Catshanghai

Shanghai is busy and disrupted today, because the Olympic torch is passing through the city. There is heavy police and military presence to ensure that this leg of the relay proceeds smoothly. Look out for bunting and road closures in the following areas: 1. Huangpu District (A) 5:30 to 8:30, Tibet Road and Huangpi Road [...]

A colleague just sent me the following anecdote, which is a great case study about why foreigners in China should never leave their home without their passports until the week after the closing ceremony. Photocopies do not count. My husband was held 3 hours in a police station 2 weeks ago outside of Shanghai although [...]

The official death toll is now over 41 000 and rising. (See this BBC news report) Our thoughts are with the victims and their families. Monday was the first of three days of official mourning to honour the dead and their families. This is the first time that China has remembered ordinary people this way. [...]

Micah Sittig rightly raised a concern that the Learning2.008 conference is expensive at $350 a head for non Acamis members. The reason for this is that it costs a lot to fly out world class presenters to Shanghai and the audience will be international school educators. I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a nearly free local [...]

It’s ironic to use an Apple I-sight camera to make a short film about another camera, but short of filming it in the mirror, I didn’t know what else to use. Forgive the pauses and repetitive use of “one final note” and “footage”. You get the idea that I like the Xacti, because it is [...]

My favourite piece of software at the moment is Evernote, because it is a ubiquitous tool that lets me grab notes from webpages, from my cellphone and desktop. I wrote about it here. The service is still in beta, but the latest version has given me more space (200mb) and it lets me tag multiple [...]

Yesterday we were celebrating the virtues of Twitter as a news flash tool for natural disasters. The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate. Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent [...]

Reports are emerging on international news sites that the death toll from yesterday’s Sichuan earthquake is 10 000 and rising. Al Jazeera’s English site reported that there was extensive damage in the epicentre of Wenchuan County and surrounding areas. The toll is expected to rise sharply as authorities and rescue teams make contact with the [...]

According to Danwei there was a 7.8 earthquake in Sichuan this afternoon near Chengdu, but news of the event was broken by Twitter. The Telegraph has just reported that more than 100 people have been injured, and that 4 children died when a school collapsed in Chongqing. (Monday 7:58pm). Robert Scoble also blogged that Twitter [...]

I’m delighted to be part of the organising committee for the Learning 2.008 Conference, which is taking place in Shanghai between September 18th and 20th at SCIS Hongqiao. It’s good to share company with such an enthusiastic, talented and forward looking group. Learning 2.008 is South East Asia’s gathering of educators and learning technologists. It’s [...]