Women's Aid Ad: Isn't it time someone called cut?

The actress Kiera Knightley made this video about a pressing social issue. What is it? Can we relate this to anything in Singapore??

What Is Web 2.0?

Web 1.0 was focused on a relatively small number of companies and advertisers producing content for users to access—some people called the web at the time the “brochure web.” Web 2.0involves the user—not only is the content often created by users, but users help organize it, share it, remix it, critique it, update it, etc. One way to look at Web 1.0 is as a lecture, a small number of professors informing a large audience of students. In comparison, Web 2.0 is aconversation, with everyone having the opportunity to speak and share views.

Web 2.0 embraces an architecture of participation—a design that encourages user interaction and community contributions. You, the user, are the most important aspect of Web 2.0—so important, in fact, that in 2006, TIME Magazine’s “Person of the Year” was “you.” The article recognized the social phenomenon of Web 2.0—the shift away from a powerful few to an empowered many.

“We can’t be device centric...we must be user centric.”

—Bill Gates, MIX06 conference

Many Web 2.0 companies are built almost entirely on user-generated content and harnessing collective intelligence. The significance is not just in having user-generated content, but in how it is used. Google—the leading search engine and Internet advertising company—sends its users to user-generated websites by considering what users collectively have valued in the past. For websites like MySpace^®, Flickr™, YouTube and Wikipedia^®, users create the content, while the sites provide the platforms. These companies trust their users—without such trust, users cannot make significant contributions to the sites.

“A platform beats an application every time.”

—Tim O’Reilly

The architecture of participation is seen in software development as well. Open software is available for anyone to use and modify with few or no restrictions—this has played a major role in Web 2.0 development. Harnessing collective intelligence, communities collaborate to develop software that many people believe is better than proprietary software.

You, the user, are not only contributing content and developing open source software, but you are also directing how media is delivered, and deciding which news and information outlets you trust. Many popularblogs now compete with traditional media powerhouses. Social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia allow users to recommend their favorite sites to others. Social media sites such as Digg™ or Reddit enable the community to decide which news articles are the most significant. You are also changing the way we find the information on these sites by tagging (i.e., labeling) web content by subject or keyword in a way that helps anyone locate information more effectively. This is just one of the ways Web 2.0 helps users identify new meaning in already existing content.RSS feeds (Chapter 14, XML and RSS) enable you to receive new information as it is updated—pushing the content right to your desktop.

The rise ofsocial networks has changed the way we interact and network. MySpace— the largest social network—has rapidly become the world’s most popular website. Other popular social networking sites include Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Second Life—a 3D virtual world where you interact with others via your online persona called an avatar.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content has been the key to success for many of today’s leading Web 2.0 companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Monster. The community adds value to these sites, which, in many cases, are almost entirely built on user-generated content. For example, eBay (an online auction site) relies on the community to buy and sell auction items, and Monster (a job search engine) connects job seekers with employers and recruiters.

User-generated content includes explicitly generated content such as articles, home videos and photos. It can also include implicitly generated content—information that is gathered from the users’ actions online. For example, every product you buy from Amazon and every video you watch on YouTube provides these sites with valuable information about your interests. Companies like Amazon have developed massive databases of anonymous user data to understand how users interact with their site. For example, Amazon uses your purchase history and compares it to purchases made by other users with similar interests to make personalized recommendations (e.g., “customers who bought this item also bought...”). Implicitly generated content is often considered hidden content. For example, web links and tags are hidden content; every site you link to from your own site or bookmark on a social bookmarking site could be considered a vote for that site’s importance. Search engines such as Google (which uses the PageRank algorithm) use the number and quality of these links to a site to determine the importance of a site in search results.

Source:

http://www.deitel.com/eBook/WhatIsWeb20/tabid/2483/Default.aspx

https://php.radford.edu/~tlc/wordpress/

De Bono's Six Thinking Hats

"Six Thinking Hats" is a powerful technique that helps you look at important decisions from a number of different perspectives. It helps you make better decisions by pushing you to move outside your habitual ways of thinking. As such, it helps you understand the full complexity of a decision, and spot issues and opportunities which you might otherwise not notice.

Many successful people think from a very rational, positive viewpoint, and this is part of the reason that they are successful. Often, though, they may fail to look at problems from emotional, intuitive, creative or negative viewpoints. This can mean that they underestimate resistance to change, don't make creative leaps, and fail to make essential contingency plans.

Similarly, pessimists may be excessively defensive, and people used to a very logical approach to problem solving may fail to engage their creativity or listen to their intuition.

If you look at a problem using the Six Thinking Hats technique, then you'll use all of these approaches to develop your best solution. Your decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning.

This tool was created by Edward de Bono in his book "6 Thinking Hats".

How to Use the Tool:

To use Six Thinking Hats to improve the quality of your decision-making, look at the decision "wearing" each of the thinking hats in turn.

Each "Thinking Hat" is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

• White Hat:

  

  With this thinking hat, you focus on the data available. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.

  This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.

• Red Hat:
  Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally, and try to understand the intuitive responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

• Black Hat:
  When using black hat thinking, look at things pessimistically, cautiously and defensively. Try to see why ideas and approaches might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan or course of action. It allows you to eliminate them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency plans to counter problems that arise.

  Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans tougher and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance, leaving them under-prepared for difficulties.

• Yellow Hat:
  The yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it, and spot the opportunities that arise from it. Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.

• Green Hat:
  The Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. A whole range of creativity tools can help you here.

• Blue Hat:
  The Blue Hat stands for process control. This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, and so on.

You can use Six Thinking Hats in meetings or on your own. In meetings it has the benefit of defusing the disagreements that can happen when people with different thinking styles discuss the same problem.

A similar approach is to look at problems from the point of view of different professionals (e.g. doctors, architects, sales directors) or different customers.

http://www.learnerslink.com/questioning_card.htm

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm

Media coverage of Innova's A-level results

Here's a couple of clips featuring Innovians excelling in the 2008 A-levels:

Channel 8

Suria

PODcast resources

Hey beautiful people....

Here's a couple of resources that are IMPERATIVE for your podcasts:

Audacity is D place to download this simple audio software to record your podcasts.

PartnersInRhyme is a website that provides royalty-free music and sounds for you to use in as your intro, outro or background music. Lots of cool sounds as well.

Cool like ol' skool.

Enjoy!

Facebook to own info?

NEW YORK - TENS of thousands of Facebook users are protesting new policies that they say grant the social-networking site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.Facebook's new terms of use, updated Feb 4, largely went unnoticed until the popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed out the changes on Sunday.

That prompted a clarification from Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, although the new terms remain in force. Mr Zuckerberg told users in a blog post Monday that 'on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with'.

When someone shares a photo, a message or a status update telling friends what they are up to at the moment, they first need to grant Facebook a license so the site can pass that information along to authorized friends, Zuckerberg said. Without the license, he said, Facebook wouldn't be able to help people share information.

Zuckerberg said the new terms are necessary to reflect the fact that friends may retain a copy of that message or other information once a user shares it with them.

'Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message,' Mr Zuckerberg said. 'We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like e-mail work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.' Mr Zuckerberg did acknowledge that Facebook, which boasts 175 million users around the world, still has 'work to do to communicate more clearly' about how information is shared on the site.

The rapidly growing site has had several run-ins with users over its short history.

In late 2007, for example, a tracking tool called 'Beacon' caught users off-guard by broadcasting information about their shopping habits and activities at other websites. After initially defending the practice, Facebook ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off. -- AP

JC vs Poly

A RECORD number of school leavers fresh off the O-level boat have made it to the polytechnics this year.

And, continuing a trend that began a few years ago, many of these poly students did well enough in the O levels to have gone to a junior college (JC), but chose a polytechnic education instead.

About 20,640 of these school leavers have been posted to the five polytechnics, where they will earn diplomas in three years. The intake is 800 more than last year.

The new high comes despite there having been fewer O-level candidates last year than in 2007. As a consequence of that dip, the number posted to the polytechnics, JCs, Millennia Institute and the Institutes of Technical Education under the Education Ministry's Joint Admissions Exercise was also smaller.

The polytechnics' gain shrank the overall intake for the JCs, and also for Millennia Institute, where students take the A levels after three years. (See chart.)

One school leaver contributing to the tilt in favour of the polys is former Anderson Secondary student Ranjini Visvalingam, 17, who scored six points in her O levels. She could have made it to just about any junior college, but opted for Republic Polytechnic's biomedical science course.

Noting that her friends have queried her choice of a polytechnic over the more academic junior-college track, she said: "But I've already decided what I want to do – get an advance diploma in biomedical science and go on to Monash for a degree – so there is no need to go to a JC."
Melbourne's Monash University has a programme with Republic Polytechnic where students get on a fast track to a degree.

In response to the demand, the five polytechnics have opened up 25,700 places, about 700 more than last year.
Ngee Ann Polytechnic raised its number of vacancies by 150 to 5,250.
Republic Polytechnic principal Yeo Li Pheow has seen a 60 per cent leap in applicants who made the poly – the newest among the five – their first choice.

And they are coming in with stronger grades too.
"It's definitely a good sign for polys that students eligible for JC choose to go to the polys. It's a personal choice they make," he said.

Among the 18 JCs, the high-end ones have had no change in intake size, though a few, like Serangoon and Tampines, have smaller intakes this year.
The heads of JCs and of Millennia Institute contacted are not overly concerned that their schools now seem less popular.

Millennia Institute's Tan Chor Pang said a core of students will always pick the A-level route, which is still regarded as better preparation for higher education.
But he conceded that the JCs and Millennia Institute can do more to court potential students; the polys, he said, "are more aggressive and define their courses in a very attractive way, being up to date and relevant to industry. Students are attracted to that".
He added that this year's single intake for JCs might have also shrunk the demand for JCs.

Previously, students admitted provisionally could try out JC life until the O- level results came out in March, but "in the absence of the first three months of JC, there is no longer a natural platform to experience JC education", he said.

Ms Helen Choo, the principal of the mid-tier Tampines Junior College, said students may be going to the polytechnics because they are focused and know what they want, be it mass communications or hospitality studies.

JCs' future intakes could be uncertain, she said, given declining enrolment resulting from a declining birth rate and an explosion of choices for school leavers.

Yishun Junior College, on the other hand, took in slightly more students this year, just under 600. Vice-principal Wong Mun Wah said the JC's efforts at selling itself as a "value-added" school have paid off, as has the flexibility in subject combinations that it gives its students.

janeng@sph.com.sg

Where the O-level students have gone

Number who sat for the O levels

2008: 36,640
2007: 38,450

Number posted to their next school under Joint Admissions Exercise

This year: 34,400
Last year: 34,800

Number posted to junior colleges

This year: 11,008
Last year: 11,484

Number posted to Millennia Institute for the three-year A level course

This year: 344
Last year: 696

Number posted to polytechnics

This year: 20,640
Last year: 19,836

Number posted to ITE

This year: 2,408
Last year: 2,784

NOTE: The figures are calculated based on rounded-off percentages provided by the Ministry of Education and may not be exact numbers.