While Talking to Myself in My Attic #51 #cong18

Sometimes I just surround myself with boxes of my old Moleskine journals and talk out loud about old ideas. The A.I. does the rest.

1. You shouldn’t hesitate to talk out loud.
2. Let your voice make your story into text.
3. Read and listen to influential voices.
4. Share your ideas through immersive experiences.

Bernie Goldbach is a drone instructor pilot and a creative media lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology–for the next 590 days.

You can read Bernie at Inside View or tune into his podcasts at Spreaker. He uses both Otter.ai and Rev.com for teaching and learning.

By Bernie Goldbach

I’ve been in situations where my gut tells me something feels just right. And over the decades, I’ve broken down what “feels right” by what I hear, how I’m influenced by what I’ve heard, and how easily it is to immerse in the feeling.

Writing about ideas for #cong18 feels right. Moreover, it feels right to talk about my thoughts because my Notes to Self are better formed when I articulate them through my voice.

Over the years, I’ve heard myself talking about good ideas. And through the emergence of clever technology, I’ve been able to share my thoughts through podcasts and through the written word. Surprisingly, my voice feeds my typing.

I’ve started using free voice-to-text services as a method of jump-starting my creative process. I just let myself talk and Artificial Intelligence takes over. It’s so easy to ask your phone to create text as you speak. Google Voice does that on many Android handsets. I’ve taken a few additional steps and educated two other apps to the nuances of my voice and now I’m producing this written copy just by talking about it.

I use the free Otter.ai app and also the machine language Rev.com app. Once trained and then used in a quiet space, both of the apps produce text content that is better than 90% accurate.

I also talk to myself in my attic while surrounded by several hundred Moleskine journals. Each of those hard cover journals have 190 pages. I normally fill seven Moleskines every year and my collection spans the every year of the 21st century. Occasionally I will go back ten years in my journaling to see what I was thinking about then. And then I start talking to myself while Otter.ai cranks out my thoughts on screen. I feel like a storyteller in my attic during my deep dives into my Moleskine archives.

Throughout my 18 years of teaching third level students, I’ve accumulated hundreds of electronic titles on my Kindles. I don’t simply read on Kindle; I write on Kindle pages. Kindle annotations are another major source of ideas for me. It’s so easy to extract both the original text as well as the notes I’ve made surrounding key parts of books, documents, and newspaper clippings on my Kindles. I’ve created lectures and practical lab sessions emerging as ideas from those Kindle extracts.

I buy most of the content that appears on my Kindle. Those authors I read on Kindle influence me. They add to the ideas germinating in my head as I try to sort out what I really think or what sort of plan I believe should emerge from unformed thoughts.

Sometimes I sketch snippets of thoughts as four frames of a storyboard. Other times I just let my pen flow and create word clouds inside hand-drawn rectangles and spontaneous circles. I can actually feel an idea coming into the light through this tactile kinaesthetic process inside my Moleskine journals.

These ideas have to get out of my attic, be spoken to my favourite A.I., and then shared outside my private space. In my case, that means taking my unformed ideas into casual chats like #cong18.

Every year, I block out a weekend in November to visit Cong. I’ve missed more sessions than I’ve attended but if you looked at my Moleskines through the past five years, you would probably think I was in Cong since the very beginning. This year, I’m talking out loud about sharing ideas and watching those ideas form on screen. If you’re in Cong on 24th November 2018, you can hear me voice my thoughts out loud. I hope to share ideas from friends whose stories I’ve followed.