Big Wall of Education/Training Blogs I have been subscribing to these blogs for couple of years now. Wanted to share them with my reading working in Education and Training. Let me know (via the comments) if you want the OPML for these blogs. Click here to go to the big wall of Education and Training related blogs. Monitter Twitter users in your area This is smart, the guys at Monitter have taken the advanced search at Twitter and created a service where you can track what people in your city (or another city) are talking about a particular topic (upto 3 keywords at a time). WooriNara, Another Korean Fried Chicken Place in Singapore One of the joys of being in South East Asian cities like Singapore, Bangkok and KL is the accidental find of an interesting ethnic eating places in what seem like quiet residential areas. So the other day I was in Jurong Kecil Area of Singapore. This area has become like a mini Korea town with more and more Korean restaurants and residents. I was in this smallish lane called Lor Kilat and I found this Korean fried chicken place called WooriNara. I was recommended their Yum Yum chicken. Tried it with some Hite beer. The chicken itself was good, not oily at all, crisp skip with the yum yum sweetish sauce. Served with radish and sprouts. Addres: WooriNara (look for the south korean flag outside the shop) 19 Lorong Kilat #01-02 Singapore 598120 Location Map of WooriNara Tel: 64649282 Pyongyang, North Korean Restaurant in Phnom Penh Visited the North Korean Restaurant in Phnom Penh. Its at No. 400 Monivong Blvd. I have previously visited a similar place in Bangkok and the last time I was there, I was with several friends. The girls were curious (the clientele is usually south korean tourist and business groups) and kept coming back to talk to us. And a video The pajon (Korean Pancake) here is good. PyongYangGwan, similar restaurant in Bangkok Korean Fried Chicken in Singapore Fans of Korean Fried Chicken in Singapore can now lookup this place called KKO KKO NARA at 57 Tras Street (10 mins. walk from Tanjong Pagar MRT, map), Try the garlic chicken..   More Links Strawberry Sobert finds Kko Kko Nara Korean fried chicken finding fans in the U.S, NY Times. Thanks to the Katong Couple for showing me the place. African Blog Aggregator Afrigator Acquired I show Afrigator as a good example of a pan-regional aggregator at events here in Asia. Read Write Web informs that a South African Media company has acquired Afrigator. More at Bandwidthblog.com Edmodo - Microblogging in Class Check out Edmodo, a Twitter like micro-blogging service for he classroom use. I tried it out a little while back and I am impressed. It is almost like a light learning management system built into a micro blogging platform. And you can make set individual messages to show up as public or private. A little walkthrough from the point of view of a teacher and a student. Teacher view Once you are in, create a group for your class. Now you can leave messages for you class. You message can be a note, a link, a file, an assignment etc. Here, I am creating an alert to inform student of cancelled class next week. Here, I am creating an assignment Now time to invite your students. Click on the pencil icon next to your group’s name. The pop down box will show you the code. Student view Announce this code to your students, when they log in they use this code to sign up. This is what the students sees. The student clicks on the reply link below the assignment message. And he can upload his word file. Link to Edmodo Corporate Microblogging and Laconica Whenever I am talking to organisations about micro-blogging, I show them the Zappos example on Twitter. See what online shoe retailer Zappos staff are doing right now. I think this is brave and also a good idea as customers and people who interact with your organisation get an idea of what kind of people work there. There are organisations that like this idea but they’d rather setup their own server and host their employees on them. Laconica is an open source microblogging platform. Companies can download Laconica code and install into their own servers and create their own private or even public microblogging networks. Evan Prodromou, the founder of Laconica says Deploying Laconica within an enterprise can help employees from different parts of the organization share information, Prodromou said. The software can partition off different user groups for collaboration, or have users communicate with the world—or organization—at large. Organizations can also set up conduits to personnel at other organizations running their own microblogging services. Read more of the article Audio of Evan talking about Laconica at FLOSS weekly I met Laconica founder Evan Prodromou at Wikimania last year in Taiwan. Evan is also the founder of Wikitravel. How to Date a Japanese Girl The biggest session at Bangkok Barcamp 2 was 31o5’s tips and advice for men on how to date Japanese girls. The room was packed and people taking over the floor too Ok, here is the presentation How To Date A Japanese Girl View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: barcamp barcampbangkok2) The presentation was targeted at audience in Thailand but the information will work in other cities with lots of single Japanese girls - Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. Where to meet Japanese girls in Singapore? Other than the usual spots (Takashimaya, Isetan & Meidiya) try the Bongout book cafe at Robertson Quay. The best bet is joining the Japanese Meetup Group of Singapore where Japanese language and culture enthusiasts meet and they are helped out by a quite a number of friendly Japanese living in Singapore. Design of Objects - A Travel Accessory Found this interesting gadget at a shopping place. Looks like a lighter eh? Lets open it and see. it’s a travel tooth care kit. The white tab on the side, slide it upwards to dispense the tooth paste. A folding toothbrush inside. The other side has a removable toothpick. Nice. I like this design. Useful iPhone Apps for Users in Singapore So I got my 3G iPhone running on Singtel network. Here are some useful applications that might make life more interesting/useful for Singapore iPhone user. A lot of these apps will become more useful as more users in Singapore use them and add more local information. If I missed out some interesting app you are using, please leave a note in the comments and I will add it. Twinkle Price: Free This is a twitter client and it is also more than that. Once you have installed and set up Twinkle, click on the nearby tab below. It will try to locate you and soon after it will show you the recent conversations between twitter users nearby. If you don’t see much, change the coverage area to 10KM or larger. At the moment it is also serving as a tech support forum for new iPhone users with people asking and answering each others iPhone related queries. Twinkle allows you to post pictures too. Click here to go to the iTunes App store page for Twinkle Palringo Price: Free This is a useful chat client supporting MSN, Yahoo IM and Gtalk. Allows you to post pictures via the iPhone camera. If you quit this app, your chat sessions will be closed. Click here to go to the iTunes App store page for Palringo MobileChat Price: $2.99 MobileChat is another decent chat client. Click here to go to iTunes App store page for MobileChat. Nearby Price: Free Nearby uses the location feature and shows you nearby interesting places (cafes, restaurants, shopping). It is still a bit thin on places outside the city area but you can add your own favorite places/interesting places you stumble upon. Nearby is iPhone implementation of social mapping site platial.com Here I am adding a cafe I found in Bukit Timah area to the Nearby app on my iPhone. Click here to go to the iTunes App store page for Nearby Eventful Price: Free This app uses your location to show you events happening in Singapore. The events are picked up from the web site eventful.com Click here to go to the iTunes App store page for Eventful Picoli Price: $4.99 Many consider the 2 megapixel camera of iPhone a bit weak when it comes to the quality of images under low light conditions. Picoli is an app that lets you improve the pictures taken on your phone by adjusting brightness, contrast, sharpness and several other properties. Here I am changing the contrast in this picture. Picoli will show you a quick preview and you can choose to accept it. Picoli will not delete your original picture, the changes that you made will be saved as a new picture in your album. Click here to go to the iTunes App store page for Picoli isingeo.com This is not an app but an iPhone/iPod touch optimized web page. Helps you find transport, food and entertainment venues near where you are. isingeo integrates iris service to show you nearby busses and bus timings. Link to isingeo Cinepura Another iPhone/ipod touch web app that lets you check movie listings in Singapore. its also pulls imdb.com movie ratings data to help make you decision on what movies to watch. Link to Cinepura Google’s Interest in an African Mobile Venture and a Facebook Guide for South African Businesses Andy Hadfield presents [Cowboys and Engines]: Segmenting the FaceBook. A guide for South African businesses. Article relevant for other regions too. And Google funds a mobile startup in Africa Both Via Global Voices Wordpress iPhone App Posting from the wordpress app on iPhone. Where Are You From? Was asked this question earlier today by a Slovakian girl. The smile was so welcoming that I am tempted to stay put and add Bratislava to my list of homes. Bratislava old city, Slovakia Also, been spending a lot of time with Global Voices people, people who also struggle to answer this question. Why Dancing? I booked a 3G iPhone. Awesome Hightlighter Got to know of this nifty Web utility from the MacBreak weekly podcast. Awesome highlighter lets you highlight a chunk of text in a web page and share the highlighted page with your colleagues and friends. Let’s say your are reading this page And you wanted to highlight this part of the page, a chunk of text that you want to share with your friends. Head on to awesomehighlighter.com and paste the web address of the page you want to highlight. Drag the text you want with your mouse. The area will get highlighted. Click on the done button to save the hightlighted text. There you have it, a web address you can share with your friends. When your friends click on this link they will be routed to a copy of the original webpage with your highlighted text. Barcamp Phnom Penh 08 Where: Cambodia-Japan Cooperation Center (CJCC), Multi-Purpose Hall, Phnom Penh, Cambodia When: September 21st, 2008 Why should you attend? You will get to meet a very interesting tech community in the region and great food. Apply for a Cambodian Visa online How I used an iPhone in Japan No, I don’t have the super secret version 2 iPhone that is supposed to work on Japanese mobile network. Japan is one place where the current version of iPhone does not work as it is not a 3G phone. Still I was able to make calls on my iPhone. I used this mobile software called Fring. Fring is an amazing service, it is a multi-platform chat client supporting Yahoo, MSN, Skype, Gtalk etc. All this works on the Edge network. I am finding that I am using Fring chat feature a lot, mostly IMing while I am commuting. On a Wi-Fi network you can make a Skype voice calls too. I was using an early version of Fring last year on a Nokia phone. I was so impressed with this software that I promised a Fring employee I met that I will write about it. Never got around doing that as I stopped using the Nokia soon after I got the iPhone. A few weeks back Fring released an iPhone client. You must have an hacked iPhone in order to install Fring. I hope they will release an official version once iPhone 2.0 is out. BTW Fring works on several other mobile platforms. Tagging Real World Objects From my presentation at Chiang Mai and Singapore Barcamps, an idea to tag (and sustaining discussion about) real world objects. Thanks to the organizers and the attendees of the bar camp for providing a great venue for discussion and brainstorming. | View | Upload your own How to Keep Your Workshop Attendees Up To Date I am always traveling conducting workshops and courses. And almost all the topics I cover, things keep changing at a rapid pace. There are new case studies, new materials get posted online and my attendees themselves might end up making interesting use the stuff I have introduced to them. What I am increasingly doing is creating my notes using Google Document. It works like a wiki, I keep adding new examples, links etc. I used to forward this document to the organizers to print the notes. These days, the first thing I do is get the email addresses of the participants and then invite them to become collaborators for the document. This way even after the course, the participants have access to my updates. I also encourage them to add links and examples that they encounter. What I hope to do is build a little community around my notes. I could have used a wiki but I feel the Google doc look and feel is more user friendly for most of my course participants. Across the Sea of Japan I went to Niigata because I wanted to see the Sea of Japan. I had never been to the western part of Honshu. it was good that I went there as it was warmer and the sky was clear. Japan sea seems bluer and more rough. There was hardly anyone on the beach. Mousan found this plastic bottle on the beach. There was Korean text on the bottle. It says “Elite”. Looks like sunscreen, Wow, it must have drifted from the East coast of Korea. Almost 900 KM. Daruma Bento I always look forward to the snack lady in Japanese trains. They always have interesting food box or bento set. This time I got Daruma bento on the train to Niigata. Daruma figures are popular in Japan. Daruma is known as Damo in China is said to be an Indian monk who traveled to China. Here is something I tried in Niigata, kuzira sashimi or whale meat sashimi. Kedongdong Juice So I was in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown and saw this interesting fruit at a juice stall. The fruit is called Kendongdong. Somehow I had missed out on this fruit, this is the first time I noticed it. I ordered the Kendongdong Juice So there is my juice. Kedongdong seems bitter but the sweetness of the plums balances the drink. It also tastes a bit woody. Nice drink. MySarawak here tries Kedongdong with chilli More on Kedongdong Flickr video and Taipei Street Concert Street Concert Video from Taipei. I am using Flickr’s new video service for this. Web tool for Creating Passwords Too many services to sign up? How to create passwords that one can remember and yet are unique and not easily guessable. Kevin Sheurs and Andres Galante have created a simple web utility called Password Bird that helps you do just that. Answer three questions and the service generates the password. There is an option to let the bird generate a new password if you don’t like the one it throws up. via Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day Hello There Seen at Taman Negara National Park, Malaysia Missing Northern Thailand - Mae Hong Son Over the weekend, we participated in some serious red curry. Since then been thinking of Northern Thailand. I remembered this one trip up north. It is always nice to be able to go to a smaller town and spend some peaceful days. There was this one time I went to Mae Hong Son. Mae Hong Son town is in the province of Mae Hong Son (yes, same name) just next to Burma. Most of the people here are Thai Yai(also known as Shan people) similar to the people in the neighboring Shan state in Burma. Various hill tribes ( Karen, Hmong, Lawa, Lahu and Lesu) make their home in the surrounding mountains. Some of them are native of this region, while others moved from Burma to escape the fighting between the Burmese Army and rebel factions. Mae Hong Son used to be place well known for drug lords and opium. Now, the things have quieted down. Tourists use this town as a base to see the hill tribes. The town itself is attractive and friendly and makes you stay longer than you planned for. Some pictures from Mae Hong Son… The Shan style Wat Jong Klam across the lake Asoka’s pillars at the start of the climb up the hill to the Wat Phra That Doi Kong Mu. Wat Kam Ko A lovely wooden wat. The “Crossroads” is the local watering hole. A cabbage farm. The hill tribes resettled in the hills grow cabbage and other cash crops. The Thai government is encourages this as an alternative to Opium A lake about half an hours drive from the city. A Karen gentleman runs a small guesthouse and a coffee farm. We spoke about old days in Burma. He is been living in Thailand for 15 years and he was happy to meet someone who has been to the old country. The farms on the way to a Chinese town Mae Aw. The Chinese in this part of Thailand are the remnants of the KMT (Kuomintang) - Chiang Kai Sheik supporters who fled Yunnan province when Mao’s communists took over. They trekked through the highlands across Burma and landed up here in Thailand. The original plan was to stay here for some years, replenish and attack China in two waves - one from here and other from Taiwan. This plan never materialized. The Chinese have stayed back and made this place their home. The villagers returning from a ceremony. Their faces were black. They said they were attending an ancestor ceremony where they darken their face with black paint. Passing through the “Oolong tea” farms. The Chinese sell these tea in their village. This is a Shan delicacy, similar to the Yunnanese spicy noodles. Another Yunnanese dish. These “springroles” are stuffed with pork and fried. Another “pork” dish. The lunch - Bottom left is the interesting tea leaf salad. On the right is the “springroll” cut into slices. Wikitravel Page on Mae Hong Son How to Sell a Pen to Kids these days We have seen companies offering iPod cases and phone covers and even laptop stickers that allow the buyer to customize their stuff. Last visit to a stationary store, I found this German pen company offering a customizable pen. The lid has a see thru panel, where the kids can slide in paper with their own design. There is also a website where the kids can play with graphics, come up with they design they like and print it. Interesting idea isn’t it? .. to sell a product as simple as pen with so many competitors around. Most online systems used by students don’t even allow them to have user defined themes. Addicted to Apple 88%How Addicted to Apple Are You? I have also been using an iPhone for the last three weeks and I think its the best phone ever made. Localised and Regional Facebook Apps I might be doing this short presentation on Localized/Regional Facebook applications. I am interested in applications that people are developing targeting users in a particular city or region or user group. If you know of any let me know in the comments. Beer/Lunch on me when you pass by South East Asia. Preetam From Qatar, AlJazeera English news headlines and the Riz Khan QoW (via Mohamed Nanabhay) Facebook Apps from India MyOrkut App - made by an IIT PG guy http://apps.facebook.com/myorkut Zoho Facebook App - Zoho online office suite etc. has been built by an Indian company http://apps.facebook.com/zohoapp Slideshare App - to embed slideshows in Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/slideshare iThink App http://apps.facebook.com/ithinkapp/ Via Amit Gupta goNoGo - local restaurant recommendation app http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=8116656885&b&ref=pd Alternative Information Center Palestine/Israel - The Alternative Information Center (AIC) is an internationally oriented, progressive, joint Palestinian-Israeli activist organization. It is engaged in dissemination of information, political advocacy, grassroots activism and critical analysis of the Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=8091891596&b&ref=pd Facts of Israel - application displays a different fact on Israel on your profile and on the main canvas. It includes hundreds of facts on the history, geography, demography, economy, agriculture and people of Israel and the Middle East. http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2430319931&b&ref=pd Via Gilad Lotan