Arrived home yesterday afternoon.

The distance from Singapore to Sydney is 6300 kilometres. The flight took just under 7 hours. At various times during the flight the tail wind was approximately 140 kmh. That pushed us along a little faster than normal.

In comparison, the distance from Sydney to Wollongong is about 85 kilometres. I arrived in Wollongong 3 hours after arriving in Sydney. Long story, long wait and 3 coaches involved.

I was going to meet up with some teachers in Sydney that evening yet had decided against it a couple of days before due to the possible impact of the World Youth Day celebrations upon traffic. I was also simply exhausted.

This post was blogged via MarsEdit on the Mac. I am also trying out NetNewsWire as a feedreader as it integrates with Mars Edit. Shall see how it goes.

I have been playing around with a visualisation of RSS feeds. I began by creating a collage of logos and headings in Adobe Photoshop Elements. I was then going to create bezier curved lines with arrows. This was not possible in Elements. This is a work in progress.

Not too sure how to label semantic tools like AideRSS, Yahoo Pipes! and Dapper. They all filter and/or mix feeds. They could also be placed between the various RSS sources and the news aggregators in the centre. Then of course the RSS feeds from the news aggregators can be fed into tools like NetVibes and Pageflakes. Feeds from the aggregators could also be pumped back into blogs, and so on.

Just a start. Still have the PSD file with all the layers.

Chris posted this nice link on Twitter a moment ago. He was asking what could be added to this set of resources?

http://betchablog.wikispaces.com/Learning+is+a+Conversation

If you have read my previous three posts you will realise that I am presently working in Singapore. Conducting a number of workshops. Yesterday I conducted a workshop that was organised by Keith See from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

Read~write web workshop, Singapore, July 11th 2008.

I had received an email from Keith in early April of this year inquiring about Web 2.0 workshops. I assumed that Keith may have attended my presentation at the Good To Great Teaching Seminar here in Singapore last February and found out about my work as a result of that.

Yesterday, being curious, I asked Keith how did he track me down. Keith replied that he had found me via a Google search on Web 2.0 related topics (workshops, Singapore) and it was my del.icio.us bookmarking site that had first caught his eye and then my site. I was amazed to hear that. Good old del.icio.us bookmarks. Social bookmarking works for me!

St Joseph’s Institution, Singapore.

Yesterday. My first full day in Singapore on this trip. Did not sleep much the first night. Too much on my mind. Getting past the first workshop or presentation is always a bit of a hurdle. Not sure why. Anxiety, probably. Those stage-fright tensions. Always feel it even though I have been doing this sort of thing since 1994. Once the curtain is raised I feel fine.

I conducted the first workshop at St Joseph’s Institution Junior School [wikipedia entry]. The campus is located on the site of the former St Michael’s School in Novena. It is a primary school. The workshop consisted of presentation and a hands-on component. There were teachers from a variety of schools across Singapore. About 30 teachers in all.

St Joseph’s Institution Junior School. Condominiums in the background.

Time was at a premium and I attempted to make the most of it. I created a presentation ppt yet that is more for the benefit of the participants as they make notes on the hard copy as I usually flick across to a browser and show them examples of the tools at work.

The teachers were quite reserved which is not unusual and I always look for ways to break the ice like singing a song in mandarin, sharing some anecdotes about history and so on.

Once the questions begin and then things begin to bubble along and the workshop thrives. I am always grateful for that first question. I think all of the other participants are too. We looked at eduBlogs, Twitter, QR Codes, QR Codes generators, Flickr, Compfight, Posterous and Plurk among others. I shared some of the wikis made by my Year Eleven students and blogs written by my Year Nine students. The participants also received Twitter greetings from acroamatic, janelowe, isaakkwok, skytrystsjoy, syamsul and catspyjamasnz. More materials and downloads can be found here.

Ming Liang, Keith, Chan Chuan and Feliz (l to r)

The workshop was organised by Keith See from the Infocom Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). His colleagues, Chan Chuan and Feliz were also in attendance. The IDA is working in tandem with the Ministry of Education on a number of innovative projects including the Edvantage Programme, Future Schools@Singapore and iAccess~Interactive Learning Trails. There are many more projects. Singapore is an island state. Its main resource are the children of Singapore. As well as my presentation there was a demonstration by Ng Ming Liang of G Element Pte Ltd of Earth@SG and several impressive geographic visualisation tools being developed for use in teaching and learning.

The day concluded about 5.30PM or thereabouts and I congratulated the teachers for their attentiveness on a late Friday afternoon. The likelihood of that happening with teachers in Australia is not as high. Once that Australian school bell rings at 3.30PM there is a stampede, with the teachers leading the charge, and the school is empty by 3.35PM, with the dust barely settled.

Chinatown

I chatted with some of the teachers after that and we then began to make tracks for our respective digs. Jumped on the MRT and alighted at Outram Park. I eventually ended up in Chinatown and had dinner at my favourite haunt. I have been eating in this ‘coffee shop’ for about nine years now. I used to work just around the corner. Ate the usual and slowly consumed a nice drop of Tiger beer with the owner of the coffee shop.

Tiger Beer

Then, unwinding. I sat for a while, thought about the day, watched the world go by, finished the beer, cooled down and then caught a train and bus back to the NTU campus.

Arrived in Singapore last night for a week of workshops. I am staying at Nanyang Technological University.

Scenery at Nanyang Technological University

Today I shall be going across to St Joseph’s Institution [wikipedia entry] to share some ideas with a number of teachers regarding blogging and other read~write tools. It will be a busy workshop. Too much to do but I am sure we will all get there. I have uploaded some resources for the participants here.

Saw a tweet by Al Upton this afternoon. As follows:

alupton HELP … need help to validate the Fiery Red Leather http://tinyurl.com/6c28v7 margarita … needs to be googleable

I followed the link and discovered that a Wikipedia entry will be deleted if Wikipedia cannot find the term or listing in a Google search. The exact wording is as follows:

It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern: Cannot find mention of drink in a Google search. Seems to fall under WP:NFT

Now, I find that unusual. The Wikipedia entry is for a Fiery Red Leather, which is a type of drink. See the entry below.

I never realised that Wikipedia used Google as one of its verification methods. I wonder if that is valid?

Let’s all save Al Upton’s Wikipedia entry by blogging about a night out drinking a Fiery Red Leather or two down at Al Upton’s Bar and Grill. Perhaps some of you more experienced drinkers could mix up one or maybe two Fiery Red Leather drinks, take a photograph and upload it to the Wikipedia page.

This morning I blogged about Swurl. I praised the tool. It has a clean, uncluttered interface and the timeline is stunning. The manner in which it updates is mesmerising. I was also impressed with the manner in which Jonathan, one of the developers responded directly via email to my problem regarding Flickr feed subscriptions. I added in my post that Swurl would not suit my needs and I was also concerned that anyone could comment, for example spammers, on any of your aggregated feeds as published in Swurl.

Both developers Jonathan and Ryan commented on my post. That is excellent. I am always impressed when developers respond in this manner. I would like to re-publish the comments here as a tip of the hat to Jonathan and Ryan. Swurl is a clean and easy to use tool and it deserves mention. The comments are as follows:

Jonathan Neddenriep Says: 

Thanks for the post about Swurl!

The badge idea is interesting - we’ve talked about that although up to this point we haven’t had time to work on things like that. We’d love to implement this in the future, although a third party developer could also use our API to do this.

As far as comments - yes, spam is an issue we’ve thought about. To this point we haven’t had a problem with it, but we have some safeguards in place to easily delete spam if it gets to be a problem. Also, you can simply double-click a comment to remove it.

Thanks for trying out Swurl and stay tuned, we have more cool stuff planned!!

My reply

Thanks Jonathan. I am incredibly impressed with your response and the promptness of it. I am glad to see that you have your fingers on the pulse. I shall keep an eye out for a badge. I like the way the Jaiku badge has been implemented ~ hint, hint. ^_^
Best wishes, John

Ryan Says

A badge would be cool, but right now we designed Swurl to become your main blog. You should try it out, Swurl is actually a pretty cool blogging system. If you totally wouldn’t do that, let us know why, we would love the learn how to make Swurl good enough to become your blogging engine. If that turns out to be unpopular we could always try another direction.

My reply

Ryan, Thank you so much for your comment. I hope I have not stirred the pot too much. Please let me know.

That is an interesting idea that Swurl could be your main blog. In my case I do not think I could switch over to Swurl entirely and allow it to become my main blog or gateway. Like many bloggers I have invested a lot of energy in my blog and its associated site. I have set up a self hosted Wordpress blog and obtained a domain name, etc.

If Swurl was to become my main blog I would like to be able to post to it directly, just like a blog. Self hosting would need to be a consideration as well. I never considered Swurl as a replacement for my blog. I was hoping it could augment my blog and act as a junction point for all my activity on my site and blog, much in the same way as the Jaiku badge.

Personally, I am impressed with the Swurl interface and the the timeline. The manner in which blog posts, tweets and the like update is impressive. Your design is clean and uncluttered.

Swurl would be great for new bloggers, but they would need to be able to post to the Swurl blog directly. Yet, most users with Twitter, Flickr, and similar feeds probably already have a blog. There lies a conundrum. How to attract new users and existing bloggers to direct all their readers to their Swurl account as their main gateway on the net? Many probably will but not all.

Cheers, John.

During the last week read a few reports about Swurl. I have some good news and a point that I think is not so good. Some background, the good news and then some potential bad news follows. [Please not my addendum too]

The initial reference to the tool that caught my eye was made by Jane on her excellent eLearning Pick of the Day blog. I was then impressed with the screen shot on the Read/Write Web review of the tool. Since then Silvia Tolisano and Alan Levine have blogged about the tool.

I have been looking for something to replace my Jaiku badge as its servers are down quite often and I cannot perceive that any changes have been made to Jaiku since Google purchased the company last October. I thought that perhaps Swurl was the answer. As I mentioned I was impressed with the screen shot published as part of the report. I thought, “Could this replace my Jaiku badge?”

After reading the review I skipped over to Swurl and signed up. I was able to plug into my blog, twitter, del.icio.us and Last.FM feeds. That was all. For some reason I could not plug into my Flickr feed. I made several attempts. No luck.

So, I left a question on their suggestion page. More on that in a moment. Anyway, this morning I received an email from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. He is pictured here with the other chap behind Swurl, Ryan. These gentlemen are real. Their feedback is excellent. This is impressive.

Jonathan mentioned in the email that they had added an additional feature that allowed you to enter the full url of your Flickr account. It worked for me. I could switch on Flickr. I think this level of support is brilliant. Simply outstanding. That is the good news.

Now, Swurl is good but it is not the solution for me. I was after a sidebar badge that could replace Jaiku but it was not to be. Perhaps one day Swurl will have a badge that I can embed on my home page. The Jaiku badge there takes in all my feeds (except Twitter ~ my choice) and it acts like a “What’s New” for my site and feeds. 

Now, for the not so good point. There is one thing that concerns me about Swurl. When you mouse over any post or entry on your Swurl page a hidden comment field appears. Anyone can comment. What if spammers get a hold of this? It could become a nightmare. Even each individual Twitter post allows for comments. See below.

The comment feature needs to have controls not unlike that of a blog in my opinion. This has been raised on the Swurl suggestion page.

Addendum. Now for some more good news. This blog post has received a comment from Jonathan Neddenriep at Swurl. These guys are brilliant! Please read Jonathan’s comment below. Excellent.

Just completed an iChat with Westley Field. He is a much traveled chap. He is in London doing this and that. Anyway, here he is, having breakfast with Richard Millward, an educator delving into learning, technology and its development through his research and development work with Core Education UK and the IDIBL project in the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton.

Good morning gentlemen

Richard and I laughed about our foreheads. I then sent Westley, via iChat, the link to my previous post about QR Codes and asked Westley and Richard to check out my forehead replete with my blog’s QR Code.

I explianed QR Codes to Westley and to my surprise Richard grabbed his phone which had software capable of reading QR Codes. He pointed his mobile phone at the QR code on my blog and, on cue, my blog appeared on Richard’s mobile phone. Now, I think that is quite neat.

Proof of concept ~ the QR Code pointed to my blog

We chatted a bit and I provided Westley with some pointers for a presentation he must be doing later. I have a knack at being in the right place at the right time when it comes to Westley. And vice versa.

How did I create this post? I took the screen shots of the iChat session using SharpShooter. I imported the images into Comic Life and added the word balloons, etc. I exported the Comic as a jpeg image and then resized each image it in Adobe Photoshop Elements and exported it using the Save For Web… option which allows you to fine tune file size and quality. I used CyberDuck to upload the two images.