Googling myself

I googled myself to get some information for my resume. In the process, I discovered that this site has been indexed by Google and so is its mirror. For some reason I found weird Google ads on my blog, but couldn't find them when performing site administration. Anyway, they are gone now... weird!

More writing samples from me that I never knew existed:

RJC2000PRELIMQ4

“The Internet’s early communalist enthusiasm for open-source software-which is free, unpatented and uncopyrighted- has now given way to a land-grab. Internet companies are rushing to patent their ideas.” The Economist, July 2000

• 
  
  a. Explain the likely market structure which economic theory suggests would exist in industries where patents are prevalent. [12]
  
  

• 
  
  b. To what extent is the above trend bad for the consumer? [13]
  
  

Part a

Economic theory suggests that an oligopolistic market is likely to exist in industries where patents are prevalent. An oligopoly is a market structure that falls between a monopoly and a monopolistic market, and it refers to the situation where a market is dominated by a small number of large powerful firms.

Like in the case of internet companies rushing to patent their ideas, the oligopolistic market is characterised by barriers to entry as well as interdependence of firms. Barriers to entry may be natural or artificial. Patents are a form of barriers to entry as they create secrecy of knowledge characteristic of oligopolistic firms producing differentiated products. Patents offer legal protection.

Other barriers to entry include brand loyalty. For example, the established real player and winamp software have a large following and are hyperlinked to many other websites, and thus a new software may need great innovation and first impact to rival the number of downloads these famous names receive.

Also the extensive research and product development may raise already high start up costs in industries where patents are prevalent. For example, the software counter-strike allows internet gaming and LAN games, and has new betas published frequently, and thus other companies will need to have equal, if not better, variety and quality in their software to rival that.

Besides that, in an oligopolistic market structure, products are differentiated, and secrecy is generally maintained. Generally, non-price competition is adopted and supernormal profit is made. For example, internet companies like SingNet and Pacific Internet have long avoided price competition, until StarHub introduced free access. Pacific Internet decides to attract eyeball s to avoid direct price competition.

An important characteristic of an oligopoly, here patents are prevalent, is the interdependence of firms. This may well lead to the formation of a formal collusion (a cartel e.g. Organisation of petroleum exporting countries OPEC) or a tacit collusion. Firms tend to adopt similar pricing, advertising and marketing strategies. For instance, both winamp and real player offer a free download with the option of purchasing a better full version of its product online. Due to tacit collusion, firms are likely to base prices on barometric firm price leadership – following the most representative firm at a particular point in time, or base prices on dominant firm price leadership – i.e. a firm that has the greatest influence sets the price and all others follow.

In an oligopoly there exists price stickiness, which may be explained by a kinked demand curve, showing that if a firm raises its prices, then other firms are not likely to follow but if prices fall then other firms are likely to follow suit. However, this does not explain why the kink occurs or why the initial price was determined such. The costs of updating the WebPages etc. and other menu costs incurred may explain price stickiness.

Part b

To some extent, the evolution of the internet into an oligopolistic market is bad for the consumer. First, an oligopolistic market relies heavily on advertising in a bid to avoid non-price competition. Advertising in itself may be a form of directly unproductive activity, and therefore is a misallocation of resources. Furthermore, advertising may be a form of irritant to consumers. For instance, pop-up advertisements that appear when one accesses a certain website. Advertising costs may be passed on to consumers indirectly too.

Second, the rise of oligopolies in an internet market where patents are prevalent may lead to the presence of X-inefficiency such as a breakdowns in a Hotmail account etc. X-inefficiency arises when the firm gets bigger.

Third, this above trend may increase the difficulty of new firms breaking into the market due to the higher fixed costs, the patented designs and so on. For instance, a young entrepreneur may find it expensive to start a new internet firm and patent his designs, when his competitors may include Netscape and Microsoft. Thus, innovation is limited and consumers may lose new choices.

However, this trend of moving towards an oligopolistic internet market may not be entirely bad, for instance, large oligopolistic firms earning supernormal profits will have funds for research and development to upgrade their existing products, and these improvements in product quality will be passed on to consumers.

Also, oligopolies provide a range of differentiated products for consumers to choose from. For example, one may choose a Netscape or Internet Explorer browser and equip it with a variety of other supporting software such as macromedia etc.

Third, oligopolies earn supernormal profits and the copyrights and popularity of existing firms may encourage entrepreneurial spirit t break into these contestable markets. For example, the establishment of meshworkz was encouraged by the boom of internet gaming and the underutilisation of internet gaming capabilities. Such new firms will benefit consumers by providing them with greater variety of choices.

However, considering that the oligopolistic market is potentially allocatively inefficient as price may exceed marginal cost, thus creaming off consumer surplus and leading to welfare loss, it may be seen that the trend of internet companies rushing to patent their ideas is no perfect blessing. An oligopolistic market, like any other market structure, has its good and bad.

Huang Kailin

A03A

19/25

Notes on DISC

I am a high DC, which explains why I do not like having no options. When dealing with a D-student, give them options, even when the final outcome is likely to be the same as what you have predetermined.

For instance, instead of, "We are going to work on this topic," say, "We have a list of topics, and this is the one that the majority have chosen to work on."

Discovery of the Day: MediaFire

http://www.mediafire.com/

Free file hosting... looks simpler than Yousendit!

Education Studies Elective

This is the one I am interested in. I quote from the Jan 2008 PGDE(S) Handbook:

QED581 Differentiating Instruction for Able Learners
The promise of an ability-driven curriculum and that all students will learn is mere rhetoric if teachers lack deep knowledge of learners and the pedagogical skills necessary to help learners of diverse abilities. There is a need to help teachers better understand the traits and needs of high-ability learners and to make needs-based curricular modifications and
instructional decisions in mixed-ability settings. This course aims to help student teachers develop an overview of the conceptions of giftedness,
understand the psychology and needs of the precocious student and develop appropriate, differentiated approaches to meet the learning needs
of these students in mainstream classrooms.

My other choices, in order of preference, are:

QED560 Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)
QED576 Developing Creativity in the Secondary Classroom
QED582 Teaching Students with Behavioural and Learning Problems

Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?

Read the full post here. This is the winner of the most influential post at the 2007 Edublog Awards. One of his key arguments is that it does not matter if you are a digital native or immigrant - you must be technologically literate to teach.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Strongly recommended by my NIE senior and NUS peer, especially for those who will be going to neighbourhood schools, and who may be interested in other uses of drama in teaching.

Giftedness

Taken from Wikipedia:

Generally, gifted individuals learn more quickly, deeply, and broadly
than their peers. Gifted children may learn to read early and operate
at the same level as normal children who are significantly older. The
gifted tend to demonstrate high reasoning ability, creativity,
curiosity, a large vocabulary,
and an excellent memory. They often can master concepts with few
repetitions. They may also be physically and emotionally sensitive, perfectionistic, and may frequently question authority.
Some have trouble relating to or communicating with their peers because
of disparities in vocabulary size (especially in the early years),
personality, and interests. As children, they may prefer the company of
older children or adults.

Reflection on the course that has concluded, but not the last you’d hear from me

Form-filling...

SCLP-related

What were some major changes to my SCLP?

The removal of our introductory video and changes to our web header image.

Why did those changes take place?

To prevent ourselves from inadvertently distributing copyrighted material.

How did I contribute to my group's SCLP?

Some project ideas. Did the website (using edublogs' templates) and its header (using GIMP), the spliced introductory video and the titles on the demonstration video (using misbehaving Windows Movie Maker), flubbed role-play in one-half of the demo, the links and anchors on the pages... and I forgot or rather never bothered to test our page on Internet Explorer all this while! The change has been made on our online site for progeny... but in line with my personal policy, all pages, SCLP or not, should be best viewed in Firefox. Get IE tab to resolve IE/FF conflicts.

What did I learn as a result of creating an SCLP?

I revisited  Scrapbook with joy. Actually, Guilian did help clarify a lot of my ideas on scaffolding and the assessment process. So yes, I think one of the strengths of our SCLP is the excellent scaffolding. Yay. And of course, lots of practice with Google Docs, GIMP, html and pretending to be a student.

What did I learn from QED522? (What was the first thing that popped into my mind?)

I've wanted to raise this question for sometime now... but I always thought Dr. Black was the one killed, and Colonel Mustard... he's just one of the usual suspects.

Student-centered learning will not kill the teacher. I actually think it gives teachers more room to play and students more motivation to learn. From the mercenary point of view, I have learned pedagogical approaches and received/created opportunities to polish rusty ICT skills, so my list of skills has expanded.

I  am still thinking unashamedly about free laptops...

Almost final, plus a note on valedictorians

It's almost the day of submission and I feel compelled to write a redundant post to remind myself of things that need to be wrapped up.

1. Capture my SCLP with a depth of 2, so that comments on "student" blogs will be saved as well for offline viewing.


2. Export the captured SCLP package to another directory for checks before burning it onto a disc.


3. Finish up our final storyboard on GIMP.


4. Export our lesson plan and clean it up for burning.


5. BURN!

I just checked the results of the NIE Valedictorian poll... a grand total of 45 votes were cast, making the outcome very representative, but the graduating cohort will have their valedictorians no less. The tribe has spoken, kind of. It just makes me doubt increasingly how well online polls that carry no perceivable benefit for the voter can work. Behavior modification does take some time and study to function in full bloom.

Maybe it’s good to sell fish once in a while?

This post has nothing to do with selling fish, actually, but I figured that it will probably have a total readership of about 3-4 people. Enough of the idiosyncratic crap that I think I understand.
How to export a web-based SCLP for offline viewing in your browser (instead of printing everything to PDF for further painstaking annotation) - my way:

1. You must have Mozilla Firefox installed. (Switch if you are using IE.)


2. Find and install a lovely extension called Scrapbook. Restart FF to complete installation.


3. Go to the homepage of your web-based SCLP, then right-mouse-click, "Capture Page as..."


4. To capture not just the page you are on but also the pages that it links to, and the pages those pages link to, you need to select a Capture Depth of at least 1.


5. Wait for it to save, grab a Kit Kat, have a coffee, or go for a toilet break.


6. Check your Scrapbook folder for the saved package. If saved correctly, the links will be relative, so they should work offline as they do online.


7. Smile to yourself, use Scrapbook to annotate the saved pages if you like, then burn a copy for submission.

*NEW* Additional instructions to myself:

• Give the folder an English name.


• Locate the file named "index" to start browsing offline.

Kanji of the Year, Word of the Term, Streams of Consciousness

Just like the Japanese pick the Kanji of the Year every year since 1995, I wonder what would be our Chinese or English word of the term?

Looking up the etymology of "overkill..."

What would happen when, days/weeks/months/terms/semesters/academic years/years/decades from now, a student/colleague/peer/superior/anybody stumbles on/finds/is directed to this blog? Will this change anything or make anything or do anything or be anything? If I have the intention of retaining this learning/sharing blog as a teaching/sharing blog, how will it evolve?

I need to go to the toilet, and that is a sensitive topic in some schools, where you need to take a short/long journey to another washroom, which is as good as announcing that you have business to do. Better still than students, whose honest and deceptive requests for toilet breaks may all be ignored as excuses for wanting time out in the open, not time-out. Better that than body damaging restraint.

Better direct than convoluted maneuvers, or direction perceived as convolution. A blog is more bulimic than it is anorexic, for whatever goes in is regurgitated, perhaps not in their original glory but rather in a perverse re-rendering of its contents, toxic or otherwise. An edublog is medicated, sanitized, sanctioned. Foucault: the medical gaze is dehumanizing, separating body from soul in its regard. And we live in a panopticon.

Cathartic catharsis. The beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning.

Metacognition, and the beginning of the end

Just a week to go before QED522 concludes in all its splendor. Some thoughts, as honestly as I can represent them, before my own subjectivity subjects my consciousness to oblivion.

Copyright: I guess working in the Writing Centre only acquainted me with how not to plagiarize in a written paper, but Prof Tan's comments on possible copyright infringement in our SCLP were really a positive eye-opener. Functioning under the paper-citation logic, I had thought that it would be okay to create a montage of clips as long as the sources are cited somewhere. After all, the way the montage is put together is "original." However, this is only half right. We were alerted by Prof Tan to the fact that putting such a video up online will still make us liable of distributing copyrighted content.

I am sincerely grateful for his helpful firefighting suggestion that we show our painful Windows Movie Maker product in an offline class instead. For a while the thought of possibly having to kill my video horrified me.

Affordances: Yes, it makes sense to edit an image with software like GIMP or Photoshop. I was so thankful that I used many layers in the source file for our original header image, which contains copyrighted images. With the help of exactly two mouse clicks, the potential infringements are now out of sight, and I have added some new design elements adapted from free fonts and royalty-free images, without killing the healthy bits of my header. Cheers!

Polling: Private opinions made public beneath the guise of confidentiality. Democracy, the allusive ideal to attain to, almost always a test of how well publicity and imaging/image sway the vote. As it is with every other election. I always doubt the integrity of polls.

Appraisal: If peer appraisal for teachers is going to be launched at its full, we may just end up playing Survivor every other day. Like Tina from the Second Season, to survive we will have to lie low until one by one the rest are eliminated. Does school have to be Battle Royale?

Threat: There are just a few more months to Practicum and several more months to school posting. I am happy to be perceived as a threat, and just sad that, as two friends and NIE seniors have already told me, that it is better to be less of a perfectionist in my work, in case I am seen as spoiling the market and get peer reviewed negatively. Since when did this culture of preferring imperfection over and above one's best effort become the mainstay in the nation's education training ground? I really do not think metacognition should be applied for the purpose of consciously downgrading one's work just to upgrade one's public standing. It is simply obscene.

Niche: I now (or, for now) think that the best way to protect myself, my sanity, my integrity, my quality, my output, my longevity, my hopes and my dreams in this line would be to find this impenetrable niche unique to me.

Teacher: As much as this statement may disgust, I am first a teacher, then a Chinese teacher. We do not want to be politically incorrect by being racist, Occidentalist or Orientalist. We do not have to be politically incorrect to the extent of finding Chinese teachers who use English like drinking tea, and who cannot let a day go by without playing with some ICT tool, an anomaly and a cyst.

Pleasure: At the risk of sounding like a boot-licker or even more incorrect and incongruous, I really, really, really enjoyed myself in QED522. Easily the best taught and most fun course I've taken in NIE. I blog and I play in my sandbox because I like it, and am motivated. I am at the center of everything, because I am not just a student, but the student at the center of student-centered learning, which respects the individuals we are.

I am who I am, because I am made by I AM and an image of that which is I am.
Yes, the above issues will still haunt me in the school(s) I will be posted to. But Rule#1 says, there are no ghosts. Amen to that.

SCLP development thus far - it’s almost the end of the module!

We are almost at the end of the road that leads to new ones. For the past week, Guilian and I have been discussing the peer evaluation, critiquing, and blogging mechanism for our SCLP.

For instance, she helped me sharpen my thoughts on the rubrics design by asking whether it would be better to just have a common set of rubrics for "Agents" and "Guides" since many criteria overlap. I thought however that having two sets of rubrics would be clearer, since the tool I advocate using (Forms on Google Docs) does not allow us to redirect students to different questions based on their answers (e.g. "If A, go to Q5").

We did have some cordial disagreements over the best ICT tool for peer evaluation rubrics. Aesthetically, I agree with Guilian that there are many free online survey tools that can do the job much better. She also managed to locate some sites which provide pie charts and other graphical representations of the survey results. My reasons for sticking to Google Docs' Form tool is that it actually links the survey to a Google Docs Spreadsheet which not only lists all collected responses so far, but also timestamps every response i.e. there is an automatically generated column that displays the time at which each set of responses was received. By adding fields for the names of the respondent and critiqued student, we can also match each set of responses to their owner, unlike other free online surveys where this is not possible. Furthermore, you can keep customizing your form without having to create a new one.


At present we are happy that we are developing an SCLP for e-learning (thank you, Prof Tan, for the idea) that can also be adapted for face-to-face classes. Having an SCLP that resides online also allows many other possibilities for future expansion, not the least through hyperlinking to other hypertexts.

GIMP layer effects test

Font: Bleeding Cowboys

Email etiquette…

Not that I am always correct and polite, but here are some common examples of bad email etiquette:

-Replying to queries with "Hi" without addressing the other party (it's too informal, impersonal, and impolite). I just got a reply like this to my query regarding the recent PBP. It does not help that the reply is vague and ignores what I said as well. This is what I hate about writing to a email address like ***_RU_*** - sometimes you get good and clear replies, sometimes you don't.

- CC-ing the entire school when a message only concerns PD tutors of level X/CCA or whatever ICs. Not recommended, but always advised and done. Why? For the purpose of cover, if you like, as Just Follow Law states it. Another example: why does one teacher's email about a spoilt school laptop have to be CC-ed to at least 2 HODs on top of the TAs?

I really think I am very cynical and critical of late. The most productive and destructive time to blog. Does this even fit edublogging? Perhaps not.

Do not upload your notes only the day before class at an unspecified time!

The affordances of Blackboard have been exploited, sometimes forcing us to be on standby more often than necessary.

Since whatever they are uploading has been prepared long ago with much dedication and care, it does not do them any justice either to surprise us with late uploads (or, uploads they preloaded, but timed for late appearance on our student page).

Personally, I also hate it when an upload I have just downloaded is overwritten
later by a newer version but without any announcement. What kind of
signals are they sending? That it is better late than never, and always
better to be just in time than early?

Even if we can learn anytime, anywhere, we should not be coerced into non-learning, time draining tasks like this all the time, everywhere. Please do not make self-serving assumptions about students' computing habits.

Grade Curve vs Grade Inflation

I have been wondering for some time whether NIE awards grades by criterion-referencing or norm-referencing. While in a certain class the other day we were told that the former is used, so that different tutorial groups in the same module are assessed with a consistent set of guidelines, I have also heard otherwise that NIE practices the grade curve.

NUS has been known to use a combination of absolute results and relative standing to derive a student's final grade. There is a moderation process that goes on behind the scene. It has been said far and wide that there is also a curve of some sort for EPMS, which means the bulk of grades given will have to be average, even though the grade descriptors for different bands are meant to correspond to how far the education officer exceeds or falls short of expectations. In other words, we can't have an entire school exceeding expectations on all counts? Of course, correct me, an untrained teacher, if I am wrong. It seems as though we cannot do well unless we also do better than everyone else, not just ourselves.

The kind of compensatory measures (read: norm-referencing on a parabola) practiced in our education/education employment system fly in the face of grade inflation in the United States, which some say are a result of professors guarding their tenured positions against negative student feedback.

To be on either the extreme of loyalty to a grade curve or to feel-good grade inflation would not conducive to learning, however. While using grades as extrinsic motivation/pressure is not ideal, it does seem to be the case with extreme practices. Nonetheless, grades need to be worked out properly so that assessment of learning/work can be executed for learning (QED520's A/P Chang distinguishes between assessment of & for learning).

All the more do we as educators and those being educated need to rethink the issue of grades.

Long Gruelling Episode with Video Editing

Just had a long grueling episode with video conversion and editing software, plus a bad encounter with (surprise, surprise!) Adobe Download Manager (which is used for downloading trials from Adobe) that crashed my computer several times without my initial suspicion.

What happened was that it took me some time to realize that I would lose control over my desktop every time I tried to launch a file or resume a download from Adobe Download Manager. It was bad, I lost all my Mozilla Firefox bookmarks and extension settings. At first I even thought FF was corrupted and reinstalled it. IE also has a problem now... it does not really run.

After a little more research I think it's Akamai Download Manager that screwed up big time... 

Fingerpointing is easy in cyberspace 

Mindmapping tools online (free!)

Some free online mindmapping tools that you may wish to try out.

• Mindmeister: Can be used with its accompanying widget/browser extension Geistesblitz, so that you can submit ideas to Mindmeister immediately for mapping.
  
• Mindomo
  
• Bubbl.us:Cute, adorable, intuitive. Controls for changing bubble colours and adding nodes are located on each bubble - just mouse over.

However, as far as I can tell, they are not entirely suitable for non-linear storyboarding as you typically cannot connect two nodes to a new node, nor can be insert a new node in the middle of an existing chain. I could be wrong though.

 

GIMP and Paint.NET: the brief 3-point review

GIMP

• Good enough as a Photoshop replacement, although it does not have a magnetic lasso and RYGB mode. It only has RGB, so it's more suited for non-print designs.
  
• Many free add-ons, scripts, brushes, gradients available. A lot of GIMP users regularly convert Photoshop brushes, gradients and other effects for GIMP.
• Palettes are all over the place (compared to Adobe CS), may require some interface customization.
  

Paint.NET

• Not as feature-rich as GIMP: no healing brush and brush selection. May have to use the clone stamp tool instead to work around this.
  
• Has Black and White and Sepia adjustments option, good for converting color photographs without going through too much trouble
• Good enough for really basic image editing. After all, it was originally designed to replace Paint which comes with Windows.