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Tom Cruise stars in the JAG-based “A Few Good Men”. I’m still not quite sure why it was called that and I have to say, the JAG tv show normally has better story lines. The location of the crime (a marine gets roughed up and dies) was most intriguing – it was Guantanamo in Cuba. [...]

‘Sayonara’, starring Marlon Brando, was set in post-war Japan. Brando plays a Korean war flying ace who is stationed in Kobe in 1951. This is meant to encourage him to marry the general’s daughter, but somehow he gets distracted by a female Japanese performer. This is a no-no in post-war Japan, with ‘strict’ regulations against [...]

Dubya loved to crow about the “freedom” and “peace” that he brought to the “Iraqi people”, since the “victory” in Iraq. The USATODAY poll of April 2004 showed that the majority thought of the Americans as occupiers (71%), not liberators (19%) and that the invasion brought more harm (46%) than good (33%). While they are [...]

Let’s make e-learning more about communication between learners and less about posting of content, so we can achieve an on-line presence which is equal to, or even better than, a classroom context. Most people need a teacher to guide them through their learning, and a classroom context to give structure to that learning. That is, [...]

A lot of what passes for ‘e-learning’ is really a dumping ground for content (most often PowerPoint slides – ugh.) Learning should be as authentic as possible, with students learning by solving interesting and appropriately challenging problems. This applies whether it is via e-learning or in a classroom. Bized of the UK, a “service for [...]

Great news today – China has enacted an alternative energy law. I would love to see China and Japan as leaders in the area of hybrid cars and clean energy development. Sure, China has a long way to go, but what a huge impact they would have if they significantly reduced fossil fuel usage – [...]

I’m fascinated by PHP at the moment. It is a programming language that was developed only in the last few years as an open-source concept. The acronym ‘PHP’ originally stood for Personal Home Page and it was developed byRasmus Lerdof as a short add-on to HTML for simple form processing. It has grown rapidly and [...]

There is explosive growth in the ‘blogosphere’. Can blogs be used effectively as learning tools or will that just ruin the students’ enjoyment of them? We struggle with this notion – same thing with instant messaging. I came across an interesting bunch of inter-linked blogs by students from a certain Singaporean polytechnic (studying mass communication). [...]