Creatives aren't concerned about cognification

Cognification

I ENJOYED A CLASSROOM conversation with Jess McNamara about cognification, an inevitable trend described by Kevin Kelly. We're diving into The Inevitable with 35 students as they examine how changing technology may affect their lives and livelihood in the decades ahead.

Listen to "Life When Cognified E24" on Spreaker.

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Experimenting with an Emerging Trends Channel

Artist at Work

I'M CURRENTLY EXPERIMENTING with an educasting channel called "Emerging Trends" that I want to offer as a mini-MOOC through iTunes U, YouTube, and Spreaker.

The audio content should be available through all podcast services. At the moment, everything I'm doing revolves around creative multimedia workflow.

If we have planned things correctly, people using feed readers like Feedly, Inoreader, Pocket, or Web Subscriber (iOS) should be able to use those apps to discover rich media content from the Emerging Trends Channel when visiting selected website.

[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business on the Clonmel Digital Campus of the Limerick Institute of Technology.]


First Bash at Seeing the Future

FRESH OFF A DAY-LONG session with web-savvy students, I'm looking at how to explain the roadmap I use to view the world of emerging trends. Straightaway, I don't know if my route is worth following. 

A lot of what I do involves falling into rabbit holes. I've dug and dug into social bookmarks, followed streams of consciousness on Twitter, and occasionally showed the discipline to read the hundreds of pages that drop onto my Kindle every week.

By my own admission, I need more clever listening because even reading 2000 words per minute, I fall behind on a weekly basis.

Nonetheless, I think my strategy is sound. I start with watchlists that include terms I need to explore or hashtags on Twitter that I should follow. I constantly review reading lists, trying to find precise chapters and paragraphs that deliver the greatest meaning. And I spend time to poke around the landing zones (i.e., the company websites or personal blog pages) of trust agents worth following.

Some of this process respects serendipity. That means I get to flick through stacks of interesting photos on Flickr and Google Plus. I also permit myself time to view a few exceptional video clips on Vimeo every day.

The insider's tip I should reveal is this--you need to spend some time every day in deep thought, perhaps arising after reading a minimum of 80 pages in a standard book. That deep immersion, away from a computer screen, takes a reader to a special mental place.  That's what I'm going to do now.

 


On Inside View -- How to see the Future, November 15, 2011.

innovation

 


Technologies Bringing Change

Cousins PaddingDICK O'BRIEN REPORTS on "10 technologies that could change your business" and I want to bring his five page article from Computers in Business into the Emerging Technologies and Trends module I teach at Limerick Institute of Technology.

I've already made "tablets and creativity" a major thread of discussion in the module and that corresponds to Dick's third technlogy (i.e., mobile devices). He also cites near field communications, cloud computing, long term evolution, green technology, 3D, nanotechnology, sensor arrays, motion control and HTML5. I'm interested in hearing from fourth year students how many of these emerging technologies will be part of a creative's work flow in the year 2020.

Trends in Tech


Dick O'Brien -- "10 Technologies that could change your business" in Computers in Business, October 2, 2011.

trends


Collaboration Plus

Adding to #litddALTHOUGH THE SCREENSHOT (at left) might not look like anything special, it represents a major step forward in my collaborative classroom.

Thanks to the instant upload capability of Google Plus, I'm able to record short pieces to camera with my creative multimedia students and let my mobile phone do the rest of the work. The items upload automatically behind the scene or I can remove the Xperia Arc's memory chip and manually upload the files later. This is a big deal because it removes all post-production processing from the loop. I can set an oral task, walk around with my cameraphone, record a few pieces with the camera, and know that Google Plus is shoveling the short takes onto a shared space behind the scenes. We're helped along in the process by a free and open wifi node on the campus. And we're also fortunate to have students who have shown a willingness to dive straight into the process of collaboration through tight circles on Google Plus.


My Totally LIT Circle on Google Plus.

collaboration