During the last couple of days I have sorted through photographs taken during my last two trips to Singapore in February and April of this year. I still have a few photographs to organise. I have created a number of new galleries and added them to the galleries of my main web site.

April 2008 ~ Singapore

Kampong Glam and Arab Street with Alan and Westley.
Workshop at Singapore Airlines Training Centre.
Hwa Chong Institution Workshop and Presentation.
Macintosh Meet-up with the team from Me@n.
Nanyang Technological University ~ Read-Write Web Workshops and Presentation.

February 2008 ~ Singapore

Friends and Food ~ eating out with Tom Reeves, Westley Field, Siva, Airani, Anand, Vivien and Sheryl.
Good To Great 2008 Teaching and Learning Seminar, Nanyang Technological University.
Hougang Primary School.
Hougang Primary School Podcasting Workshops.
Chinatown.
Views of Singapore from the Peninsular Hotel. Day and night.
Changi International Airport ~ The new T3 Terminal.
First flights on the Singapore Airlines Airbus A380.

There were a number of other catch-ups with friends and culinary delights that I am going to blog about specifically in the near future, so please stay posted.

During the course of this week in Singapore I have experienced some rather impressive thunderstorms and downpours. I captured a few of the moments on my trusty little camera while walking around Nanyang Technological University where I have been conducting a series of workshops and a presentation.

The rain is pelting down

The drains are pushed to the max

Drenching rains and running drains

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.

I have been staying at the Nanyang Executive Centre at Nanyang Technological University during the last week. At the end of each day I usually grab dinner at one of the canteens on the campus and then walk back to the NEC. I relax a little and even watch a little of the local television. Shao Ping and I used to watch the local channels here during the years that we lived in Singapore.

It was good to catch a guest appearance by Kym Ng on the game show Deal or No Deal. She is my favourite Singaporean personality. It was hosted by Adrian Pang. I have always enjoyed watching the movie Forever Fever in which Adrian Pang played the lead. Some great footage of Singapore in that flick. Anyway, there are some photographs of the local media below for your enjoyment.

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.