Inside View

Skinning my Second Brain

by Bernie Goldbach in Leiria, Portugal

I AM COMPLETING a short advanced programme with RUN-EU and started sharing my research methods with colleagues. I depend heavily on advice I got from Tiago Forte about the PARA method. The acronym PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. I believe this concept is best explained by Maggie Appleton in her Medium post "Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes".

Learning to think critically

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I AM CARVING OUT four hours a week to immerse in a short course about Creativity and Critical Thinking. After a few hours in the classroom, I'm starting to think that critical thinking is at odds with creativity.

For the first 12 years after finishing my university education, critical thinking processes help me question, analyze, and evaluating. When working with men in suits, my creativity helped generate clever ideas and explore multiple solutions. But they weren't always welcome.

Repurposing Old Phones FTW

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY extended the upgrade cycle for our mobile phones and now expect the handsets to work at least five years before being refreshed. Today, I've started pushing the functionality of an iPhone we bought in 2018 by using it as a daily transcription device.

Enjoying Local Link 356 Clonmel-Dungarvan

by Bernie Goldbach in Dungarvan

ONE OF THE BEST discoveries of the summer of 2023 has been the very cheap and cheerful Local Link 356 service connecting Clonmel in County Tipperary to Dungarvan in County Waterford. In my experience, it is a well-used service.

Factoring AI into UX Design

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

After one semester of integrating AI into my daily lab sessions, I can assuredly say AI has made a profound impact on the way our UX designers work. Leveraged purposefully, AI enhances creativity, improves personalisation, and trims workflows. As I review my early 2023 teaching practice, I want to offer a few observations about using AI while teaching creative media students in a university setting.

Aiding Accessibility and Inclusivity

Without even coming close to ChatGPT, people can take some simple steps to ensure their use of AI can enhance accessibility. It starts with reviewing the alt-text tags that Microsoft generates inside programs such as Word and PowerPoint. Microsoft's AI technology tries to make digital experiences more inclusive by automatically creating text descriptions of images. The content creators should review that AI-generated content. To be truly accessible, web sites should have alt-text for images that are optimised for screen readers. This is happening behind the scenes already which means AI contributes to a more inclusive design approach. I'm a big fan of adding meta data to online folders and directories because those ReadMe files help me locate locations of files I've saved since the 90s. I've discovered the Markdown files I'm adding to OneDrive and Google Drive locations help me locate information faster when I ask the respective mobile apps questions by using my mobile phone.

Open Note for Karlin Lillington

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I SPENT 55 MINUTES on a catch-up Zoom Call with journalist and thinker Karlin Lillington today and want to mark my timeline with the event. Although the purpose of the call was to share what we think about the Fediverse, some of the preliminary commentary helped me resurface some important references to shared experiences. I need to sharpen the screenshot of Karlin before Google Images adds it to its collection.

Back into Notion h/t @redgregory1

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel

I'VE RESTARTED  my daily flow with Notion as part of my Personal Knowledge Management, spurred on by Larry G. Maguire and helped massively by Sarah Brennan's excellent YouTube tutorials. I'm writing this blog post to remind myself I owe RedGregory at least five coffees because of her free templates and excellent online teaching style.

Thinking about my Secondary Learning

by Bernie Goldbach in Waterford

WHILE ATTENDING a hands-on training session in Waterford, I was challenged by Mark Guerin to reveal a facet of my secondary learning outcomes. I believe reflective journaling is primary evidence of my secondary learning. [1] [2] If my students can produce high quality reflective journaling, they have achieved gold stars for secondary learning outcomes.

Getting Inside AI

by Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel.
Image from The Emotion Machine.

MOST OF MY WORK with Artificial Intelligence has been in the field of Machine Learning. I teach students how to improve their online profiles so they enhance their prospects of gaining good jobs. And last semester, I introduced generative AI into classrooms to increase the speed of creating responsive web sites.

Grow Remote Open Coffee in Clonmel 6 July #GROC

IT'S TIME to reboot Irish Open Coffee sessions with creatives, this time with the halo effect of Grow Remote Ireland. Along with a team of animators, some working remotely with major studios, the helping hand of Grow Remote, and the support of the Questum Acceleration Centre, we will restart local Open Coffee sessions on the first Thursday of every month.