ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

STUDENTS, DO YOU GO ONLINE while attending a face-to-face (f2f) class? Where do you surf and what do you use? So far, has going online helped or hindered you (the learner), other learners and/or the instructor? What happens when your phones have Internet access too?

Most likely, your class is NOT going to be as exciting as this one (left), where the professor gamely laid on a bed of nails while someone else tried to break a cement block on him with a sledgehammer! In such a case, you are likely to be distracted by a backchannel.

As Chris Lott put it, “…regardless of what a participant has at hand– a backchannel, a laptop, a cell phone, a book, or a set of Legos– they are not and never will direct 100% of their attention forward and they will find ways to create the attention cycles that characterize engagement. I was able to ignore… incompetent teachers just fine back when the only thing digital [we] had access to was a watch.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sat in a very interesting module, “Storytelling in Research and Practice”, last night. We started by watching the recording of an excellent stage play called “Handle with Care”. An ethnographical performance based on qualitative research among women with metastatic breast cancer.

The theme seems to be “Fear blocks people’s ears”: Fear in the patient and fear among the patient’s relatives and friends. So marvellously executed. Constantly bombarding the audience with multiple points of views — a young woman, a middle-aged one, an elderly one; the whiner, the “never-say-dier”; the the mother, the daughter/son, the husband, the neighbour, the doctor(s); how others’ apparent concern and advice could be “smothering” or “just wanting to know ‘You’re feeling fine’ “; becoming “invisible” once perceived as sick; issues of “control” versus “no control”; “hope” for cure, less pain, longer life, emotional support…. Truly thought-provoking and ever so witty. Read the rest of this entry »

Attended the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE) 2005 at NIE last week, from Wednesday (20 Nov) to Friday (2 Dec).

Useful, informative and great for meeting people. Also had a great physical workout — climbing flights of stairs to LT1A (at NTU) for the 9am and 1.30pm keynotes, striding quickly every one or two hours from LT to LT (lecture theatre) at one end of the NIE cluster of buildings to the other, lugging along (among other things) a notebook PC, an iPod (with iTalk), a small digital camera and brochures from the exhibitors. By the second day, I’d left the hardcopy 985-page proceedings at home and started referring to the softcopy CDs instead.

One great pity though — 10 concurrent tracks full of interesting information and there’s only one me. If only I could easily switch channels… if only the conference organizer had made use of 10 virtual rooms in addition to the 10 physical rooms for the speakers to present their papers! Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting piece of information from a recent report in BusinessWeek Online (curiously dated November 28, 2005), dubbing wikis as “Killer Wikis”:

…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

Read the rest of this entry »