Thoughts on teaching, technology, learning and life in an era of change.

Archive for November, 2008

Pompeii and Herculaneum ~ resources and links
November 10th, 2008

Students undertaking the 2 Unit Ancient History course in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate are required to complete a compulsory study of Pompeii and Herculaneum. When they attempt the relevant section in the final examination they need to answer three questions as follows:

Question 1, which usually consists of several parts, requires the students to extract relevant information from some or all of the historical sources included with the question.
Question 2 requires the students to employ historical sources and apply their own knowledge to reconstruct aspects of life in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Question 3 requires the students to refer to sources and apply their own knowledge to issues of investigating, reconstructing and preserving the past and related ethical issues.

My students are presently researching for a presentation on the life and society of the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum. They are permitted to use technology to faciliate their presentation. Each student has to collect a range of historical sources to augment their presentation. I hope to utilise a wiki or web site to collate all of their material.

I have updated a dedicated web site of links to research, resources and photographs of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Links include the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei, The Forum at Pompeii, Mazois’ famous sketches of Pompeii, CyArk’s multimedia exploration of Pompeii, the excellent QuicktimeVR panormas created by Francesca Tronchin and Diego Bonilla, an extensive gallery of images at the University of Buffalo and John Hauser’s pictures of Pompeii. I have also added a set of links to relevant galleries on Flickr.

Sootie as a kitten
November 9th, 2008

Early one morning Sootie discovered himself in the mirror. He attacked himself for some time. This was a couple of years ago when he was a kitten.

 

This post was inspired by Maru, a Scottish fold cat that lives in Japan. My wife and I discovered Maru via Boing Boing. Maru has a blog and a YouTube page.

Sri Venkateswara Temple
November 3rd, 2008

Last weekend Shao Ping and I took our Taiwanese homestay student Jenny and her boyfriend Ho Yen for a drive. We went north across Sea Cliff Bridge via the Grand Pacific Drive and up to Bald Hill to take in the view of the Pacific Ocean. We then paid a visit to Sri Venkateswara Temple which is located south of Helensburgh.

It is a beautiful temple. I shall be posting more photographs over time. The temple’s history goes back to 1978. The temple’s web site has a gallery of excellent photographs. We also had our lunch at the temple. We ate some prata with a rather nice curry plus some masala tea. Very nice indeed. I took a few photographs.

Will real newspapers bite the dust?
November 2nd, 2008

Will Richardson has written a nostalgic piece on print media, journalism and the relentless march of new media. I commented on his post and I felt, “What the heck?” and I have repeated my comments here.

I will miss the print editions of my favourite newspapers. I will not miss the local rag. Melancholy will be the order of the day in the likely event that the print editions of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian become extinct.

I enjoy sitting down to read the newspaper. It is tactile. Tangible. Turning a page determines what I will read and which photographs I will view. It is quite linear and ordered and requires little or no thinking and/or decision making on my part. I can get ‘lost’ in a broadsheet paper. The moment takes me “away”. Reading the stories, the readers’ letters, the political cartoons and the comics follows a progression that is seemingly innate.

In comparison reading the same newspaper online is nowhere near as pleasant. Which link to follow? Which section to scan? Where is the editorial? Where are the political cartoons? I cannot get lost in the moment. Too many distractions online and on the computer. I must concede that links to earlier letters to the editor and related information are indeed useful.

New media is here to stay of course. Perhaps limited print runs of newspapers will be continued for diehards such as myself.

I find reading the real newspaper to be relaxing and an effective way to de-stress. It is so good sharing the Saturday morning newspaper and its supplements with my wife as we lounge together in the living room with a cup of coffee and some breakfast.

Australian edubloggers wiki
November 2nd, 2008

Just received an email alert that the Australian eduBloggers wiki had been updated. I clicked on the link to check out the latest listings and noticed that my entry still referred to my blog as TeachTech. Thought I better update the name of my blog on the wiki.

I edited the page, changed the name from TeachTech to Watershed and updated the link to these resources for teachers. I saved the changes. Two edits in all.

Screen shot of portion of email alert text

Not long afterwards an email alert came through advising of the changes to the wiki. That alert goes out to all subscribers.

Well, the email alert indicated that I had made thirteen changes throughout the wiki. I had only made two. It did not show the updated link in the advice either. This is weird. The indicated changes in the email were identical to the replaced text. If anyone knows what happened I am all ears. Is it an Apple Macintosh Safari browser thing?