This morning I received an email from Intute in the UK with the advice that they had listed the web site that I had created about my father’s experiences as a prisoner of war during the Second World War within their catalogue.

The listing is detailed with a synopsis and an excellent set of key words and key terms. I may use these terms in the meta tags of the site.

I am quite humbled by and proud of the addition of the site to Intute. Check out their blog.

Well, what happened today? Well, first of all I transferred some notes on my classroom’s whiteboard to my MacBook. I had quickly jotted down some notes down on the board yesterday while sharing some ideas with the class about various theories regarding the downfall of the Minoan Civilisation and a possible connection with the volcanic demise of Thera. There is debate regarding possible connections and the dating of the eruption on Thera. I was repeating the lesson to a second Year Eleven class later today.

My first class, with Year Ten History, focused on the Day of Mourning on the 26th January, 1938. That was the 150th anniversary of white settlement in Australia. William Cooper and William Ferguson organised the Day of Mourning, related publications and protests.

Following that lesson I taught a class about the conscription debate that took place in Australia during The First World War 1914-1918. Australia was supporting the efforts of Great Britain during the conflict. Voluntary enlistments were high during the first two years of the war but by 1916 numbers  were dropping off and the current Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, led the call for an amendment to our conscription laws so that men could be conscripted to fight overseas. The debate was highly emotional and split the nation in half. Two referendums were held and the No vote won on each occasion. The results were relatively close on each occasion. 

Following recess I taught a double period Year Eleven Ancient History class regarding the nature of, and evidence for, the relationship between the island of Thera, the Mionoan Civilisation on Crete and the Mycenaean Civilsation on the Greek mainland. I repeated that double period with a second Year Eleven group after lunch. I also interviewed a number of students regarding the current state of their historical investigations.

During lunch, grabbed some kites, went out to the oval and flew kites with some of the Year Seven students. A crowd of students turned up all wanting a turn. Years ago I used to build and fly kites with the students. I remember one day we had about 30 kites flying above the school. An old photograph from those days is included below.

The kite flyers, 1995.

It was quite windy today and we could only fly the smaller single and dual line kites. One kite was damaged when it hit the ground, hard. Repaired it when I arrived home. It was great to watch the kites flipping about in the wind today. The kids had a great time ~ running, launching kites, untangling lines, laughing, watching and clamouring for more. Students are fascinated with the kites. Such a simple ‘technology’ with which they love to play. Shall be flying the kites again tomorrow.

My favourite kite, Jurong East, Singapore, 2003.

I enjoy kite flying. It is a great way to de-stress. I take a few with me when I travel. I have a couple of soft kites that can be folder and rolled so small that they take up no more room than a pair of folded socks.

After reapiring the kite, scanned the Google Reader and cleared all the posts. Saved nineteen for later reading. Did note that a number of the NECC related blog posts reveal a little frustration with the numbers and ‘noise’ of edubloggers in some venues. Too many edubloggers in one place? Is that possible? Is this homophily in action? I feel that a conference full of edubloggers would be almost superfluous given their skills in connecting online already. I guess that is why there is an unconference but even that may have suffered due to homophily. Perhaps I am wrong. I am not there. Wish I was, admittedly.

I shall be catching up with some edubloggers in July hopefully. The last thing I wish to talk about is edublogging, twitter, education technology and the like. I simply wish to eat, drink, chat and converse about politics, people, IVF, weather, wine, beer, pets, house renovations, climate change, whatever. Get my drift? Whichever way the wind blows.

How did I create this post? I scanned the photograph on a HP Photosmart 2570 All-in-One device, rotated and resized it in Adobe Photoshop Elements, saved it as a jpeg using the Save for web… option in Elements, uploaded it to my host using CyberDuck. Of course the blog post was created using Wordpress. I also linked to an image in my own gallery.

This is an aboriginal interpretation of Zorba The Greek. This performance always lifts my spirits. I am always happy to see anyone enjoying life and not taking themsleves too seriously. As the description on the YouTube page explains…

Frank Djirrimbilpilwuy from Milingimbi has been in the Indigenous Media Industry for many years and has been a long-standing member and supporter of the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association, TEABBA Radio. He has worked Independently in Music and Film for many years also. As the man behind the camera and release of the video, Frank is also representing the dance group who call themselves “The Chooky Dancers”.

Frank has said that he filmed the footage at this years Ramingining Festival on the 30th September 2007 and knew it would be “something special” as soon as he saw the boys rehearsing. “The crowd went wild as you can see in the video, and the classic song Zorba the Greek has now become a hit overnight in the communities and now it seems, everywhere else too.”

Have been doing a little work on the site about my dad, Frank. Added some additional links and corrected a few others this week. Presently in the process of gathering together some students to work on a similar project.

Do you have relatives who also experienced the trials and tribulations of war? Would love to hear about them.

During the last couple of trips to Singapore I have managed to photograph a few places I had visited while I lived in Singapore and as a result a few before & after opportunities have presented themselves. Singapore is constantly changing, constantly.

Sometimes the past is preserved. At other times the past disappears.  Let me share three simple examples.

1. The corner of Club Street and Ann Siang Road

Before

Visit site: The Pasir Ris Mercury

After

Visit gallery.

2. Kampong Glam

Before

Visit gallery.

After

Visit gallery.

3. Sultan Gate ~ Abandoned property

Before

Visit gallery.

After

Visit gallery.

Today, I literally stumbled upon the following web site, AERA ~ Ancient Egypt Research Associates. This is the official web site of AERA and as they point out on their home page it provides a window into the “work of Dr. Mark Lehner and the international team of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project”. It is a well designed site that is easy to navigate.

It features a rich array of textual and visual resources that would be ideal for any teacher and students interested in Egyptian archaeology and the rich history of ancient Egypt. There are links to four key areas of the web site: Projects, Specialists, Artifacts and Resources.

The projects cover such topics as the The Sphinx Project, Giza Plateau Mapping Project, The Lost City of The Pyramids and the How Old are the Pyramids. Each project is documented in excellent detail and well supported with photographs, maps and diagrams.

The specialist projects consider problems such as the feeding 20,000 workers and the significant role of stone tools in Egyptian society. The artifacts sections contains excellent photographs of related Egyptian antiquities and the resources provide links to publications and related sites on the Internet.

There are many primary and secondary source materials for students to explore. Teachers of the Preliminary Ancient History Course in NSW could take one of the projects and evolve it into a customised case study. Of course teachers of Stage 4 History in NSW could also take full advantage of this excellent web site when teaching the junior history course to Years 7 or 8. I have added a link to this site on my dedicated pages for Year 8 History, Year 11 Ancient History and Year 12 Ancient History.

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Now playing: Philip Glass - From Egypt
via FoxyTunes

This morning I read about the Historic Tale Construction Kit in the Instructify blog. This web based application allows you to create a sequence of mediaeval events using images drawn from the Bayeux Tapestry. I believe that teachers of history that cover the middle ages would find this application very useful on a number of different levels.

Teachers and students could recreate scenes from the tapestry and add additional text blocks that annotate the scene.

Scenes from the tapestry could be reworked thus generating arguments and controversies for debate. This could be considered a mediaeval form of “airbrushing” and “photo-retouching”. Discussion based upon “What if?” scenarios could be started.

The application allows the user to drag and drop a variety of characters, animals, beasts, plants, buildings and boats on to the canvas. These objects alone could be used as standalone focal points for analysis and discussion. You can also add authentic looking text to the canvas. They have even included Halley’s Comet which made an appearance in 1066 and was included on the original tapestry. You can create a sequence of scenes and advance from one to the next.

The user generated images can be emailed to a friend or sent to a gallery (although I could not get this to work). Savvy computer users could take a screen capture of the image, save it as a jpeg and then import it into a VoiceThread. Students could then add their own commentary to the image. They could also create an imaginative oral history based upon the characters in the mediaeval scene. The image in this post is a screen capture. Captured images could also be embedded in presentations, blogs and so on. There are opportunities for learning, debate, humour and fun. This is a captivating application.

It was a little buggy at times. I suspect that you can only drag a maximum of 9 or so objects onto the tapestry window. After that previously placed elements disappear. At times it appeared to freeze when you dragged an element on to the editing window from the palette at left. When embedding text you cannot place the cursor i-beam at the point you wish to re-edit. You have to use the delete or back-space key to return to the editing point. I was unable to publish to the gallery. My first attempt at using this online application can be found at this post.

I know that teachers of the Stage 4 History syllabus in NSW would find this a handy tool to use when teaching students about the society and people of the Middle Ages during Year 8 of their schooling. Students studying the Battle of Hastings will find it particularly useful.

As an aside I conducted a quick search for related sites and two of the more interesting were EuroDocs: Britain 1066-1485 which is a treasure trove of primary source material and The Bayeux Tapestry which provides a Quicktime VR panoramic view of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Links

Historic Tale Construction Kit
Medieval Sourcebook: William of Malmesbury, d. 1143?: The Battle of Hastings, 1066
Anglo-Saxon Sourcebook: The Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings: A brief tour by Dr Deborah Vess
The Battle of Hastings according to Orderic Vitalis
J.P.Sommerville: The Battle of Hastings
EuroDocs: Britain 1066-1485
Britain’s Bayeux Tapestry at the University of Reading
Official site of the Bayeux Tapestry (French)
The Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry ~ QuicktimeVR panorama
Wikipedia: Bayeux Tapestry and Battle of Hastings

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Now playing: XTC - Senses Working Overtime
via FoxyTunes

I was conducting a little research on the Battle of Hastings by closely examining the Bayeux Tapestry. It is 270 metres in length and 50 centimetres in height. It is an amazing document and truly one of the great primary sources of history.

Can you imagine my shock when I found a reference to the term diigo! I captured the scene and I reproduce it below for your enlightenment.

The image was created with Historical Tale Construction Kit. Via Instructify. Neat, eh? I shall blog a little more on this online app in the future.

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Now playing: David Bowie - Kooks
via FoxyTunes

This morning I read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the world’s oldest recorded sound. The recording was made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on a phonautograph. The audio recording predates Edison’s sound recordings by a couple of decades. The recording is available from the the First Sound site.

The world’s oldest recorded sound

The entire recording is ten seconds long and features a Parisian singer giving a rendition of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”. The recording was made on a phonautograph, a device that was created to record sounds visually. It was not designed to play them back. A group of scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California devised a method to decode the paper based transcription to audio.

The 1859 model of Scott’s phonautograph. Source: Franz Josef Pisko,
Die neuere Apparate der Akustik (Vienna, 1865). Image courtesy of David
Giovanni and First Sounds.

Detail of an 1859 phonautogram made by Scott and included in his patent paperwork, preserved at the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI),
the French patent office. Image courtesy of David Giovanni and First Sounds.

David Giovanni gave permission for the reproduction of the images on this page. His own web site is well worth exploring. David Giovanni has been involved in the discovery and publication of old recordings. One of his releases, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922, even won a Grammy Award.

David Giovannoni inspects Scott’s first two experimental sound recordings,
made in 1853 or 1854, in the archives of the Académie des Sciences
of the Institut de France, where they were deposited in 1857.
Photo by Isabelle Trocheris. Image courtesy of David Giovanni and First Sounds

.
I have always had a fascination with audio. I used to enjoy taking bootleg recordings of artists like Bowie, Led Zeppelin and others and then attempting to improve the sound quality using tools like graphic equalisers and a DBX 117 dynamic range enhancer. I was once a guest editor of Crosstalk, the journal of the Australian Tape Recording Society way back in 1980, I think.

Vaguely related note: If you are interested in old 78RPM records I highly recommend that you check out Joe Bussard’s Fontone Records site. He was born in 1936 and is a classic digital native. Check out his MySpace profile for his take on rap music and rock ‘n’ roll.

Links:

Wikipedia: Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville
First Sound.org
David Giovanni’s web site.
New York Times. Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison
Sydney Morning Herald. Listen up: world’s oldest recording gets airplay
Archeophone Records
Fonotone Records
Joe Bussard’s MySpace page

Last week a number of teachers and students from the Albion Park ~ Oak Flats area of the Illawarra visited the Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway in Sydney. We were guest of the Albion Park RSL Sub Branch. The Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) serves the interests of its members, veterans, the ex-service community and members of the Australian Defence Force.

The Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway is an interesting memorial. It remembers the bravery of the Australian troops who fought through appalling conditions and against superior enemy numbers in the Papua-New Guinea campaign of July 1942-January 1943. The Australians inflicted defeat on the Japanese Imperial Army with US support. The fighting took place along the Kokoda Track.

View Larger Map

The walkway consists of a series of stations along an 800 metre walk. Each station documents an event during the campaign. There is also a larger memorial complete with a water feature and five startling images from the campaign that have been sandblasted into the walls of the memorial.

There were guides from the RSL that took small groups of three or so teachers and students from station to station. Our guides were Charlie and Lloyd. Both men had fought in the campaign and were now in their eighties. The oldest guide was 91 years of age. It was both amazing and moving to meet some of the men that were in the historical photographs displayed at the memorial.

The day was most informative and despite the heat a good day was had by all. The RSL provided lunch for all of the teachers and students as well as providing coach transport to and from the venue. They were excellent hosts.

Looking towards the main memorial

Part of the main memorial

A section of the memorial walkway

One of the stations

A selection of the indivdual memorials at the Rose Garden

The walkway is supported with an excellent web site that provides additional detail and photographs for each of the stations on the walkway. There is also a selection of oral histories with both archival and recent recordings of the ‘diggers’ on the track.

The web site constitutes an excellent resource for teachers and students of both Australian history and the history of the Pacific campaigns during the Second World War. Students undertaking Stage 5 history in NSW would particularly find this site useful as they explore the role played by Australia during the Second World War.

Links:

Kokoda Track Memorial Walkway

The Kokoda Track at www.anzacday.org.au

The Kokoda Trail at www.diggerhistory.info

The Kokoda Track Campaign at wikipedia