My Barcamp notes

 – posted January 22nd, 2007 by Laurence Veale     One comment

Bernie Goldbach on podcasting in education

Back in December, at the Irl-Dean event in DCU, I had heard an inspirational talk by Ann Heelan (AHEAD) about the need for change in educational institutions. She cited the example of the lecturer who won’t publish their lecture notes on the web, for fear that students won’t show up at lectures.

Bernie’s a bit different. He records his lectures or workshops and gives his students the MP3 summary of the key points. I’d love to be a fly on the wall or a student in class at one of his lectures.

Less is more

There was a five member panel discussion on start ups, sharing their insights on starting a web business. Four of the five are what one could call new Web 2.0 applications, the other, Zinadoo, a mobile services provider. I’ve signed up for the private beta testing on the three and am looking forward to giving them a test-drive (maybe this post will expedite that!)

At the panel discussion, all five echoed the Getting Real mantra of 37 signals, where “less is more”. I agree.

While PXN8 (pronounced pixenate) has been around for a while, Walter Higgins, the brains behind it, has recently quit the day job to put everything behind it. The other three Web 2.0 applications that we’ll be seeing pretty soon are:

Conn on the practicalities of podcasting

Conn gave some great tips on how to produce high quality podcasts, as opposed to the ones that snap, crackle and pop. I got a lot out of this one as podcasting is something we’re actively considering.

Ruby on Rails

Aidan Finn gave a good introduction to Ruby on Rails, comparing it to other frameworks and discussing the benefits of it. It’s now on my ta-da list.

Brian Caulfied on funding your company

Brian Caulfied, Trinity Venture Capital gave a great insight into raising capital for a start-up. He should know, he’s done it once or twice himself.

Pecha Kucha

This was a new one to me. The concept is you’ve got to present twenty slides at twenty seconds per slide. The topic was your last twenty delicious bookmarks, generated by delicious.salted.com. It was a great way to end on a light note.

More on Barcamp Waterford

There are a few write-ups on Barcamp from the usual suspects ;)

There’s also some photos of the event from Michele and Bernie

Categories Barcamp, Spotted

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