Blind Cricket

Here is a clip about how the visually impaired can still play cricket.

Re PowerPoint

On Saturday I did an advanced PowerPoint course at CityU. I was unable to do a basic PowerPoint course, I guess I will have to pick that up from somewhere. I did not realize how much you could do with PowerPoint. At Christmas I switched from Open Office to MS Office and started using MS Word. In January I was required to work with Excel, and now PowerPoint. They are all from the same stable which means a lot of the buttons do the same thing. I thought that text dancing across the screen was pretty cool. However, animations, music to suit, the occasional drum roll, the odd movie popped in for good measure. There is a lot more to PowerPoint than I was aware of. I was transfixed by the displays. I teach the younger students and I imagine that they would be transfixed as well. I think I will go to You Tube to try and find basic PowerPoint tutorial. Probably the most useful button in PowerPoint/Excel/Word is the ? button, the help files, they may have the answer to your question right there !

Just a point

I used to work at a language training centre where they used computers and You Tube a lot. The parents wanted instant results with the computer games their children played in class. Second Life could hardly be called a quick fix, it is very much a long term thing. So, how do you explain that to the parents ?

Hungry ?

If you are hungry today just remember there are some people out there who are even hungrier than you are !
Go and visit The Hunger Site and make a donation of food at no cost to yourself. There are other sites there as well, go and visit them and donate.

The National Palace Museum Taipei,

If anybody gets the chance to go to Taipei, do go and see the National Palace Museum. This has the world's largest collection of Chinese artifacts. When my ancestors were dodging wolves and bears in England, Chinese people were writing, painting, making exquisite bronze pots and creating all sort of artifacts. If you are Chinese, go and see the museum, if you are not Chinese, go and see it anyway ! Gong Hay Fat Choi !

The FBI has developed new technology to save the world from terrorism, click here for a demonstration !

An Inital Proposal

I have some serious reservations about “Games” such as Second Life. In Bangkok in 1994 I used a game with students called The Oregon Trail. This proved to be extremely popular with the students, less so with the administrative staff and probably the parents. By and large Thais are extremely conservative. I would imagine that many parents might object to “games” being played by their children. To be truthful regarding Second Life I have only had a brief glimpse of it. Judging by some of my peers comments on their blogs they got a lot further with it than I did. A trip around the Globe Theatre for instance really intrigued me. If it fired my imagination, I wonder if it would fire a student’s imagination. Judging by my experience in Bangkok in 1994 I would have said that students would be fascinated by it. Perhaps field trips could be organized with trips around the world without ever having left the classroom. Maybe students could keep blogs about their travels.

My guess is my generation is probably the last generation that has not had constant exposure to computers. Things have changed a lot with computers. In 1990 I helped a woman buy a PC. It had a large hard disk by the standards of those days, 20Mb. Nowadays computers are far smaller, far quicker and with massive capacities by comparison. Further in a few more years they will have improved further.

In the past I have given ex students my e mail and Windows Live Messenger and SKYPE name. Very few students bother to keep in touch. With hind sight keeping a history of conversations would be a really good idea. http://thefoomeister.blogspot.com/ has a suitable caution about online behavior on dated 31 January 2010. I wonder if SL allows you to speak and listen to other players you meet. If anybody has information on that please let me know.

What I would propose is taking a more in depth look at SL, particularly with a view to being able to talk and listen, (maybe this could be done with another programme like SKYPE running in a different window. One thing that I think was very relevant was SL is not the sort of game (?) that you would be able to spend 20 minutes with and be able to do anything useful. I would imagine it would take many sessions just to master the controls. Then again maybe the students would be able to lead their teacher around and show them how to do things. The question then would be who was helping who ? The answer might just be does it matter ?