Back yesterday morning from Sydney, was hit most significantly and almost immediately by our most _wonderful_ weather here (29-34C, >90% humidity) *hmm*
It was a short, yet enriching trip. Heard many wonderful presentations and thought it would be most appropriate to capture my limited understanding here while memories are still fresh 🙂
There are two main streams of blogging in effect:
(1) Social blogging (with emphasis on political blogging)
(2) Edublogging (with more papers from higher education settings)
I’ll start by looking through the keynotes and invited speakers.
1. Thomas N. Burg on “technologyLog – innovating knowledge sharing”
The work on innovation “technologyLog” is introduced. It is a platform in development that has many features. And the whole thought behind this whole development is the need for innovation in order for a corporation to move forward. With social interaction and democratising innovation as the requirements for innovation, perhaps that’s why a major part of the engine is blog or blog-related.
Slide 6 is interesting, as it captures the adoption cycle of any form of innovation (not restricted to the use of blogging). Particularly the chasm, if we look at ourselves as early adopters/visionaries, we’ll need to bridge the gap(s) before the early major pragmatists will come on-board. This reminds us that when we introduce portfolio using blogs, we are in fact faced with TWO CHASMS and not just one to address.
Some other interesting discussion on this presentation can be found here.
(to be continued …)
National Interschool Blogging Championship – update
The NIBC 2005 launch was on last friday. Couldnt be there and heard from Guat Kheng that everything went smoothly. Looks like the news for this competition is catching up everywhere, locally and abroad. Check out some of them:
TODAYonline reports
SG Gov Official Press Release
Weblogg-ed
Couros Blog
Witness the competition here from 1st Jun onwards.
It’ll be interesting to see how some of (edu)bloggers from abroad react to the existence of the competition 🙂
Blogging off the conference venue
This is the 2nd day of the BlogTalk Downunder, in the midst of a presentation in fact 😛
Great exchange of ideas had went on between the presenters and the participants. Yesterday’s presentations were more on social/political blogging and today we see more edublogging lined up. Will follow up with findings later, back to listen to the presentation.
Visit the conference blog first for the postings streaming.
Portfolio Building in Chinese Language Learning Using Blogs
Just to blog our paper submitted for BlogTalk DownUnder 2005 for future reference 😐
Fun with English – Showcasing local stories
After 5-6 months of blogvangelism, not sure how many of our workshop participants has actually realised the use of edublogs in their teaching and learning. If you are one of them reading this post and you have been/started introducing blogs to your students, do let us know 😉
As I have shared with Jeanne the other day, (edu)blogs, unlike other edtech, can quite easily be integrated into existing classroom practices. So from now on, we are going to embark on another dimension of our sharing, to scout for local Singapore examples of teachers who too have experimented with edublogs.
So, to get our “Showcasing local stories” series going, the first one that I am going to share is the “Fun with English” blog, by Mrs Letitia Tan from Beatty Sec School.
Mrs L Tan is an EL teacher. Gathered from her blog, she would like to “interest students in the eng language” via “spontaneous writing in a more creative and casual way”. Great!
She has employed the students 1-to-1 approach of using blogs on Blogger.com, so in her blog, she has linked up to the blogs of classes 3E2 and 3E4 students.
To start everything going in the right perspective, she has set ground rules for the students to follow. Read on if you are interested to find out more!
Continue reading “Fun with English – Showcasing local stories”