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!

This afternoon Shao-Ping, myself and our two guests from Taiwan, Claire and Kelly, went for a drive south through the Illawarra, past my school at Albion Park and then up Macquarie Pass to the top of the Illawarra Escarpment. A new tourist attraction opened on the escarpment two weeks ago ~ The Illawarra Fly.

What is the Illawarra Fly you ask? A large insect of the order Diptera with dimensions not unlike the Big Banana at Coffs Harbour? Perhaps a massive opened zipper comparable in size to the Big Pineapple at Nambour? Well, thank goodness, the Illawarra Fly is not a kitsch piece of titanic tourist trash. It is a tree-top walk along the edge of the Illawarra escarpment.

We arrived at the ‘fly‘, bought our tickets and made our way through the temperate rainforest to the structure. It is quite high and I am not one for heights actually. Not sure why. I climbed Uluru when I was 14 and I have even been on two tandem skydives from 4000 metres but some heights still get to me. I ventured out on to the structure and began taking photographs. I will admit that I did not climb the tower. Perhaps next time.

The views north and east across the Illawarra escarpment are sensational. You can see all of the peaks conquered by my alter ego Larry as a member of the Adventurers’ Club. Mount Kembla, Mount Keira and Broker’s Nose are all there. The Illawarra looks like a nice place to live and work, eh? I car-pool with Diamond and Horse from the Adventurers’ Club.

Looking north towards Wollongong in the distance and the Illawarra Escarpment

Beneath us lay Albion Park and the Yellow Rock region. Due east is Shellharbour. The Pacific Ocean spreads out along the eastern horizon. The weather was perfect for the adventure.

Yellow Rock and Albion Park countryside

Following the tree top walk we made our way back through the forest and I took a few more photographs. I think I took 71 in all. I should create a new gallery.

A massive tree ~ I do not know the species…

Shao Ping, Claire and Kelly

After that we drove back down the mountain and through the dairy farms. Claire and Kelly jumped at the opportunity to photographs the cows in the late afternoon light.

Contented cows. They’re not thinking about joining a Diigo group.

Now for part 2 of my story. Part 1 is here. The Good To Great 2008 Teaching and Learning Seminar at Nanyang Technological University concluded on Thursday afternoon. There were a number of workshops where the threads of the conference were drawn together and presented to the attendees at the final session. The participants in my group considered issues such as the bridges that need to built to connect teachers and learners. The obstacles that one could encounter were considered and finally the first steps that one needs to take were discussed among the group.

How can we build bridges between teachers and students?

There were some very creative teachers in the group and one collection of teachers produced the following two illustrations…

Two challenges faced by teachers in utilising technology in teaching and learning.

A first step that can be taken by teachers in using technology in the classroom…

During the course of this workshop I fired up Twitter and posed the questions to the ‘universe’. Sue Waters [blog ~ twitter] of the Edublogger and Willis Whitlock [blog ~ twitter] graciously responded and I shared their timely and informative input live with the participants. It was quite neat to be able to demonstrate this tool ‘live’ per se. Thank you very much Sue and Willis! Much appreciated!

Sue and Willis contribute to the discussion via Twitter.

I am not a frequent user of Twitter. I received some feedback about Twitter at the seminar. One commentator confused Twitter with Skype and declared that they would stick to Skype. I find it difficult to understand how anyone could confuse Twitter with Skype. Two completely different tools with two completely different functions. Like comparing apples with aadvarks. By the way, Sue Waters, just published another excellent post about Twitter and some of the tools that you can use to access the messages and embedded urls. Sue is a legend. Sue wished to know how the participants had responded. I shall get a transcript of their work and share it with Sue and all that read this blog.

We all explored Twitter and WebNode

I conducted a couple of more workshops on a variety of tools including WebNode, WordPress and podcasting. I worked quite hard and I think all of the participants had a beneficial time. Some of my workshop participants are pictured above and below.

Together we explored podcasting, blogging and webnode. Too much for one day!

During the course of the week the conference presenters and delegates were supported by the brilliant team at the Centre for Educational Development and student helpers. They were all very helpful and totally committed to ensuring everyone had an excellent expereience.

The excellent team of the CED

June, far right, with the wonderful student volunteers

At the end of the day, Friday, I packed up and together with Sheryl and Vivien of the Centre for Educational Development at NTU took a taxi directly from the university to the new T3 terminal at Singapore’s Changi International Airport and we shared dinner. It was a wonderful way to conclude the week. Vivien and Sheryl are excellent company and we had a great evening. They bid me farewell at the gate and I took a Singapore Airlines flight back home to Australia.

Vivien and I

Sheryl and I

Our excellent dinner!

Vivien tries the spicy soup!

The last few days have been flat out. On Tuesday I ran an all day a pre-conference workshop. Tools that the participants were able to explore included WordPress [doc], Swickis [doc], del.icio.us bookmarks [doc], Flickr [doc] and Twitter [doc]. It was an interesting workshop and the participants seemingly had a good time.

Web 2.0 workshop participants 

On Wednesday I gave a presentation on the read~write web and current developments in the area including mashups, Yahoo Pipes and scraping of sites througgh the use of tools such as Dapper. Some of the audience members are pictured below.

The audience 

NTU has an excellent set up and my presentation was recorded by Ian and the team pictured below.

Ian, centre, and her team of helpers 

At the conclusion of the presentations myself, Tom Reeves, Sheryl Wong, Paul Gagnon and Westley Field grabbed a few quick photographs. The Good To Great Seminar has been excellent and there has been a lot of buzz and excitement. I shall be coming back up to Singapore in April to follow up on some of the workshops and presentations of this week.

Myself, Tom, Sheryl, Paul and Westley 

One evening Tom, Westley and I went out for a drink and dinner. We had a beer by Boat Quay and then I took them both for a walk down South Bridge Road to Chinatown. I grabbed a quick photograph of Westley and Tom by Speakers’ Corner. We ate at the Tai Pei Eating House and then went for a walk around Chinatown followed by a visit to the Sri Mariamman Temple. We then walked back to the hotel, past Clarke Quay, across the river and up Victoria Street.

Westley and Tom settle a point of debate. 

Last night I caught up with Siva, Airani and Anand. We had a jolly good time. I drank four or more ice-lemon teas and consumed a healthy amount of popiah and tucked into an incredibly rich fish-head curry that just about blew my head off. It certainly cleaned out the cobwebs from system. 

Anand and myself 

Aiarani, myself and Siva

This morning I awoke early, reworked a powerpoint for today’s presentation and went downstairs and grabbed a taxi to Hougang Primary School. Wai Tuck, my friend at the school had emailed some teaching programmes from the school and I generated some ideas for possible podcasting scenarios in preparation for today’s podcast workshop. I arrived at the school at 7:30AM and Wai Tuck graciously organised some breakfast for me. I had spaghetti with a spicy curry, plus some juice, fruit and coffee. Singaporean schools have excellent canteens with a large variety of freshly cooked hot food ~ Chinese, Malay, Indian and even Western food. I had a nice curry with rice, chicken and dried anchovies for lunch as well. Beautiful!

Hougang Primary School is a neighbourhood school. It is surrounded by Housing Development Board blocks and sits opposite Hougang Secondary School. It is an incredible primary school. It is four storeys high. It is colourfully decorated throughout. It is has incredible facilities and includes an agricultural plot, live animals and birds, a fernery, climbing walls and even a modern, well-equipped dental facility. The technology facilities are also incredible. The students were polite, graceful, greeted me as they passed and made one feel most welcome. That is one thing I miss a great deal when I am back in Australia. I shall post a gallery of photographs tonight if I have time.

I conducted two podcast workshops today. One was held in the morning from 9:00AM to 12:30PM for those staff that taught during the afternoon shift at the school. Then I conducted a second workshop from 1:30PM till 4:30PM for those staff that taught in the morning. Singaporean teachers do work very hard. The school day starts with assembly at 7:30AM each day and completes at 6:00PM. There were about 90 participants in all. All of the participants were attending the workshop during their free time. The teachers often conduct and supervise extra curricular activities before or after teaching time and as a result the average teacher is spending approximately ten hours each day at school.

It was quite a task today. I covered GarageBand [pdf], Audacity [pdf], Quicktime [pdf], ProfCast [pdf] and Propaganda [pdf] during the course of the three hours. During the afternoon session I added Blogger and illustrated how easy it is easy to set up a vodcast using Blogger and a simple RSS feed subscription in iTunes. The upload did not go that smoothly however I think I managed to get the point across. I have added some photographs of the participants below. Resources utilised for the podcast workshop can be found at this dedicated page.

At the end of the day I went for a tour around the school and then took a number 235 bus to Hougang MRT and caught a train to Clarke Quay MRT. I walked up Eu Tong Sen Street to the Funan Centre, banked the cheque I received for today’s workshop and walked back to the hotel. Took a break, wrote this post and now I will grab a bite to eat. I am off to Nanyang Technological University in the morning to conduct a pre-conference workshop. Topics being covered tomorrow include WordPress [pdf], Swickis [pdf], del.icio.us bookmarks [pdf], Flickr [pdf], Twitter [pdf] and whatever takes the participants fancy in that wild and woolly world that is the read~write web.