it's been another long while since there's any update to this blog, and today marks a day worth celebrating -- the long-awaited (albeit 6 months delay) revamped version of Culture Bridge is officially launched. Culture Bridge (aka 文化桥) has been the babies of multiple webmasters, and i believe the current webmaster Tan Ying 丹盈 (and 凤琳、自金 as well) must have been through a great deal of efforts to get this revamped version go live. thank you for taking over the work and giving the Bridge a new breath of life :)
am regretted for not being able to contribute to new content much as we wished to as our current "full-time parents, part-time student" portfolio is unexpectedly overwhelming. however, i shall end this post with another great news for the future development of Culture Bridge, as on this very same day, Adobe has announced that it'll release codes needed to search engine developers to make Flash content indexable! yes, until now the Flash-based Bridge has remained a 'void' to the web spiders, so what better news can there be :)
saw this new online tool mentioned in Anne Davis's post and thought it's a nice tool to try out, and best of all, you get to share your findings with other users. something about the tool:
iBreadCrumbs is...
A Social Network for Researchers
to Share Recorded URLs, Track Websites,
Review Notes Online, and Encourage
Online Collaborative Research.
to find out more, visit the site now!
2 things that came to my mind before i actually try out the tool:
1. the dynamicity of the www can lead to the fast outdating of our research. for how long would such a research 'history' be useful and how much would it benefit other fellow users?
2. organising makes info more mearningful but it takes effort and time as well if we were to review the list recorded by the tool and strike off sites that we deemed not useful. not sure if this would be too overwhleming.
will try it out soon :)
it's been eons since i last posted anything and the examinable essays are running behind me ....... *SCREAM*
ok 言归正传, saw an article by Christopher D Sessums entitled "Internet Safety Discussion and Resources" and the topic would definitely be something of interest if i were back in school now (此 school 非彼 school). some words that came as a form of reminders: "online predators", "parental supervision", "youth victimization", "cyberbullying", and there's a link to a presentation on safety entitled "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do". interesting title? but Christ reassured readers that it's a presentation on safety, but the download's very slow at my end, only clocking abt 3000bytes per second? reminds me of downloads off my good old 56kbps dial-up.
yesterday yh2 and yh juniors and yh's grandma went to visit the 'national AAAA sight seeing' venue, makes pple reflect (if pple bother to) if the grading means anything at all. reflects real badly on the country itself (i think it's not just shanghai's reputation that's at stake here). MOST if not all the interactive displays were OUT OF ORDER. cant say how disappointed yh juniors are during the visit (and grandma's impression as a visitor).
so if you are reading this post and making some plans to tour shanghai in the near future (cant say for sure how LONG they will take to fix it, if anyone bothers to fix anything since they let it deteriorate in the first place), go there if you are really bored with nowhere to go and too much cash to spare.
this is my first impression of the chinese local when i came upon this land some 8 months ago. this is so because back in singapore, we would address each other by (first) names only but here in china, friends would call out to each other names in full (last+first names). to a singaporean chinese, if someone were to call you that way, it's probably something bad that you have done :P
have not had the time to dig out the reason behind this observation and a chance arises when we were required to do a mini assignment for the cultural linguistics module. hence i used the chance to dig out some materials from the internet to get some preliminary observations. here's the report (written in Chinese) that i handed up 2+ weeks ago.
if you are a 新加坡华人 reading this post, it may interest you, though be minded that the findings are very preliminary, and further research using sociolinguistics methods with large samples is needed to uncover more about the phenomenon.
exactly 3 months ago i posted about voicethread and about 22hrs ago a comment left by a fellow singaporean CL teacher came as a pleasant surprise. he's 德顺（his students would call him 关老师）from rulang pri sch, and he has got some real voicethreads going live! check out his reflections on his experiment with his students, and be sure to drop by his collection of voicethreads too!
great work keep it up and keep the voicethreads coming :)
juz received the latest installment of preview book list from sensepublisher, here's 2 of the books that i thought are interesting to read. 2 chapters of each book can be downloaded via the provided URL:
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RETHINKING EDUCATION WITH ICT: New Directions for Effective Practices
Nicola Yelland, Greg A. Neal and Eva Dakich, Victoria University, Australia
This book brings together a number of academics who have conducted research and written about effective practices and pedagogies that incorporate the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). The book is intended for graduate and undergraduate students in Teacher Education programmes, as well as teachers and those who are interested in contemporary educational issues. The authors in this book have been engaged in rethinking education with ICT. Implicit in this, is the view that we need to reconceptualise our pedagogies and practices in order to make schools relevant to the lives of the young people who inhabit them. The chapters in this book are based on empirically grounded research work. The chapters illustrate the various dimensions of innovative practices with ICT that can extend teachers’ pedagogies and engage learners so that they are able to extend their potential for knowledge building in new and dynamic ways.
CRITICAL READINGS IN TEACHER EDUCATION: Provoking Absences
Anne Phelan, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and Jennifer Sumsion, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia(Eds.)
Like other fields of study, teacher education defines itself both by what it includes and by what it excludes. Teacher educators and researchers have spent a great deal of time seeking and attempting to eradicate the flaws in existing structures and practices, but significantly less time learning to perceive the absences. The premise of this book is that until we can identify and begin to address what is absent, teacher education will be constrained by a perennial recycling of concerns that have characterized so much of research, policy and practice to date. If teacher education is to have a different future, we need to ask different and difficult questions. This book, with contributions from theorists in Australia, Canada and the United States, addresses the challenges we face in establishing a more hopeful future for teacher education. The authors’ provocative contributions identify what is ‘missing’ in teacher education while providing critical counterpoints to existing frames of reference in the field. In writing ‘against the grain’ they open up new conceptual spaces and exciting trajectories for a different teacher education.
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