History of Singapore Coffee Shops

Greetings from the Foochow Coffee Restaurant & Bar Merchants Association Singapore free muesuim on Singapore coffee shops. You need to go into the building foyer and up to the 4th floor and through the doors. Staff turned on the lights and gave a detailed talk. Or just wander around. 

Printing at the Singapore Writer's Festival

Greetings from the Singapore Writer's Festival. In the foyer outside the official opening there are artists helping delegates print their own stencil onto reclaimed fabric.

Composting on top of Singapore

 

Greetings from a rooftop garden high above Singapore.  I am here to help "Tony the Farmer" with his composting in the community garden. There are regular working times, with anyone welcome to join in and learn. Details of when and where on Eventbrite.

This is on top of a multi-story carpark for apartment residents. The beds were originally intended for a decorative garden but has been given over to grow fruit and vegetables for residents.

PARKROYAL Hotel on Pickering Street Singapore

ParkRoyal on Pickering in Singapore.
Photo by Tom Worthington CC-BY 2022

Singapore is leading the way with Biomorphic Architecture, and the PARKROYAL Hotel, 3 Upper Pickering St, is a good example. 

The Luggage Market Singapore

The Luggage Market in Singapore,
Photo by Tom Worthington CC-BY November 2022

The Luggage Market in Singapore is worth a visit, if just to see the spectacle. Took me while to work out it is not a market for selling luggage, but one where people bring things (mostly clothes) in a suitcase, open it on the floor and allow others to rummage through.

Battlebox Singapore

Standing outside the bunker where the decision was made to surrender Singapore in World War Two, there is very much a sense of history. It must be confronting for British tourists to hear how their military lost. There are lessons for Australians, on the limits of alliances. The "Battlebox" tour of the bunker is worthwhile.

Ez-link isn't easy

The friendly staff at Changi Airport called around until someone came to open the Travelex booth. They quickly handed me my Singtel combined SIM & travel card. Took some time to get the SIM to work, as the number to use was on a label which sealed the card in a bag, and had to be split in half, through the serial number, to open. Tried to top up the travel part of the card, but the MRT station machines only accept Singapore credit cards, no cash. So I had to wait until the staff arrived at 6am. They only take cash, but I had some. With all that done the SIM and the transport works well. 

SIMless in Singapore

Greetings from the arrivals hall at Changi Airport Singapore, where I await someone to open a booth to give me the Singtel SIM card I ordered. The two 24 hour Traveled booths remain closed.

Power for Traveling in Singaport and Sri Lanka

On a recent visit to Singapore and Sri Lanka I had the problem of how to recharge my laptop and phone. Both Singapore and Sri Lanka, being former British colonies, use UK power plugs, with large square pins. But Sri Lanka also uses a round pin plug. So I purchased Australian to UK and Australian to European power adapters.

The UK (BS 1363 Type G) adapter worked fine until I left it behind in a hotel. The problem was that the adapter, like most, was the same off-white color as a power point, thus easy to forget. I suggest buying a black one, so it looks like part of your computer power cable.

The next problem was the two different power plugs in Sri Lanka. The capital city, Colombo, seemed to use the UK plug, whereas the rest of the country had a three pin round unit. This looks a little like the European power plug but is not quite compatible. The three pin round sockets are not European ones, but a derivative of an old UK standard (BS 546 or Indian IS 1293).

I found I had to buy a local power adapter for Sri Lanka. There are adapters readily available for about $US2, but these are of questionable safety. The adapters are designed to take UK, European, US and Australian plugs. They have so many and so large holes in them that the plugs are not held firmly and large sparks can be seen when contact is lost.

In Singapore I purchased a Lifetrons 10.5W Travel Adaptor FG-2102PD. This is almost a cube with a US/UK,European and Australian socket on one side  and plugs for the same folding or retracting into the other sides. It is bulky and cumbersome looking but works okay. The unit is black and when plugged into my laptop cable it looks neat. It also has one high power USB socket and so can be used to charge a phone at the same time.

MOOCs from Singapore

In the discussion of "MOOCs with Books" in Singapore on Wednesday, it was mentioend that National University of Singapore had joined Coursera, one of the US based Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) consortia.They have a course in "Unpredictable? Randomness, Chance and Free Will", by Valerio Scarani and "Write Like Mozart: An Introduction to Classical Music Composition", by Peter Edwards. Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have an interesting series of articles about e-learning, including MOOCs, in their Momentum Newsletter.

Samsui Woman and Mobile Cinema

As you enter the National Museum of Singapore there is temporary free display area on the right (just next to the gift store). This currently has has an excellent exhibition with " Trading Stories: Conversations with Six Pioneering Tradesmen". This includes "Sanshui Women" originally from Guangdong Province of China, who worked as a female collective in Singapore. Also there is a Mobile Cinema, being a rickshaw with a box on the back containing a movie projector and small screen. For a small fee locals could watch short movie through windows in the box.

MOOCs with Books Talk in Singapore 24 April

I will be giving a free talk on "MOOCs with Books" in Singapore 24 April 2013, hosted by Pearson. Anyone interested in attending, please contact Teck Chuan, Ang at Pearson Singapore. This is a short version of my talk "Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning" for the 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2013), 28 April 2013, in Colombo.

MOOCs with Books

Tom Worthington will discuss the implications of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for traditional university education. He will outline why he believes textbooks, in the form of eBooks, will still be key to education, be it on-line or in the classroom. Tom will illustrate this with his own globally accredited on-line course run by Australia's leading university.

1. What is a MOOC?
2. Some MOOC Examples
3. Software and Training for MOOCs
4. Implications for Universities
5. Adapting Traditional Courses for Online Use with books

Tom Worthington is an independent certified computer consultant, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University. He teaches ICT sustainability, the design of web sites and use of e-commerce systems. In 1999 Tom was elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) for his contribution to the development of public Internet policy and he was Canberra ICT Educator of the Year for 2010. Tom an ACS Past President, Honorary Life Member, Certified Professional and a Certified Computer Professional of the society as well as a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

MOOCs with Books: Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning

This is to invite corrections and suggestions for my presentation "MOOCs with Books: Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning" for the 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2013) in Colombo in late April (web slides also available). The basic idea is that use of "real time" delivery of e-learning places an unnecessary burden on the Learning Management System (LMS) and networks used and is also not good for the students. Most supposedly "synchronous" education, on-line and in the classroom, is not really "real time". Relaxing the restrictions this imposes on the system will allow millions of students to be accommodated and also provide better learning. An easy way to explain this is with the example of an eBook, which the student can download and read when they want, attempt the exercises in the book and check their answers. It is only after doing their "homework" that the student needs to interact with the LMS, their fellow students and perhaps a teacher. Rather than build complete new Learning Management Systems for MOOCs, packages such as Moodle, can be upgraded to handle the load, using existing technology, such as SCORM and HTML5.

 This started as a scholarly paper on "Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning". But since submitting the paper last year, I have given a few presentations on how to have large on-line courses scale (both in terms of software and pedagogy), under the title "MOOCs with Books", so I added this to the conference presentation as a postscript. If anyone is interested I can give a practice run of the talk in Canberra, Sydney or Singapore.

Description: On-line learning uses the terms synchronous and asynchronous to describe tools and learning activities. This research looks into the origins of these terms, their use today and asks if these are the correct terms to use and if the use of these terms has held up the development of better tools and techniques. It is proposed that the use of syncronisation of asynchronous learning is particularly applicable to address issues with large scale e-learning, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).
Keywords: Asynchronous Learning; Synchronous Learning; Electronic Learning; Web Conference; Videoconferencing; Pedagogy; Massive Open Online Courses, MOOC.
Please cite as:

Worthington, T. (2013). Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques. In Proceedings of 2013 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 26 Apr - 28 Apr 2013 , Sri Lanka.
Preprint available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/9556

Singapore Certified Green IT Professional

The Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF) offers a course in green ICT in conjunction with authorized commercial partners. There is a four day instructor-led core course, plus a one day elective leading to the "Certified Green IT Professional".