Monthly Archive for August, 2006Page 2 of 4

Presentation

Published
by
acroamatic
on Wednesday, 23 August 2006
in Personal and Tech
. 2 Comments

blogs_mindmap

I ran my Blogs & RSS presentation by my non-techie colleagues this afternoon.

Some stuff I want to improve:

  • Make the visuals more impactful. No. To begin with, get more visuals. My presentation is quite texty.
  • The RSS portion descended into chaos. I need to be sure of my sequence, and note exactly what examples I should use. Less jumping back and forth between PowerPoint, FreeMind and Firefox.
  • Need to up my energy levels. My lethargy carried over to the audience. To mitigate, the presentation was after lunch…
  • Need to be more interactive. It started off fine but became one-way towards the RSS bit. Then again, that’s the part which is confusing.
  • Without going into tagging and other cool and useful things, it’s hard to drive home the utility of feeds. But at the same time, not introducing these meant fewer things for the audience to digest, which is a good thing.
  • Will have to carefully pack what I need. This time, I ran it through a remote desktop connection. While it was fine today, I can’t assume it’ll be fine on Monday. Must plan multiple backups.
  • Can’t assume the presentation PC has Firefox. And it definitely will not have FreeMind. In times like these, I wish I had a laptop. Can use the office laptop, but it won’t be the same.

On the bright side:

  • The mindmap handout was well received.
  • I think my colleagues had a much better understanding of blogs and feeds after I was done. Particularly, I’ve erased the notion that blogs are purely for personal use/gratification.

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Copywriting

Published
by
acroamatic
on Wednesday, 23 August 2006
in Fun and Media Watch
. 6 Comments

Incompetent copywriter or copywriter with a vendetta?

Just got this off Mr Brown’s site. It was originally posted on Adrants. The ad is for Imedeen’s skin care pills.

i swallow

In case you can’t read the text:

“My secret to beautiful skin? I swallow.”

So now, we know.

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The new Batmobile

Published
by
acroamatic
on Thursday, 17 August 2006
in Fun and Photos
. 7 Comments

batmobile

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31st or 36th?

Published
by
acroamatic
on Wednesday, 16 August 2006
in Media Watch
. 0 Comments

Mr Wang points out an article in today’s Straits Times which says that NUS has been ranked 31st in Newsweek’s Top 100 Global Universities list.

There is a slight problem with this. Newsweek’s article lists NUS at 36. University of British Columbia is 31st.

Ooops.

Update Apparently, in the print edition, there were ties for 13th, 14th, 24th and 28th. That doesn’t push NUS’ ranking higher. E.g. if three schools are tied at 13th, the next school is 16th, not 14th.

P.S. I don’t particularly care about the rankings. I do care about creative reporting.

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On teaching English grammar

Published
by
acroamatic
on Wednesday, 16 August 2006
in Musings
. 1 Comment

What's wrong?

I confess. I know almost nothing about grammar.

That is to say, I don’t know what past perfect means or even if there is such a thing. Nor do I know the definition of a phrase or a subordinate clause. Subordinate… ordinal… mathematics?

So, it was interesting reading the problems native speakers are facing with teaching grammar. An anonymous secondary school English teacher from Sydney questions the place of teaching formal grammar in the curriculum. The blog entry also touches briefly on the socio-political factors surrounding the Australian grammar crisis.

While the situation in Singapore differs, we should be asking the same question: Where is the place of formal grammar in schools?

I’m a bad case study because I come from an English-speaking home. I know that English, as it is spoken/written in Singapore, is often a result of thinking in another language and translating the output.

Force feeding grammar won’t work. The anonymous English teacher quotes Dr Ken Watson, apparently “an English educator of international repute”, alluding to a possible solution:

The study of rhetoric, the art of effective speaking and writing, was a central part of education from classical times, and in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the study of rhetoric was part of the trivium (rhetoric, grammar and logic). The grammar studied was, of course, Latin grammar. Centuries later, as Latin gave way to English as a key subject in the curriculum, rhetoric could easily have become the central part of the new subject, but unfortunately grammar won out, and the focus in language study became the sentence rather than extended passages of prose and poetry.

Rhetoric and logic. Prose and poetry.

Cannot lah. Wait everyone start thinking, blogging and criticising without giving alternatives, then how? Not to mention an increase in the number of never-to-be-seen plays.

Original photo by Adam Chamness, modified from
www.flickr.com/photos/adamchamness/61602245/, under a cc by-nc-sa 2.0 license.

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