orla Nolan presented an overview of Connect Ireland to more than 50 people attending the event, getting some straightforward suggestions from the floor along with attracting a posse of influencers who should echo the "jobs for Ireland" message.

Fireman Rich's Comments

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Elana Kehoe shared emotive memories with the group, recalling the difficulty in unlocking her deceased husband accounts on his passing last year. Paul O'Mahoney gave a miniature master class in Audioboo and won the award for "most entertaining" presentation of the day. He won an iPad charger for his efforts, to be collected at 3D Camp this Saturday on the campus of the University of Limerick.

A big thanks to the Clonmel Chamber, the Tipperary Development Unit of the Limerick Institute of Technology and engaged local businesses for supporting this #protip event.

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Fireman Rich -- "I attended #protip with @omaniblog virtually

Paul O'Mahoney -- Protip with Audioboo

Bernie Goldbach curates links about social media.

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.

Investors with Single Shares

Bernie Goldbach in Horse & Jockey | Image from Yahoo Finance

THE SUNDAY PAPERS have speculation about Facebook's institutional investors and unrelated disparinging Twitter chatter suggests there's no magic in flushing money into start-ups. I look at Warren Buffett because his  investment success over the decades has been admirable.

Buffet did not buy into Facebook. His decision might not be a judgment call about Facebook but rather more a risk-adjusted ploy based on the current level of technology stock he already manages. A lot of investors review Berkshire Hathaway's financial reports and buy the same investments Buffett owns. That's nearly impossible across Buffet's portfolio because a lot of the portfolio lies with companies that aren't publicly traded.

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.

Notes From First Cesimeet Hangout on Air

Bernie Goldbach at #cesimeet | Screenshot from Googleplus

I DID AN TOTALLY IMPROMPTU #cesimeet presentation to a group of 41 Irish educators assembled in LIT-Thurles and it resulted in the first Hangout on Air at an Irish education event. The video is embedded below the break.

The photo shows the Logitech HD 910 webcam and the blue glow from the Vodafone HSDPA USB modem used to stream the Hangout on Air through my Google Plus account at http://gplus.to/topgold.

I asked Mike Kelly to switch off the audio feed shortly after starting because it started feeding back into the venue. To get an idea of what the silent camera looks and sounds like, scrub forward to 12:10 into the clip and get the full effect of a condenser mic connected to a laptop using a webcam to stream an event live across Google Hangouts on Air.

CESI Meet with Hangouts on Air

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Thurles | Screenshot from Google

IN TYPICALLY DISRUPTIVE FASHION, tonight's CESI Meet includes several Hangouts On Air. The first one will air at 1919 CESI Time with a half dozen more through 10PM.

This is a real test on several levels because I have no idea if the proxy running on the Thurles campus will permit Hangouts. Worse still, the Dell Precision M2400 laptop I have does not let me join campus wifi. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of both an O2-Ireland Hotshot (delivering better than 1.2 Mbs upload speeds when I tested it yesterday on campus) and a Vodafone Mobile Broadband USB modem (offering better than 7 Mbs over the air in Thurles when tested). But connectivity is only part of the problem.

From experience, I know these Hangouts tax the patience of viewers more than watching cats dance on keyboards. Although they might be serendipitous, they waste a lot of bandwidth. That said, a Hangout on Air shaken and stirred CESI Meet Energy will deliver decent white noise. You can judge for yourself because when we finish each five to seven minute segment, the Hangouts will go to the ICTedu playlist on Topgold's YouTube channel.

If you have questions you'd like answered, leave them on my InsideView blog post. Or if you like, shout them into the Hangout. We're prioritising questions from people using mobile handsets to join the Hangout and we're screenscraping the event for a tight showreel of the First CESI Meet Live On Air.

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Watching the #CESImeet today. Bernie Goldbach curates links about Google.

Outside with a Multi-seat Hangout on my iTouch

I JUST FINISHED WALKING while sharing my morning view (a few minutes after the one with Jay Martin in the screenshot) with three others an ocean away. I was using Google Plus on my iPod Touch with an O2 Mifi Hotshot. It worked better than Facetime because it was a group chat.

Pundits will tell you that there's no real market for phones with front-facing cameras and they're right. The only people I've discovered who want to use cameras for live events on phones are truly techies, artists with new work in studios or journalists. I'm off to discover if there's an interest among educators too because I'm showing my little discovery during a CESI Meet in LIT-Thurles at 8PM on May 18, 2012. If you're interested in watching or talking, just join our Hangout on Google Plus.

As expected, using a Hangout to connect to several people while streaming data over the air is problematic. My connection faltered whenever my local data quality dropped between EDGE and HSDPA. I could hang longer while using just 2G connectivity when I muted my video source and just observed what was happening.

During my early morning connection, I learned what people thought about Ireland--a lot influenced by Pierce Brosnan. There's a "drinking like fish" stereotype still firmly entrenched about the Irish personality. And there are clever ways of keeping your household's Netflix queue filled with good titles worth considering. All these little tidbits percolated past me in a three minute Hangout. I think I'll do some more, first between work desks with colleagues in different parts of Ireland. I'll be the one with the iTouch. I expect to be joined by the occasionally wacky, such as the receptionist from Hogwarts (a voice I encountered during one Hangout).

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Bernie Goldbach is http://gplus.to/topgold and he curates links about Google.

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.

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.