Private-owned high school Ngoi Sao (translated as Star) was probably the first non-international school in Ho Chi Minh City to provide edu email to their students. Read the story here
First, since the capacity is 7Gb, I have reason to believe that the school’s IT utilizes Gmail service.
Second, providing students with the school email address makes it more professional for communication than a personal mailbox on a free service. The students can use their school email to apply for part-time or free-lance job.
Third, I wonder if there is any difference between email addresses of students and email addresses of the school’s staff?
Last but not least, maybe these students can use their edu email as credentials to join a network on Facebook, instead of the current introduction mechanism.
How to join a network on Facebook
1. Location-based network has no restriction
2. For organization-based network, members must have an email address belonging to their company / organization where they find the verification link from Facebook
3. High schools also have their networks, but since many high school don’t provide school email, joining process is done on introduction basis. Person A requests network N to which s/he belongs. When person B who is a member of that network in real life want to join N, B has to add A as a friend and asks A to confirm that B is actually in N before Facebook adds B to N. Then C shall have to add either A or B and ask for confirmation. This process goes on for subsequent members…
The blog craze started in 2004, MySpace came out in 2002. From then till now, Web 2.0 has penetrated deeply into our lives.
You may have heard the buzz: it’s all about communications, exchange information and expressing the ego.
Have you thought of utilizing all those things for learning?
Recently I’ve been very aggressive on the net to see how we can use the applications for learning, and here I am with my key findings:
The requirements
Let’s imagine a very familiar study scenario: you’re assigned into a group to do a research on topic X.
Traditionally, the group would rely on emails, phone calls and IM to communicate and collaborate. Have you found these media difficult to classify your information?
This is how I would use Web 2.0 for learning
1. Search for information with Search EngineS
Obviously, information searching starts with search engines.
I have some hints for this:
Don’t just use Google. Try Yahoo! search, Live search, Ask search and other engines. They give different results and thus, relevant information might be found from ones other than Google
Try Google on different region settings. google.com/ncr (international version) yields different results from google.com.vn
Try different keywords and keyword combination. Also, exploit the operators
Also search for images. At least Google, Yahoo! and Live support this. Images are useful for illustrating your ideas and, in some cases, give you additional information.
5. Blog your group’s findings on group-blog powered platform
WordPress supports multiple-author. I would want our group members to blog our research everyday on our blog. This is not superficial. It helps us
Collect information, thoughts, findings, analysis and intermediate conclusions
Track each member’s progress
Present to the lecturer our growth
5b. Share micro details
This is optional though. Some information might be very detailed and we want quick sharing methods. I would connect my mobile phone to Twitter and quickly update my thoughts on the way.
Facebook is good to build relationship with your work mates.
11. Publish your research
Publish your research as presentations on slideshare or documents on scribd to share your knowledge engage in discussion on the topic.
12. Consolidate them all into one page
There are just so much!
How’re you gonna navigate around them all?
Well, one solution is to use a homepage service like netvibes to put all these services together.
Why all these?
Too complicated? Well here are the reasons why I would do it this way
Better organization of information. No email confusion
Exhaustive analysis. You write on the way so no information is missed
Better collaboration
Man, isn’t it fun?
I know it would be much easier for you just to email. But how much time have you spent searching for information later on? I’d rather spend the time to get things organized first, then make it easier later to focus more on creating contents.
And I’m pretty sure of one thing: just next year, this entry will be outdated because many new services will come out. Semantic web, mobile apps are just a few to predict.
It’s not a fashionable fad or a time-killer, it’s a shift in the way we can be more effective. Do you want to miss the train trend?
Digital Divide
But you know, all these will never happen if digital divide hasn’t been closed.
Technology proficiency and more importantly, community habit is a big gap. I want my team to do so, but other teams may not, so some of my team members may argue “why do we have to!”
With the internet connection speed in Vietnam, using Google Docs et al is insane.
Today, a world that is flat is till a romantic dream for me.
Resources
I’ve already tried out these services. Kindly see mine as example of how things may end up evolve: taitran.com/blog/resources
Eventually after aggressively penetrating Vietnam market with a lot of properties such as the colorful Zing portal, the controversial Zing chat and the very successful social-networking site Yobanbe, Zing MP3…, Zing is preparing to roll out Email service.
30Mb attachment, 3 times as much as that of Yahoo! Mail
Server in Vietnam so bottle-neck effect is eliminated.
Through a short interview with Zing team’s Chief Developer, I learned that the following will be supported
Unlimited storage
POP3
Screen capture
e-cards
Music embed. This is a smart move to integrate with products together.
When I logged in using Safari, the message “System is busy” pops out. I retried with Firefox and it went well. The message looks like a facade to the incompatibility of many browsers.
My prediction is that many users will utilize this service as a music-sharing channel.
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