Last Thursday  morning I conducted a two hour presentation~workshop at the Singapore Airlines Training Centre, the home of the world famous Singapore Girl where the newly recruited attendants are trained. When I had worked at ICUS eLearning I had led the design for some eLearning materials for Singapore Airlines. The online courses had covered areas such as ticketing procedures and cargo handling.

Staff of the SIA Training Centre

I worked with Line Yeo, an instructional designer and senior officer with Singapore Airlines, during the development of the online courses. I first met Lina following a presentation I gave to a post-graduate class of Masters’ students in Instructional Design at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, back in July 1999. She was a member of the class which was taught by Dr Cheung Wing Sum. Wing had also taught me at the University of Wollongong during my own Masters’ Degree in 1994.

Staff of the SIA Training Centre

Lina caught my presenatation at NTU last February and asked if I could repeat the presentation for her colleagues at the SIA Training Centre. I adapted the presentation and materials to focus on the corporate sector. The presentation considered how SIA could deploy social networking tools within its various divisions and scattered international offices to develop collaborative communities. We also looked at how other airlines, such as SouthWest Airlines are using tools such as blogs and even Twitter to reach out to its customers.

Staff of the SIA Training Centre

Following the presentation I had a chat with staff and shared stories of my times in Singapore and experiences on their aircraft. I quite enjoyed the chat and it certainly raised some very sentimental and nostalgic moments for myself. I have lost count of the number of times I have flown with SIA. I am most fortunate indeed. We then retired to the canteen for morning tea. Trainees and staff were present and I grabbed the chance to take some photographs.

Relaxing in the canteen

The training centre’s canteen ~ note how the food stalls deploy SIA’s trademark font

Newly recruited SIA flight attendants ~ future Singapore Girls

Flight engineers relaxing in the canteen

The wonderful staff at Singapore Airlines, in particular Khee Boon, Linda, Catherine and also Lina, took excellent care of me during the visit. I really felt quite at home there. Everyone was courteous, friendly and very helpful.

This week I have been based at Nanyang Technological University. I arrived last Sunday via Singapore Airlines on the new Airbus A380. Amazing aircraft. It is school vacation time back in Australia so here I am in Singapore, my second home.

First up on Monday I gave a presentation to a group of educators from across the island on current trends regarding web based technologies as well as illustrating some of the possibilities relating to the application of mashups and data scraping to your RSS feeds.

Flipping between a Mac and PC

The audience begins to arrive

Lecture theatre 12 is a great venue, not too big, not too small

Nice smiling faces

On Tuesday I gave a reasonably straightforward workshop on some of the tools that one can use to manage their news feeds and bookmarks. We looked at readers, del.icio.us, blogger, wordpress and twitter. During the course of the workshops I posted micro-blogs to the ‘universe’ on Twitter to demonstrate aspects of its possibilties and the universe responded with an engaging shower of meteororic responses from Sue Wyatt, Siva, Sarah, Russel, Chris, Alec, Keamac, Helen and Jane.

I have mixed feelings about the WordPress upgrade to 2.5. There are some interface improvements. Other interface let-downs. I am  most unimpressed that it will not allow javascript in your widgets. Bad move WordPress. I just might switch blogging engines again later this year. I will certainly never use WordPress as the basis for my workshop. I will revert to Blogger. The WordPress server was slow, dead slow actually on Thursday and again on the Friday with frequent time-outs.

CED Traing Room, there is Dr Jacob Gan in the foreground

Wednesday was quite an exciting workshop. We looked at RSS feeds in a little more detail. The types of tools we explored included Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper and AideRSS. We also performed an autopsy on Google Reader to see how we could derive greater benefit from the tool. We performed CPR on Google Reader after we stitched it back up and you will be relieved to learn it performed to our expectations.

It was quite an interesting day and admittedly I was a little apprehensive as some of the technologies are a little quirky. Everything went quite well. It is quite neat when you can create an RSS feed from a site where none previusly existed. We “collected” data from a number of sites that did not possess feeds, established the feeds and then merged them into a single feed. In that manner, when the sites were updated we were informed via our readers, such as Google Reader.

More happy participants… Wednesday’s workshop was quite fun actually

Yesterday I gave a workshop at the Singapore Airlines Training Centre, the home of the world famous Singapore Girl where the newly recruited attendants are trained. During the afternoon I gave a workshop at the Hwa Chong Institution. Today I have an introductory workshop on what I call the core tools of the read~write web. I will post on those tomorrow.

In just a few hours I shall be on my way to Singapore. I will be conducting workshops at the Centre for Educational Development at Nanyang Technological University for four days.

I shall also be facilitating workshops at Temasek Polytechnic and Singapore Airlines. Then, on Friday night, a Macintosh meetup. Excellent!

Well, that was a surprise. I whipped across to Twitter not long ago and I observed a sequence of messages between Sue Tapp, Jess McCulloch and Sue Wyatt regarding a Flash Meeting. I signed up and jumped on board. There were eight teachers in the meeting at one stage… Sue Tapp, Jess McCulloch, Sue Wyatt, Sarah Stewart, NRWatkins, Simon Brown, Fiona and myself.

It was the first time many of us had used Flash Meeting. I quite enjoyed the spontaneity of it all. These asynchronous tools require a little self discipline and the evolution of protocols. A bit like CB-radio. “10-4 Good Buddy” and all that.

We chatted about potential uses and planned for regular meetings as a forum for Australian and New Zealand educators interested in regional issues down here, underneath the planet. We all reside down here, downunder, and like Atlas we prop up the rest of the edublogosphere with our solid foundations and matter of fact approach to education and the classroom. Hey! Hey! Thanks for setting it up Sue! Legend.

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