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.

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.