Mr Brown, Xiaxue and Preetam were at Woodlands Regional Library to conduct a blogging workshop this morning.
First up was Xiaxue. She talked about why she set up a blog (because she didn’t want her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriends from tearing up her paper diaries). She talked about blogging by students and requested for teachers to provide some leeway to students who blog so that they can blog freely and thus, hopefully, improving their writing skills. Some of the topics she spoke about were on privacy issues and copyright. One point she made stuck in my mind: you must be passionate about the things you write on your blog and shouldn’t be blogging for the sake of being famous.
Mr Brown was next to speak. He demonstrated to the audience how easy it is to set up accounts in Blogger and Flickr. He also showed how they are used as a combination when blogging. He also touched on podcasting and how you can use the latest version of iTunes to subscribe to podcasts and even listen on your iPods. He touched very briefly on RSS feeds and how they are used to ‘subscribe’ to feeds of the blogs you are interested in. You can do so via Bloglines, an online feed reader, or through dedicated feed readers, such as NetNewsWire (Mac) and FeedDemon (PC). Even browsers such as Firefox and Safari have in-built feed browsing technologies. The highlight of his session was when he showed the audience how he could post stuff on his blog with a photo via Flickr.
Next up was Preetam. He’s an educational technologist with Ngee Ann Poly. He showed how he teaches lecturers to use blogs, Flickr and podcasting to enhance their lessons. He showed an example of a history professor in the States who blogs/podcasts an introduction of the following week’s lesson so that his students are able to download the podcast to get an idea of the lesson. He also talked about using blogs to collaborate when doing projects, whether locally or across countries. He mentioned that students can use blogs as a way to do their revision for the day’s lesson by posting about their thoughts on the lesson taught and also adding extra information via links.
Kenny Sia, Malaysia’s most famous blogger, made a surprised visit to give moral support to the speakers as well. He was invited by the organisers to participate in the first Singapore Bloggercon held in the afternoon at DXO.
Update: A plus point for this blogging workshop was a mother. whose kids already blogs, will be starting a blog of her own.
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