Slovenian students (and teachers) enjoying autumn holidays this week :-)

candle one, originally uploaded by francesca.sara.

Doris wandered about the Halloween in different parts of the world here and I'm writing this in response to her post.
In Slovenia we don't make a big deal about Halloween; we carve out pumpkins and people attend Halloween parties and concerts (especially young) but we generally don't make much fuss about it.
October 31st is a work-free day in Slovenia and so is the following day, November 1st. The reason however is not Halloween but another religious holiday celebrated on this day, called Reformation Day.
The Reformation was a Protestant movement in the 16th century attempting to reform the Catholic Church. The first Slovene book and the first mention of the name 'Slovene' is associated with the Reformation and Slovenia has therefore appointed Reformation Day as a national holiday. There is usually an 'official' celebration but it is not really people's holiday.
The following day, November 1, on the other hand, is a firmly rooted national holiday called All Saints Day or simply the Day of the Dead. As the name itself tells, it's the day when we remember our dead. Families gather together, we remember our dear ones, visit their graves, bring flowers, light candles, stop for awhile by their graves, and also meet friends there. People take this holiday very seriously. It therefore suprised me very much when I happened to end up in the Mexican part of Los Angeles years ago on Dia De Los Muertos and witnessed a joyous and lively celebration of November 1st. I liked it.

A Vision of Students Today

We've been talking about education recently - Prof. M. Wesch and his students (from Kansas University) shared their vision of higher education. Is this your vision as well?
Prof Wesch is also the author of the widely viewed and discussed The Machine is Us/ing Us.

Countryside Management group created blogs

Here we are :-).

Maja Š.: http://exoticplantsandanimals.blogspot.com
David Č.: http://cyberfulowz88.blogspot.com
Valter J. : http://thedoctorvalo.blogspot.com
Nejc G. : http://nejc-nils.blogspot.com
Matej V. : http://mnenjeplet.blogspot.com
Luka K. : http://lukakogoj.blogspot.com
Martin C. : http://martincernatic.blogspot.com
Sabrina Ž.: http://sabrinazizmond.blogspot.com
Rok L. : http://roklozar88.blogspot.com
Primož K.: http://sladkitrakprimojack.blogspot.com
Simona Š. http://simonaskibingorenje.blogspot.com/

Have fun!

Global warming

Monkey, originally uploaded by Saša Sirk.

It's getting hot, isn't it? Air conditioners hum all around and we linger by our firmly shut windows observing the world outside like tropical fish from a fish tank. Progress, huh?
Taiwanese students created very interesting propaganda materials to promote fight against global warming . Check it out at http://multienglishes.blogspot.com/ .

RSS in Plain English

I could not resist posting this video here - it talks about RSS readers and why we should use them - something we've been exploring recently...

Tag Clouds

What do you think of these tag clouds? I find them cute. They visualize word frequency in chosen texts. You simply enter the text to be visualized and hit the 'visualize' button.
I read about these clouds in the blog of the Slovene Association of LSP Teachers some time ago... One of the teachers commented that her students had a lot of fun analysing speeches by G.W. Bush. Here's visualization of my writingmatrix wiki page. Try it out yourselves - it's fun!

account active aleksander ales already although articles beautiful better bit bloglines blogs blogspot bogdan bookmarks check class com comments community computer content course decided del different diving dusan effort english experience explore feed fields formats group hope html http icio ie igor information interact interest keyword knowledge learn life links lot matej maybe meet met nelba news nice opened others people personal photos post posted posts presentation project reader really rita robert rostilj rss search shared similar something start stay students suzana tag technorati thank themselves things think used users vance videos web webhead week wiki wikipedia window wonderful writingmatrix

created at TagCrowd.com

Technorati puzzle

I was at Blostreams Salon at Tapped In yesterday. Blogstreams Salon is a monthly event where people meet to discuss and explore blogs. We talked a bit about Technorati and the writingmatrix project. The idea behind writingmatrix is to get in touch with people with similar interests across the world by tagging posts writingmatrix and then searching for blogs of interest using Technorati (you simply enter 'writingmatrix' in the search box, click on the arrow next to the text box and choose 'in tags' to find all blog posts with writingmatrix tags). Technorati generates a list from the most recent posts on. You'll find many students from Venezuela there.
When checking the list yesterday, we found out that it doesn't include some of the writingmatrix blogs despite tagging - we wondered whether the reason for this could be that the missing blogs aren't configured at sending pings (under settings/publishing). 5 Roštilj student blogs are on the Technorati writingmatrix (in tags) hit list (Suzana, Igor, Robert, Dušan, Aleš) and 4 of them are left out (Matej, Bogdan, Aleksander, Robert Č - Robert hasn't really posted anything yet, Matej misspelled the tag (his pin configuration is set at yes, has already corrected his tags but is not yet on the list), Aleksander and Bogdan tagged their posts correctly but are not included – I hope we'll soon understand why.

Funny turist on Malta...

Hi everyone!

I found this funny mp3 file... You should listen it.

It is on this link http://damijanlikar.webhop.net/TuristonMalta/

Bye.

Some more from the class

Aleš and Robert

Saša in action

Part-time informatics class 06/07

Our class: Matej aka 'Catman',


the lucky father of sweet Aša Aleš and our two Roberts,

Mavricij and Igor (the diver) in the front and Aleksander and Peter in the back row.

Tomorrow's teaching is today

Tomorrow's teaching is today, originally uploaded by sasasirk.

I have been 'silent' for awhile because I was busy attending E-twinning conference for language teachers, which took place this weekend at our school(from Thursday to Saturday). There were about 65 participants from different European countries (UK, Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Poland, France, ...). We enjoyed wonderful workshops and had a lot of FUN. Ewan Macintosh, a cool Scottish presenter, wrote some nice words about our school here.

My new blog

link:

http://catmanworld.blogspot.com/

The world of bears

My last movie is two days old...

Too Busy to Stop and Hear the Music

Today I read about an interesting experiment which took place in January - a world-class violinist played for hours in a subway station and almost no one stopped to listen. I learned about the story in Seth's blog.
We are always short of time, always in a hurry... Had you been there, would you have done the same thing? I'm afraid I would.
Seth says most of us probably would and it bothers us. »If your worldview is that music in the subway isn't worth your time, you're not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn't match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. We're so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that we've created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world, most of the time, even when we suffer because of it.«
Let's not forget to take a deep breath every now and then and simply enjoy the moment. Have a warm, sunny weekend.

HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

Install Win Vista from USB drive.

link:
http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!da410c7f7e038d!1665.entry

Anti-Phishing Working Group

The total number of unique phishing reports submitted to Anti-Phishing Working Group in January 2007 was 29,930 – the highest recorded number by the APWG. This is a count of unique phishing email reports received by the APWG from the public, its member organizations and its research partners.

More on this web site:
http://www.antiphishing.org

Where are we heading?

My husband asked me if I ever imagined when I was a student that 95% of my work would involve the use of computer. I didn't. Where are these fast technology developments taking us? Here's a video speculating about it. What are the most surprising facts for you? Or did you know? ;-) Thanks for the link, Jennifer.

Phishing Demo

We had converssation about phishing last monday. This is another example of phishing.

I'll be more careful

You all told me in class that a scam was done through the Mercur. Do you think the scam in the video is the way they got the customer's information? I don't think I have ever really noticed if an ATM looks different than I expect, I am afraid that I would be one of those customers who would get caught unaware. Now I will be more cautious.
Kay

Scamming the ATM machine

On Monday we talked about different crimes people commit using computers (phishing, spamming, creating viruses, etc.). Somebody mentioned ATM scamming and Kay came up with a nice video about it. THANK YOU, Kay. Check it out. Did you know your magnetic cards can be cloned so easily?