e-wot?

This is a great one-stop-shop for all your adult learning needs. click for Adult Learning wiki

A few weeks ago I went to the Chinese New Year annual Yu Sheng Lo Hei at the Straits Knowledge office in Singapore. I saw a big pile of freshly printed books, and in a quiet moment, I picked one up. It was ‘KM Approaches Methods & Tools – A Guidebook’. It looked great, so I bought one.

Since then I’ve dipped into it and I must say that it’s the best compendium of KM tools I’ve seen. The tips for facilitation are particularly useful. So here’s the pdf version for download. But really, you should buy it. It works better in book-form. It’s on my desk at work and is great to dip into. Patrick, Edgar and Wai Kong have done an excellent job in making the book, so it’s worth buying, really. Get it here.

This report caught my attention. Mainly because of the point it makes that the fastest growing segment of new Facebook users in the US is women over 55. Mothers want to keep in touch with their kids.

I say this because after reading this report I had a brief conversation with a colleague (not 55 yet, I must say) who’s just got back from leave, sending her youngest daughter off to university. It’s been tough for her. She misses her daughters. And she told me she’s now spending most of her time on Facebook to keep in touch with them. I can only imagine how she must feel. I’ve got another 15 years or so before I have to deal with that heartbreak. It must be really painful.

Facebook is a poor substitute for being with someone you love. But it’s about the best thing out there I reckon.

I couldn’t talk to her for long, because I could feel how hard it was for her to come back to work. But I hope she gets the chance to move back home, to be near her daughters. Being selfish, I’d rather she didn’t, because she’s great to be with (one of my favourite people) and one of the best we have working for us.

A thought provoking post on Classroom 2.0 by Christine Southard who highlights one aspect of an upcoming World War II history special. The producers have asked the YouTube generation to record oral histories (frome their grandparents in other words) before we lose them forever.

Great potential. Great educational project.

Ewan McIntosh nails it when he writes about Ken Robinson’s new book The Element. It’s a great blog post. Ewan reminds us

It’s not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher’s life easier) or even assessment. This is something I’ve been reporting back from research for two years (and which I’ve been blown out on more times than I can count). It’s not about letting students lead the way with technology and “show us teachers” how it’s done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.

No, it’s how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.

Great stuff. One of those blog posts that really hits the spot.

A great article from Maish Nichani. Click for How to design good educational apps for the iPhone

To sum up:

Good educational apps have the following qualities:

• Clear goals
• Useful & engaging start up screen
• Interesting gameplay
• Meaningful interactions
• Appropriate feedback

Read the article.

We don’t all have great internet connections. It’s particularly embarrassing if we try to show a video on YouTube to a class and our internet connection stops the video from playing. A more reliable method would be to download the video before class, then play it from your computer. Here’s how:

The site Jamie uses in this video is http://www.savevid.com/ it works a treat.

For more fantastic tips from Jamie on using videos in EFL classes visit his awesome blog TEFL Clips.

Over the past few days I’ve been on a mission to put our teaching centres on Google Maps. Here are a few things I’ve learnt along the way. I’m a complete newbie, but I hope this’ll be useful to someone in the same position.

1. First off, create a Google account that you can hand over to your web team when you’re done. The tags you create will be linked to that account (so don’t use your personal account, m’kay?).
2. Use Google Maps’ Local Business Centre (LBC) to create the map tags.
3. Start simple, with just the basic info for each tag you create. I made the mistake of writing complex descriptions for each tag and these had words in them that Google didn’t like – they got ‘flagged’ as ‘waiting for content check’. Here’s an explanation of what to do if this happens to you. To avoid this happening at all, don’t write a description to start off with. Add it later, once the tag goes ‘Active’.
4. Add any pics and vids later too.
5. Next, Google needs to verify you are who you claim to be. To do this, you can opt for: a phone call where they ask you to key in a PIN they give you; an SMS text message PIN to a mobile phone; something that uses the postal service (I didn’t try this)
6. If you go for the phone call option, make sure that you’re near your reception/call centre switchboard to help your receptionist key in the PIN.
7. You can do the SMS thing quite easily though, with a little workaround. Here’s what I did for three out of four of our teaching centres. I used my personal mobile number. Got a text message with a PIN in it. Entered the PIN myself. Then once the tag turned to ‘Active’, I edited the tag’s info and deleted my mobile number. Ok, yeah right… Now that seems like a big hole in Google’s security, but hey, it worked for me, and it saved me a lot of time too.  [edit 6 Oct 09 - Our WebAdmin tells me that this doesn't work anymore. It appears that Google has now spotted this loophole and fixed it. ]
8. Once all your tags are ‘Active’, go back and edit them to add descriptions and stuff.
9. the first photo you add will be the one that appears in the listing, so add the best one first. See post on this.
10. If you add video, it seems to block any images from appearing in the listing. So if you want your tag to appear in the search list with a nice pic, don’t add a video to your tag. I could be very wrong here, but this is what happened to me. Any tips for fixing this, are most welcome.

In my limited experience, the whole Google Map tag creation thing seems a bit clunky. Not very slick. Too many workarounds and uncertainties. But I got it to work OK in the end.

[edit 24 March - here's an instructional video from Google, nice... but no help in avoiding the bugs. Recently 3 out of 4 of my listings on Google Maps have vanished from the Map, although they're still in the Local Business Centre lising. I'm growing to hate Google Maps. Shame really, because it's cool when it works. It's just that it doesn't seem to work very well most of the time, which is very uncool.]