Daily Archives: June 16, 2024

More on those proposed social media age restrictions, and cometh the Olympics ere long

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Starting with Leo again

As he pointed out — and he has been running a news site via YouTube since the age of 11 — what he and his team have achieved would have been impossible if the policy, which is now bipartisan, to restrict access by under 16s to social media had been in place. “Silly and impractical” he told ABC News Breakfast yesterday.

My teaching and tutoring practice from 2000 through to 2010 would have been impossible too.

I was chuffed when my English/ESL Blog — formerly the Sydney Boys High English and ESL page — was honoured in June 2009.

English/ESL nominated

30 JUNE 2009

Last year English/ESL came in at #75 in the Top 100 Language Blogs 2008 on Lexiophiles. I have just been informed that English/ESL has been nominated for the Top 100 of 2009.

Phase 2: Public Voting (July 8 – July 27)

At the end of the nomination phase, we will prescreen every blog and put it into one of the four categories (see below). In each category 100 blogs will be included for voting. If your blog is on the list you can ask your readers, friends, family and whoever comes to mind to vote for you. We will provide a voting button for your convenience before the voting starts. Every person can only vote once the voting of the top 100 blogs for each category.

I depended on some social media platforms — particularly YouTube which is one of those being considered for restrictions by our leaders in both major parties — for material to share with students, and for students to share work with me, in that case several blogging sites especially.

And in March 2008:

English/ESL honoured

05 MARCH 2008

I am really pleased about this. Go to Creating a Community of Writers Using Technology and you will find details of a March 7, 2008 Conference in Grand Rapids, MI.

Activity 3 (30 min.): Show examples of blogs and evaluate how well they would add to the community of writers in the classroom; teachers can follow links while facilitators show the link on the screen.

Thanks, people. Have a good conference!

Very likely that all but one — mine! — of those links no longer work.

Then I ran an entire class partly in areas that might in future be age-restricted:

This is really quite an old site now, but it seems that there is still a demand for it. I put it up on Diary-X for a Year 12 English Extension class (2002) at Sydney Boys High. In February 2006 Diary-X crashed and burned…

Saved it just in time!

 

Mind you those students, being in Year 12, were all over 16, but I also had dedicated pages on such platforms as Angelfire for classes where they were below 16 — Year 9 and 10 for example.

Paris Olympics — counting down the days now

Our swim team selection trials have just been happening….

Of course here in Oz those of us who were in Sydney in 2000 will never forget those Games! And you guessed it — I blogged them!

And teaching at Sydney High at the time…

Some of the Class of 2000

Entries complete, unabridged, and sometimes embarrassing!

Thursday September 14: the Torch goes through my neighbourhood.

8 am: Yes, in one and a half hours the Torch goes by! Meantime I’ll leave you with an irrelevant quote–encouragement to The Rabbit, myself and all other online diarists ; Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better to write twaddle, or anything, anything, than nothing at all. –Katherine Mansfield

9.50 am: Well, I saw it at last! The torchbearer had very nice legs. It was amazing how a crowd materialised so quickly. Half an hour back hardly any unusual activity could be seen, but then suddenly people appeared everywhere. On the balcony of the Surry Club Hotel there was a champagne breakfast. And yes, the torch was accompanied by lots of fine specimens of manhood on Harleys! Not sure I saw the one The Rabbit’s page mentions though. A nice sight was the Mother Theresa nuns (various nationalities, but mostly Indian–there is a convent of them near here) all waving their Australian flags.

4.00 pm: The weather has been so glorious I have neglected my reading, but I am enjoying The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra, which The Rabbit lent me. It began slowly but becomes quite absorbing; the characterisation is subtle, the writing good, and the politics and cultural background fascinating. (Follow that link above for more about him and his work, and a rather scathing review: a bit too scathing I suspect at the moment.)

I went down to sit on the green carpet (yechhh!) in Belmore Park near Central Railway, hoping to imbibe the Olympic spirit. And did As I said, it has been as good as Sydney gets–good enough for some wonderful shirtless sights for a poor old codger like me to (dare I say) perve on–in the nicest possible way of course–a pure aesthetic experience.

10.00 pm: Laser lights, fireworks, and the news here absolutely dominated by the upcoming Olympics and today’s events. In passing, the Australian dollar sliding below 55 US cents for the first time ever! Good for all those Olympic visitors of course. On PBS (USA) news on the other hand the only mention of the Olympics tonight was the arrest of an official from Uzbekistan for importation of human growth hormone, and that story was quite sympathetic to the official who, it is claimed, needed the drug for a medical condition and had in fact been hospitalised when his drug was seized last week!

Halfway through The Romantics which is triggering some odd associations. I certainly see something of myself when young in the narrator’s (Samar’s) combination of awkwardness and (alleged?) intellect. Second, reflecting on the novel’s presentation of many Indias, or visions of India, I think of how profoundly MP has been affected by the place; I also think of myself studying Indian History at University and how such arcane knowledge attracted me. Also, what India did we learn about? Part of my obscure motivation for studying this subject was a friendship that ran from age 13 to 15, then by correspondence for a few more years as the Indian friend went to St Paul’s School in London. Ashok was one of my closest friends,….

Saturday, September 16

GO THORPIE!!!! Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi OI!!!!! That 4X100 relay was sheer magic.

More on the Opening Ceremony–yes that torch thing did get stuck apparently! However, wasn’t that “underwater” lighting spectacular! And the waterfall! Yes–they did lay the politics of reconciliation on a bit thick, but it needs to be addressed and the Olympics was a powerful symbolic time: so too for the two Koreas and East Timor–moving moments both. However, I think the image of the girl and the songman remains the most powerful image for me.

I was tutoring in Chinatown today. One student, an 18-year-old from Mainland China, came in clutching tickets to the Olympic Table Tennis where his team will undoubtedly do well! He too admired the message of reconciliation in the Opening Ceremony, and was touched not only by that and the two Koreas being united, but also felt the fact China and Taiwan could play together in the Olympics sent a good message to the world and to the people and the politicians…..