Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret anything that made you smile..

For our only time off during our visit to Singapore we took the 10 minute walk from our hotel to the outside bar in the courtyard of Raffles Hotel. We resisted the temptation of their world famous “Singapore Sling” (the price at over $30 helped our resistance!) and settled for a lime and soda!

Raffles Hotel is a colonial-style hotel dating from 1887, and named after Singapore’s founder Sir Stamford Raffles.  It now costs over $800 per night to stay in the hotel, hence we only got to the bar!

Some facts about Raffles Hotel (from Wikipedia)

• Raffles Hotel is reputedly where the sole surviving wild tiger in Singapore was shot and made extinct. Some stories place this event in the Long Bar. Raffles itself claims the tiger had escaped from enclosure at a nearby “native show” and chased underneath the hotel’s Bar & Billiard Room (a raised structure) and shot to death there on August 13, 1902.
• Raffles is where the Singapore Sling was invented. The cocktail was invented by bartender Ngiam Tong Boon between 1910 and 1915.
• Raffles is the setting for Murakami Ryu’s novel and film titled, Raffles Hotel. The film was shot on location.
• The site of the hotel was originally the location of the oldest girls’ school in Singapore (1842), now called St. Margaret’s. It was founded by Maria (Tarn) Dyer, the missionary wife of Samuel Dyer.
• The hotel was featured as a Japanese stronghold in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun.
• Raffles Hotel was the subject of Paul O’Grady’s Orient for Carlton Television.
• The hotel featured in episodes of the BBC’s Tenko.
• Long Bar is featured in Peace Arch Entertainment’s “UberGuide” television travel series as one of the top ten bars in the world.

On the second day of the iCTLT conference, the New Zealand High Commissioner to Singapore, His Excellency Martin Harvey, hosted a reception for the New Zealand delegation and key educational leaders from Singapore.

Held at the High Commissioner’s Queen Astrid Drive residence, the reception provided opportunity for representatives from the Singapore Ministry of Education, directors from Singapore’s tertiary organisations, and key educational agencies and contractors to discuss mutual areas of work and possible future co-operation.

His Excellency Martin Harvey attended the opening of the iCTLT conference, and visited the New Zealand Learning Technologies stand with Singapore’s Minister of Education, Mr S Iswaran, enjoying the interaction between children from Singapore’s Innova School and children of Kahutara School, New Zealand, on Thursday morning.

This photo shows me (right) with CORE staff  and members of the New Zealand contingent at the iCTLT conference.

Tuesday morning we had the pleasure of visiting Innova School, a modern primary school to the north of the island of Singapore.

Innova School are taking part in our Singapore-NZ Connect project, which is linking them with Kahutara School in rural Waiarapa. At the school we met with Principal Mr. Michel Saw (who visited CORE Education as part of a study tour to NZ in 2009) and Mr. Lim Cheng Leong (HOD Information Technology), who has co-ordinated the project for the school. We also met a number of the classroom teachers who have been working directly with the students throughout the project.

The Singapore-NZ Connect project gives students in both schools an authentic learning experience, using an enquiry learning focus they have been exploring the differences (and similarities) in their schools and culture. At the same time the project is encouraging a range of skills such as critical thinking, timekeeping, creative thinking, questioning skills, as well as the technical skills of videoing, editing and presenting to camera. Both schools have developed a series of questions that they have asked the other students, and each group are developing short videos in response.

During the iCTLT conference, Innova School will be working with CORE Education to provide a student media team, interviewing presenters and delegates throughout the event. They will also link up for video conference with Kahutara School as part of the walkbout by the Singaporean Senior Minister of State Education, Minister Iswarem, and the NZ High Commission, HE Martin Harvey.

More details of the project can be found on CORE’s Singapore NZ Connect site

As part of the New Zealand contribution to the Singapore conference CORE Education are also taking part in a virtual conference which runs alongside the iCTLT event. The New Zealand Teaching and Learning Expo 2010 is part of the The Virtual Events Centre, and allows companies either virtually from New Zealand, or attending in Singapore to have an extended presence online during the event.

It is our first time using such a medium so will be interesting to see how it shapes up as the event progresses.

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on.

* 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
* Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
* Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
* iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
* 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
* YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
* UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
* Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
* Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
* Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
* Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
* SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Brecon is home to The Royal Regiment of Wales and a company from the Ghurkha rifles, and the Beacons play a major role in the training of armed services, with the SAS stationed in nearby Sennybridge and the area used extensively for training exercises.

As we drove down to Wales last week we saw a plane heading into RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, which is where the bodies of soldiers killed in this conflict are repatriated to the UK (see my blog in July 2009 for details of the process of remembrance conducted in Wootton Bassett for these troops). It was clear listening to the conversations in the crowd that a number of people there currently had loved ones stationed over in Afghanistan (where the allied death toll continues to rise at a frightening rate, with 8 soldiers killed there last week alone). I cnanot imagine what it would like having someone I loved away fighting in such a war, and my heart went out to these people as they chatted about their partners.

I looked around but could not see anyone wearing Second World War medals like my dads and realised that many of his generation are no longer alive. This year is the first in the UK where there are no living WWI veterans, but in fact it will not be too much longer before veterans of WWII disappear with the youngest of them being in their 80s already.

After 14 years in NZ (where Remembrance Sunday takes a back seat to ANZAC Day) it was lovely to be back in the UK for this sombre, poignant, but oh so important event.