It is a sad situation we have to face today with the Web 2.0 bringing to forefront the issue of accuracy of information. With anyone being able to put up anything on the web, there are more lies than truths out there today. Even worse is the fact that people still lack the skills of judging truth from fiction. Blogs have become one of those sources of misinformation and are being increasingly misused. It is not something ethical for one blogger to write against another, but once in a while you have to break the rules for the sake of the "better good".
Terrorist not only exit bearing kalashnikovs or a belt of explosives strapped on to their chest, but they exist bearing pens (now keyboards), peace doves, and humanitarian and human rights symbols. They conduct their propaganda war, while their brothers in arms blow up building and kill innocent civilians. Each mutually supporting the other for survival. One could not exist and profit without the other, a good "business model" with plenty of money involved no doubt and as the saying goes, I scratch your back - you scratch mine.
I have been reading some so called "bloggs", one of them started in English and then branched out into Sinhala and Tamil, all blowing the trumpet of the Tiger terrorists and their supporting power-hungry puppet politicians. I think the Sri lankan blogosphere are not that stupid as these terrorist think we are. Just because they right in Sinhala or Englis it does not mean they are not terrorist supporters (What about the Sinhala Terrorists and some SL politicians - they are Sinhala speaking right, and the Canadian and British parliamentarians who attend LTTE rallies - they are English speaking right - so language, race or religion does not in anyway give a new face to terrorists). Let me ask you, if Tamilnet starts a site in Sinhala or Tamil we know that they are still the mouthpiece of the LTTE, right? So I'm not going to beat around the bush anymore, and the winner in the terrorist blog category is... "grounviews" and its sibling Sinhala terror sites "vikalpa" and their Tamil site "Marru wali" (sorry but I have forgotten my Tamil - read it as best as I could). Everybody know what "groundviews" agenda is and what terrorist group they support - and how they published a disagreeing commenter's IP info and bocked and moderated comments from others who had different opinions (they promote human rights and support free speech?). And now "vikalpa" meaning "alternate" and we all know who's alternative policies they are and who makes money through that NGO and which terror group they say "Ai Ai Captain" to.
The runners-up in the terrorist blog category is.... "transcurrants". If that bloke post something it is a fabricated piece of rubbish. I was wondering why famous defense analyst like B.Ramana and other eminent people only write to this website. These specific articles on "transcurrents" were never published anywhere else on the web not in any other news or defense site. Could it be because they are not the actual writers? Likely that some joker is impersonating these experts to give a moral boost so that the Tiger Terrorist may pump out more money from the Tamil diaspora and pacify the power hungry SL politicians and peacenics? B Ramanan publishes all his material on Rediff but where are these articles that praise the LTTE and rundown the SL government? The most horrifying thing was when I read one of these fabricated articles on the Island of the 25th of October 2007. They had simply done a "copy and paste" without verifying facts. One must say, now that is a dangerous trend, because we still believe that the Paper bought at the local boutique is a little bit more valid than what we might find on the Internet (because of the process that it SHOULD go through)!
So please keep your eyes and ears and most importantly your minds open, since this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many other blogs, youtube videos etc. etc. wait in line to do the bidding of the Tiger Terrorist to achieve their "virtual" Eelam (it just occurred to me that may be the Tiger Terrorist and their entourage could actually buy some space on SecondLife and create their own virtual Eelam and Prabahakaran can be their king LOL!).
Wish you all PEACE, LOVE AND HARMONY this Christmas and the New Year to come.
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Friday, 21 December 2007
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Little help for our little VBloggers
VBloggers, as I like to call our little Village Bolg community.
I have been receiving essays numbering in the tens, for corrections and feedback before they are posted on them web. I was reading through them and saw that some of the shortcomings were very common or were across the board. So I just thought I'd make up a list and have these little check boxes that they could go through before they are posted, and may be that will help them to improve their writing. May be you could suggest some tips too.
One of the most disturbing things I found when going through these essays was that many were using the spell checker and the grammar correction option, but they were simply doing it in a blind fashion. What ever the word or phrase that was suggested first was used to replace the mistake. I remembered what one of my colleagues said when asked about the "One laptop per child program", he said "If I give my son a calculator he will learn to use it to add and subtract and multiply, but will he learn adding, subtracting or multiplying? I don't think so. It is not about giving a laptop to a child, but how it is used to learn". Similarly these little bloggers and many others don't use the spell checker and the grammar correction option as a learning too, they simply use it to correct mistakes and they keep on repeating the same mistake over and over again. In an instance when they do not have access to a computer and need to write something, they are going to be in deep trouble.
So hope that the people who donate computers and conduct programs also point out the importance of using them as tools of learning rather than just tools for doing tasks.
Click to view
I have been receiving essays numbering in the tens, for corrections and feedback before they are posted on them web. I was reading through them and saw that some of the shortcomings were very common or were across the board. So I just thought I'd make up a list and have these little check boxes that they could go through before they are posted, and may be that will help them to improve their writing. May be you could suggest some tips too.
One of the most disturbing things I found when going through these essays was that many were using the spell checker and the grammar correction option, but they were simply doing it in a blind fashion. What ever the word or phrase that was suggested first was used to replace the mistake. I remembered what one of my colleagues said when asked about the "One laptop per child program", he said "If I give my son a calculator he will learn to use it to add and subtract and multiply, but will he learn adding, subtracting or multiplying? I don't think so. It is not about giving a laptop to a child, but how it is used to learn". Similarly these little bloggers and many others don't use the spell checker and the grammar correction option as a learning too, they simply use it to correct mistakes and they keep on repeating the same mistake over and over again. In an instance when they do not have access to a computer and need to write something, they are going to be in deep trouble.
So hope that the people who donate computers and conduct programs also point out the importance of using them as tools of learning rather than just tools for doing tasks.
Click to viewFriday, 20 April 2007
How not to Fly
I thought I should share this story with the world (or at least someone who would by mistake step into my blog instead of the other 100million+ blogs out there).
It was a workshop in Shellefteå about a two hour bus ride form Umeå, Sweden. It was the session after evening fika (coffee break). Ah.. so it was a speaker form US, Wayne Hodgins, a gray haired person on this big screen. Ok, so it will be a video conference, or rather video talk. The talk was on Web 2.0. Gosh! another repetition of Web 2.0? "This is going to be boring!" and "How can it be fun to watch someone yap yap yap.. on a big-screen" were the thoughts rumbling in my head.
Well YES it was another talk about Web 2.0, the exact topic "Wassup with Web 2.0" and YES it was a a gray haired someone yapping on a big-screen. But 2 minutes into the talk, whoosh! like magic the boredom ended. No more was this someone on a big-screen and yapping about "this is what make up Web 2.0...", he was among us and tweaking our brain cells. Yes it was true that he was still in US and we were in Sweden, but he had made contact and the barrier was broken. Wow! can a speaker be this good, I thought to myself? It was so so so GOOD!
He was talking about concepts behind Web 2.0 and not how Web 2.0 could be used for education, which everybody talks about. In fact most of his examples were related to business and entertainment. It was these concepts that made it so interesting. It was a lot of concepts to be exact but each of them made sense and each of them were an eye opener.
This image was one of my favorites of all the concepts he talked about. "Many of man's first attempts of flight, failed miserably and most of the time in broken bones or worse in death. The pioneers tried imitating the birds and other flying animals. So what does it have to do with web 2.0. Exactly! I could not figure it out. Anyway if we look at what the Wright brother did right, they did not try to imitate birds, dragonflies, bees and the gang, but they thought different. They looked beyond, and they succeeded. Simply take our own usage of software, if we used version 1.0 of software X and now we use version 10.0 of software X, is there a lot of difference in what we do except for may be a few new features and some new fancy icons and cool new looks. Can't we still do what we do with version 10.0 with version 1.0? Probably I think at least 90% of us will answer in the affirmative. The concept Wayne talks about here is "learning to un-learn". The Wright brothers knew how animals flew, but they simply thought beyond that an decided to fix an engine and come up with the concept of lift by moving wings... wow! I and many other would call it "Thinking out of the Box", but "learning to unlearn" has a little bit more complicated concept, which I find difficult to explain so I would advice you to listen to Wayne's PodCasts.
I am not going to repeat all what Wayne said word to word, since probably he does it much better. Wayne conveyed his ideas to me through a noisy channel and there was data loss, and for me to convey those ideas to a third person would be through even a more noisier channel.. so more data loss and probably data corruption :-).
So I'll just list a few more concepts you might want to lookup if you visit Wayne's blog.
It was a workshop in Shellefteå about a two hour bus ride form Umeå, Sweden. It was the session after evening fika (coffee break). Ah.. so it was a speaker form US, Wayne Hodgins, a gray haired person on this big screen. Ok, so it will be a video conference, or rather video talk. The talk was on Web 2.0. Gosh! another repetition of Web 2.0? "This is going to be boring!" and "How can it be fun to watch someone yap yap yap.. on a big-screen" were the thoughts rumbling in my head.
Well YES it was another talk about Web 2.0, the exact topic "Wassup with Web 2.0" and YES it was a a gray haired someone yapping on a big-screen. But 2 minutes into the talk, whoosh! like magic the boredom ended. No more was this someone on a big-screen and yapping about "this is what make up Web 2.0...", he was among us and tweaking our brain cells. Yes it was true that he was still in US and we were in Sweden, but he had made contact and the barrier was broken. Wow! can a speaker be this good, I thought to myself? It was so so so GOOD!
He was talking about concepts behind Web 2.0 and not how Web 2.0 could be used for education, which everybody talks about. In fact most of his examples were related to business and entertainment. It was these concepts that made it so interesting. It was a lot of concepts to be exact but each of them made sense and each of them were an eye opener.
 |
This image was one of my favorites of all the concepts he talked about. "Many of man's first attempts of flight, failed miserably and most of the time in broken bones or worse in death. The pioneers tried imitating the birds and other flying animals. So what does it have to do with web 2.0. Exactly! I could not figure it out. Anyway if we look at what the Wright brother did right, they did not try to imitate birds, dragonflies, bees and the gang, but they thought different. They looked beyond, and they succeeded. Simply take our own usage of software, if we used version 1.0 of software X and now we use version 10.0 of software X, is there a lot of difference in what we do except for may be a few new features and some new fancy icons and cool new looks. Can't we still do what we do with version 10.0 with version 1.0? Probably I think at least 90% of us will answer in the affirmative. The concept Wayne talks about here is "learning to un-learn". The Wright brothers knew how animals flew, but they simply thought beyond that an decided to fix an engine and come up with the concept of lift by moving wings... wow! I and many other would call it "Thinking out of the Box", but "learning to unlearn" has a little bit more complicated concept, which I find difficult to explain so I would advice you to listen to Wayne's PodCasts.
I am not going to repeat all what Wayne said word to word, since probably he does it much better. Wayne conveyed his ideas to me through a noisy channel and there was data loss, and for me to convey those ideas to a third person would be through even a more noisier channel.. so more data loss and probably data corruption :-).
So I'll just list a few more concepts you might want to lookup if you visit Wayne's blog.
- Perfecting the irrelevant
- Long tail
- Mashup
- The snowflakes effect
- and of course my favorite learning to un-learn
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
Första Flykt
Blogs! Blogs? "Blogs", yep knew they existed but never did find the time, interest or a fast enough Internet connection to try them out. It's been a month and a half after arriving in Umeå in Sweden. Even with a 100MB Internet connection and some time of my own, it never ever crossed my mind that NOW I can maintain a blog.
So the day had arrived, when the almighty decided “You shall be blog-lightened” a Crash and a Bang of Thunder...!.
It was a run a round the country side to locate where "HumLab" was, it was in an underground location, which to me seemed like a posh place in a basement. I walked into a seminar, already 15 minutes passed and felt totally lost for a few moments, grabbed a chair and settled in (thanks to Dög who lent me his computer). Well trying to get what this lady in a dark-gray suit was yapping about, Ahhh! alas some familiar words, Internet, Web, Wiki, Flikr, Blogs, Web 2.0.... blah blah blah. Ah! OK so she was talking about how Web 2.0 can be used for education.... or rather how she used it for education....! Great! A new way of looking at the new (hmm Old?) web stuff, how they could be used in education. That was cool.
Finally a coffee break! A chance to get a one-on-one with this lady, get more insight into the usage of these new apps. “Aagnah” WRONG! this woman seemed like a person with a not so good attitude! Snobbish as Homo sapiens sapiens from the "Land of the Free" could be. With no success for me and the break over... she went on "I", "me" and "mine"... in a marathon of a MPHOT!
Haaa any way, what is good must be appreciated, even a “rotten tomato” may serve a good purpose, sooo… thank you Barb G, I appreciate the fact that you opened my eyes and gave me a reminder about the power of blogs. Tack så Mycket
And so my journey begins…!
So the day had arrived, when the almighty decided “You shall be blog-lightened” a Crash and a Bang of Thunder...!.
It was a run a round the country side to locate where "HumLab" was, it was in an underground location, which to me seemed like a posh place in a basement. I walked into a seminar, already 15 minutes passed and felt totally lost for a few moments, grabbed a chair and settled in (thanks to Dög who lent me his computer). Well trying to get what this lady in a dark-gray suit was yapping about, Ahhh! alas some familiar words, Internet, Web, Wiki, Flikr, Blogs, Web 2.0.... blah blah blah. Ah! OK so she was talking about how Web 2.0 can be used for education.... or rather how she used it for education....! Great! A new way of looking at the new (hmm Old?) web stuff, how they could be used in education. That was cool.
Finally a coffee break! A chance to get a one-on-one with this lady, get more insight into the usage of these new apps. “Aagnah” WRONG! this woman seemed like a person with a not so good attitude! Snobbish as Homo sapiens sapiens from the "Land of the Free" could be. With no success for me and the break over... she went on "I", "me" and "mine"... in a marathon of a MPHOT!
Haaa any way, what is good must be appreciated, even a “rotten tomato” may serve a good purpose, sooo… thank you Barb G, I appreciate the fact that you opened my eyes and gave me a reminder about the power of blogs. Tack så Mycket
And so my journey begins…!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)