Here is an abbreviated version of field notes scribbled during a half day field trip to Microsoft-Europe. Credit for good stuff is Stephen Howell
Field Trip to Microsoft Europe with Game Art Designers
Purpose and Preamble One of the best things we can do with third level students is to walk with them into locations where their skill sets are acknowledged and challenged. We do that during field trips from the Clonmel Digital Campus. In doing this, we meet a fundamental challenge by integrating the academic with the practical.
Game Art Designers learn a great deal about the world from the well-constructed four year Honours Degree. But they often don't know if their newly honed skills equate to viable career skills through their studies. They learn why, how, or where they should apply their skills in the workforce by engaging with thinkers on the job. Taking field trips such as ones hosted by Microsoft Europe are more important than spending a day listening to lectures in classrooms. Thinkers like Stephen Howell shared these three main points below with students. And I added a fourth point.
I. You have to code.
And your ePortfolio should offer evidence of your coding skills.
II. Hololens 2: It's Not for Academia.
Academic institutions don't buy the Hololens for classrooms--it's too expensive. But smart manufacturing plants use Hololens extensively.
III. What Follows AR and VR?
A. Cognitive Services
Beyond the realms of augmented reality and virtual reality lies cognitive services. Stephen Howell used Azure's Computer Vision when performing sentiment analysis on still images. I plan to revise this gist with samples snapped during the field trip, showing the faces of students during specific parts of the half day event in Microsoft-Europe.
B. $100 of Free Azure Services for Students
As a lecturer, I realise I am well overdue integrating Cognitive Services into a fourth year module called "Emerging Trends and Technology". Fortunately, I have five more weeks remaining in the Spring Semester of 2020 and I should be able to integrate cognitive sentiment analysis into one of my workshops.
C. Visual Data
Data visualisation offers decision makers a wide angle view of information upon which to execute strategy. Our Honours Degree students should be able to take basic steps into the visualation of data points extracted from burial records of the 1800s in County Tipperary, Ireland. This on-going project offers an interesting complement to heritage and ancestry research.
IV.Where to Start?
A. Students will write their own trip reports.
I've asked students to prepare in their Class Notebooks (1) a 60-120 word summary of individual perspectives about the field trip, (2) an image related to the Microsoft field trip, and (3) a hyperlink to a professional or a technology profiled during the visit. I've also asked for students to port their content onto their own Github accounts where they could commit this gist to their public or private work. The intellectual question is: What important truth did you realise that affects your own work?
The business version might be: _ What valuable skill might you have that Microsoft would value_?
B. Listen to the student podcasts.
You can hear cogent insights about inevitable trends in technology as third level students talk about 11 topics first shared by Kevin Kelly in 2013.
You can find this podcast by asking for "Emerging Trends Koon Keen" wherever you find your favourite online audio.
Originally posted by Bernie Goldbach. You can find more about the Clonmel Digital Campus on its blog or by following its aggregated media feed.