Opinions, faces and tags at Walls Talking

There are all sorts of faces staring from walls


and all sorts of opinions


and many many many tags



You are most welcome to check out also parts 1, 2, and 3 of this post and share your thoughts. :-)

School and love and city life at Walls Talking

Walls Talking images connected with school and school life



some that have to do with love (one way or another ;-))



and some that deal with city life



You are most welcome to check out also parts 1 and 2 of this post and share your thoughts. :-)

Human weaknesses, world news and freedom

Here come Walls Talking reflections - part 2 (See Part 1 here). Remember to view full page with the 'show info' option on (top right).

Human weaknesses and vices


Responses to world news,events


Celebrating openess, sincerity, freedom

Nice, aren't they?

Angels, crisis and environmental responsibility

As the school year is slowly winding up our end, I'd like to reflect a bit about this year's Walls Talking journey .

Thanks to many wonderful students and kind Webhead, iEARN, SDUTSJ and I4E friends our Flicr group pool now contains almost 600 photos of all sorts of expressions from our walls.

They come from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Marocco, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Spain, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, USA and Venezuela.

Here are the first 3 sets I've created - there are many more to come. Flickr tag option is a nice and simple way for organizing and displaying sets of photos in a Flickr group by any group user. IMPORTANT: watch the slideshows in 'full page' view and with the 'show info' option top right turned on.

The first set contains some angelic glimpses


The second set contains some grimmer and more down to earth, crisis and stress related stories



and set 3 reminds us of our responsibility for the environment


There's more to come - I love this flickr option for tagging and displaying tagged items. It seems any Flickr group member can freely tag any group pool items - even copyrighted ones.

Let me finish this post with a big THANK YOU ALL for making the Walls Talking idea alive and real. And if you are thinking of joining now or in the future - well, anyone wellcome anytime. :-)

We have a saying in Slovene: 'Zrno na zrno pogača, kamen na kamen palača' (grain by grain yields bread, stone by stone produces a palace). Sifting through these colorful grains and stones that have been trickling in our Flickr group since a little over a year ago, I see we've been building a very special palace here. A palace of life. Nice things and things not so nice. The world is what it is.

Fashion and clothes at our school

These two collages have been created to chime in Schools Around the Globe fashion and clothes topic.
At our school students wear what they like – there are no uniforms. Our school is a technical school centre - it includes many technical secondary schools (computer science, mechanical engineering, electronics, metalwork...) and some college courses. There aren't many girls around, we mostly have boys' classes.

This group are mechatronics students:

This is their view of fashion and clothes; their reply to my questions: How important are fashion and clothes to you? and How would you describe a typical student at our school?
We generally don’t care much about fashion. We wear casual clothes, whatever we feel comfortable in. A typical TŠC student wears jeans or sports clothes, perhaps a hoody and a jacket - simple and practical clothes. Different students like different styles, like everywhere else – ranging from metal to emo or skaters' or metalhead looks. Clothes sometimes tell a lot about people who wear them – about the kind of music they listen to, how much money they spend on them, how much they care about their looks.

This group are informatics students:

And this is their reply to my questions above:
Some of us seem to care about fashion more than others, but the general view seems to be that it's more important that you feel good in whatever you put on and that there's not much point in spending a fortune on clothes. A typical student at our school wears jeans, a t-shirt or a pullover, a jacket, sports shoes or trainers – casual clothes, not necessarily latest fashion.
Students lego avatars have been created using The Mini-Mizer I was alerted to this site via Nik Peachy's blog.

Diversity, uniqueness, stereotypes

A few years ago, a German blogger came up with a world map that shows what traits different nationalities are especially known for. It's called "The Prejudice Map" and it is kind of a catalog of stereotypes and clichés.

Slovenia is not included, so I asked my students how they would describe us. They came up with a lot of interesting suggestions - nice ones (closely connected families, sport matters, nature too, don't like to stick out of the crowd...) and those darker ones (envy, inferiority complex, alcoholism, suicides...).
We then checked what Google says "Slovenians are known for". This is what came up:
- incredibly beautiful women,
- partying abilities,
- extreme athletes
- low confidence
- historical presence in Istria
- entertainment lovers
- excellent parties
- excellent speakers of several foreign languages
- horrible choice of gown in Miss World beauty contests

Argentina's talking walls

During our previous class we brainstormed what we know about Argentina for some 5 or 10 minutes and came up with the following:

Argentina's capital is Buenos Aires. The country is located in the South America, Spanish language is spoken there. People do tango and are fond of fireworks. Football is Argentinian national sport, one of the world's most famous football legends - Maradona comes from there.

Argentinian people eat huge steaks, lots of cattle is bred for meat. Argentinian beef is exported all over the world and served in many restaurants even in our part of the world. Argentina is also one of the world's biggest honey producers (also in Slovenia beekeeping is a firmly rooted tradition).

It is not uncommon for a Slovene to have relatives in Argentina or to know somebody who has - many Slovenes emigrated to Argentina before and soon after WW2. Even one of our ex prime ministers, Andrej Bajuk, is an Argentinian Slovene (has retired recently).

Evita Peron was a very popular Argentinian First Lady - the queen of people's hearts. Argentina hosted this year's rally and used to host F1 races too in Buenos Aires. There is a beautiful national park called Patagonia.

We then had a look at graffiti uploaded to the Wallstalking.org website and Flickr group:

the graffiti there are humorous, vivacious and colorful, - Caminito tango dancers, Plaza de Mayo street bustle, young Valu enjoying blissful afterlife, 'Hello Kitty' turned into 'Hello Kirchner', a complaint about not too good-looking women from somebody's neighbourhood,... Some graffiti there are also more serious, e.g. reminding people of a dark period from their past, protesting against capitalism,..


People seem to be proud of their culture, roots and heroes. (Hm, can we say the same for us, Slovenes?)

caminito, originally uploaded by jenverschoor.

wallstalking.org

Some friends and I are starting a graffiti project called Listen to the Walls Talking.
On my way to school some two or three weeks ago I noticed a pile of old desks next to the trash can. I stopped and had a look - they were covered in scribbles, verses, sketches... some already disassembled and ready for their final destination. Those scribbles and carvings all over them made me think of the countless hours students had spent sitting there, being productive (one way or another ;-)). I thought how these marks are in a way reflection of somebody's feelings caught in time. Bored, in love, happy, mad, creative, you name it. So when I later that day entered the classroom and registered the blank white student desks, those struck me as sterile, lifeless, cold... There were no stories there, no emotions - the desks were nice and clean. So I started looking around, at walls, chairs, schoolbags... and I thought - wouldn't it be nice to collect and share scribbles meaningful to us, see why we find them meaningful, what do they tell us? What does this tell us about us?
I talked about this to some of my friends and ended up in a fun collaborative project - people from different parts of the world started sharing photos of the graffiti they like or find meaningful. It's fun already and it has only just begun. Check it out and join us! Hope to see you there.

Buy a drink? ;-)

Brain Awareness Week

This week is a Brain Awareness Week. I heard it on the radio earlier this week, it made me curious so I googled it up and found some sites promoting this event. To contribute a bit to this, I'd like to share with you lovely tutorials on human anatomy at getbodysmart.com (check the brain section ;-)) and on the National Geographic site .
Also I'd like to share with you a fascinating TED talk by a neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who

... had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another

Enjoy!

Janez D.

I generally don't like politics so I don't follow it and don't talk about it. The way I see it is talking rather than working, saying things not necessarily meaning them, getting money not necessarily deserving it… I know nobody is perfect and I know I am not doing justice here to people, who take this profession seriously, with dignity and pride, who care about the job they do, who know they are there elected by people to work for people... As I said, politics is not my topic, I'm making an exception here to pay tribute to Janez D., a politician I liked.
Drnovšek was our ex PM and our ex President, a man who chose to live a simple life in a cottage in Zaplana baking his own bread rather than in a luxurious presidential palace, the man who personaly brought trailers to the homeless gypsy family rejected by their angry co- villagers, the white man from the inauguration of the Indian President in Bolivia, the man launching his personal peace initiatives for Kosovo and Darfur, the man believing we can make the world a better place for us all, a charismatic man with good heart and common sense listening and speaking to people, the only President whose Christmas message I listened to. He died tonight. I wish him peace.

Touring Unesco's World Heritage sites

On an island hop, originally uploaded by alvanman.

I'm doing a tour of Unesco's World Heritage sites. I have just returned from the Puerto-Princesa Subterranean River National Park in the Philippines.

This park features a spectacular limestone karst landscape with an underground river. One of the river's distinguishing features is that it emerges directly into the sea, and its lower portion is subject to tidal influences. The area also represents a significant habitat for biodiversity conservation. The site contains a full 'mountain-to-sea' ecosystem and has some of the most important forests in Asia.

Heh, just kidding. I wish I could... But... I've just come across this lovely site - http://www.world-heritage-tour.org/(requires registration), where you can enjoy 360-degree imaging of 216 Unesco's World Heritage sites (25% of all 851 registered by UNESCO), 15 are on the World Monuments Fund Watch List and 67 are additions by WHTour.org. Altogether there are 1641 panographies (360-degree imaging). More sites are going to be added in the near future. It's cool, you have a 360 degree view, you can zoom in and out, access short descriptions of the sites and monuments... I navigated the sites by clicking the map... the Search option didn't seem to work unfortunately. Check it out and let me know where you've gone. Enjoy!

The internet meme and trackback

Time for my homework as well - Doris passed the meme to me. :-)
When did I start using the Internet? I first learned about its existance in 1996. My husband, then a student at the Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics in Ljubljana, took me to a computer room at the faculty and showed me what the Internet is. I still remember how fascinated I was seeing how easily you can find whatever you are looking for. Few people had access to it back then.
I began to use it a few years later when I got access to it from home. In 1998 I think. We had an extremely slow dial-up connection at first, then moved on to ISDN in 2000, ADSL a bit later, and now fiber optics. :-)
In the beginning I mostly used it to search for useful materials for my study and work, for email and IMing (MSN messenger). Then I got my job at our school 3 years ago so I had to learn how to put together online materials for my course. Surfing the web I stumbled upon Webheads in Action, a wonderful online community of practice bringing together educators from different parts of the world. There I met many inspiring teachers and from then on things have been developing with the speed of light for me. We experiment, fool around, and have F.U.N.. We share our experience and visit each other's classes. And we learn new things every day. :-)

What follows is my response to Nelba's invitation to test the trackback option in our meme posts. How do we do this?
Trackback is ability to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. I think it should work if we first turn on the backlinks setting, which can be found under the Settings Comments tab and then post a link in our post to Nelba's blog post at http://englishvirtualcommunity.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-first-meme.html .
Does it work? We'll see.
Matias and Vance tried this awhile ago and wrote about it here and here and Bili mentiones having problems with this here.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Another great video from Common Craft explaining Del.icio.us 'in plain English'