October is approaching fast and soon I shall be giving some workshops and presentations at two different venues. The first two workshops will be conducted at the NavCon2K7 Conference in Gosford, NSW, Australia. Each of the two workshops I shall be facilitating at the conference are tagged to the eLearning track. The first is Podcasting and Vodcasting. The second is Working Wonders with Comic Life. These workshops will be conducted on the Macintosh platform. The conference finishes on Friday October 5th.

On the Sunday, October 7th, I shall be flying up to Singapore to conduct a week of workshops and presentations at the Centre for Educational Development at Nanyang Technological University. I shall be presenting an updated version of my Web 2.0 Information Sharing Session followed by four days of workshops on Podcasting and Vodcasting, Web 2.0 and managing Web 2.0 applications, in particular RSS feeds. These workshops will be conducted on the Windows platform. I shall fly home to Australia on the Friday night or the next day.

I look forward to the opprtunity to catch up with old friends and to meet new teachers.

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. An article authored by Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng. The abstract reads as follows:

“Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.”

Tim Finin of the Ebiquity Group blogged that PhD student Akshay Java collected Twitter data from March 2007 and wrote the paper analyzing the the Twitter data subset from April and May of this year. Tim Finin added that Akshay Java’s “dataset included about 1350K posts from over 75K users. The paper covers a lot of the standard statistics you would expect — usage trends, basic network properties, top hubs and authorities, community structure, and geographic distribution. Akshay’s title pays homage to the early paper that asked why we blog, but the title also reflects the paper’s key contribution — an attempt to tease out the user’s intention in writing a tweet, i.e. to analyze why people are using Twitter.” The article is available as a pdf via a link below the abstract.

A post on Mashable alerted myself to Placely. Signed in using the invitation code provided by Placely to Mashable.

I registered, added a couple of trips. An easy interface. I shall see if I am contacted. Will check it out further. It incorporates calendars, maps and networking capabilities naturally. Probably not that too useful for myself. I do not travel as frequently as others.

This evening I updated 33 pages of my web site. Using the Site Management tool in Macromedia Dreamweaver is quite easy. I was able to alter the various pages quite quickly and ftp the updated pages to the server. My hosting is provided by ICDSoft and I am using their servers in Hong Kong as opposed to the USA. They are on a similar time zone and the occasional email for advice or support is always responded to within minutes. I have been with them for over two years now and the service has been excellent.

I also upgraded the security on the wireless network here at home. I upgraded the base station and the two satellite stations linked to the printer and the two stereos. I reset the wireless access on the MacBook Pro, my wife’s Toshiba Satellite (Windows Vista) as well as the two PC laptops (Windows XP) that belong to our two overseas students. Their laptops use the Chinese Language Kit however that presented no problem. Everything is running smoothly and it is good that the network is now more secure.

I feel a little chuffed that I was able to do all this. Not bad for a history teacher.

Voice Thread is an interesting online app that allows you to annotate your photographs with voice and text. Multiple users can annotate a selection of images or a single image. The demo on the web site employs a sequence of historical photographs and drawings by students. As a teacher of history this registered a chord within me. It is a great tool that allows students, and adults too, to record oral histories and to simply tell stories. It is always useful to experiment with alternative forms of expression.

The interface is simple to use. Comments can be moderated. It is very freindly tool to use.

Merlin Mann presents a practical and down to earth presentation on maintaining an email In Box with zero messages. He speaks of how email can dominate one’s life and he presents a commonsense approach to managing your email. He has a web page dedicated to the issue as well with resources that may interest you if you are keen to eliminate, reduce or manage email more effectively.

You may like to investigate this web based tool…

“Trackstar is your starting point for online lessons and activities. Simply collect Web sites, enter them into TrackStar, add annotations for your students, and you have an interactive, online lesson called a Track. Create your own Track or use one of the hundreds of thousands already made by other educators. Search the database by subject, grade, or theme and standard for a quick and easy activity. There is a fun Track already made for each day of the year, too!”

I have used a nifty little free mind mapping tool called Freemind lately. The download link is further down the page. Mac and Windows.

Like many other cats Sootie loves the adventure and sheer excitement of a brown paper bag. He has been playing with such a bag during the last few days and I thought why not make a hole in the bottom of the bag and obtain a different perspective of Sootie as he plays with the bag. The first video is simply Sootie chewing the handles. The second and third video reveal a carnivore in full flight.