If a man knows where to get good advice, it is as though he could supply it himself.
—Goethe

This is our mission for today, and for as long as we possibly can: We’re sharing with you where to get good advice about internet safety. By our simply knowing where to get such advice, we want you to think as though we were supplying it to you ourselves.

(We might be misreading the quotation. What Goethe might have actually meant was if we did know where to get good advice, it’s as if we already had it. Oh well.)

Whatever Goethe did mean, let’s turn to where we can find articles and links about internet safety for everyone in our HEdCen community.

To set the the tone, we have a few excerpts on what we hope the internet can be to both parents and their kids, a joint enriching experience in using a technological tool:

Use the Internet with your kids. While you’re spending time with them, you can help them to be safe and responsible online. Learn about the technology together, ask lots of questions, and don’t be intimidated if it seems like your kids have a better understanding of the technology than you. Remember, it’s your family, and you have the power and responsibility to keep an eye on what your kids are doing.
—GetNetWise.org

Most people who go online have mainly positive experiences. But, like any endeavor — attending school, cooking, riding a bicycle, or traveling, — there are some risks and annoyances. The online world, like the rest of society, is made up of a wide array of people. Most are decent and respectful, but some may be rude, obnoxious, insulting, or even mean and exploitative. Children get a lot of benefit from being online, but they can also be targets of crime, exploitation, and harassment in this as in any other environment. Trusting, curious, and anxious to explore this new world and the relationships it brings, children need parental supervision and common-sense advice on how to be sure that their experiences in “cyberspace” are happy, healthy, and productive.
—SafeKids.com

For young children, the best protection against “harmful” material remains parental involvement and, where necessary software filters. For teens — who are at most only a few years away from becoming adults — the best filters aren’t the ones that run on the PC but the one that runs inside the kids’ head. They need to learn to protect themselves and exercise the critical thinking skills that will serve them well on the Internet and in throughout life.

—from an article by Larry Magid, founder of SafeKids.com

We’d like to encourage everyone, whether you’re new to surfing or an old pro at it, young or not-so-young, to read what the following reference sites have to offer. While there are other sites on internet safety, we chose those below for being among the best and well-written of the lot. Check them out:

GetNetWise Online Safety Guide
SafeKids.com
SafeTeens.com
StaySafe.org

The last one is particularly interesting. StaySafe.org
has categories for Teenagers and Parents, as well as 50+ and
and Educators. The 50+ category refers to the grandparents of our children, our loving lolos and lolas who need not feel left out and who need our help too in learning to use the internet. The Educators category is of course aimed at aiding our teachers.

If you’re feeling too lazy to go to all the sites or wade through the articles and links one at a time, then we’ve got just the thing for you. Larry Magid has this single article about
Teen Safety on Info Highway summarizing the key points of most of what we need to know. Just click on the link above and all you have to do after that is read and scroll down, read and scroll down, till you reach the end. Like what you just did for this article. Easy, ‘no?

Posted in: Internet Safety, Internet 101, HEdCen.com launch | Comments(0) | March 2007

Now that HEdCen.com is up and running, and we’ve been told that we can have our own blogs in the site if we choose to, some of us may have jumped up excitedly and shouted “I want one! I want a blog! … Uhmm … what is it?”

Let me help you out. Up to about three weeks ago, what I knew about blogging was practically zilch. Sure, I was aware that blog is short for Weblog or a sort of online diary (misspelled “diary” first time around as “dieary”; looks ominous…), but that was about it. Oh, and that blogging could also be a profession, like for some people I know (he-he).

So what is a blog? Why would you or I want to have one at HEdCen.com?

Let’s take a look at the definitions of blog as Google summarizes them. Done? … Ok, great! We can take bits and pieces from here and there and use them to describe what a HEdCen.com blog is, which might go something like this:

If I am a HEdCen student, parent or teacher, I can have this space in the HEdCen.com website where I can write about what I’d like to share with the world in general and especially with other HEdCen people mostly. Even if I have little or no technical background, as long as I know how to connect to the internet and go to the HEdCen.com website, it’s easy to type and publish what I wish to write in my personal online journal in HEdCen.com.

I can do this as often as I’d want, whenever I feel like putting in words my thoughts and ideas, like what made me happy or sad today, or how annoying it is to have a little brother and just about anything else that may or may not be important to you, but which I care enough to write about, even if it’s just to let you know what the lyrics of the new HEdCen alma mater song to be sung at this year’s culminating activity are, in its solemn version.

In other words, to blog is to make my presence known in the cybercommunity. To blog is to “virtually” be.

So, to be, or not to be? To blog, or not to blog?

Ay, had the Bard been a Blogger, those are the questions a suicidal Hamlet may have pondered. Recall the rest of that immortal speech:

“…Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”

Wikipedia’s entry of this famous Shakespearean passage says:

The simplest summary of Hamlet’s speech might read “Life is so wretched that suicide would be preferable—except that we’re too afraid of what might come after death.”

Bummer of a dilemma, isn’t it?

Writing a blog is really a lot like Hamlet contemplating suicide, but in a good way. In the vast theater of the digital world, from a lonely spot at downstage right, you launch into a soliloquy (”an act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers”) on anything you care enough to write about, regardless of any readers.

For a part-time stage actor, doing Hamlet online wasn’t such a bad idea.

I made this commitment to help Webmissy put up HEdCen.com, mainly by contributing factual content, such as the history, teaching philosophy, and other information about the school (which I’d collated some time ago for work I’d done in my professional capacity). But we didn’t want a ho-hum run-of-the-mill kind of site for the school we cared about. We realized we needed articles with a uniquely HEdCen flavor. And with Webmissy taking care of website development and generously bankrolling the project with her bandwidth and other resources she’d smartly accumulated on her way to becoming a top professional blogger locally, someone else had to write the articles. That someone would have to be …

You guessed it.

Comes now this newbie at blogging but oldie at HEdCen, unto this Honorable Community, respectfully states and avers as follows:

The first article I submitted for posting was Futbol Mania and the Mutants of The HEdless Center (Our Obsession with The Beautiful Game). At my request, Webmissy posted it on the Home Page with no byline. We wanted to to create a bit of mystery and start generating a buzz for the site. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I’ve said at the start, I’m new to blogging and hadn’t done any creative writing in years. Here I was, planning on submitting initial content for the site, something more than the usual Welcome Remarks sort of thing. Choice of main topic? Soccer was the hands-down (not feet-down?) winner. It’s the national sport of the sovereign state of HEdCen.

I started writing out the article in Word. It took me nearly a week and more than a dozen revisions before I mustered the courage to e-mail it to Webmissy for posting. After it was posted, we had to correct some stealth typos that managed to slip under the edit radar, activate hyperlinks embedded or listed in the article, and make the fake Online Survey look real, complete with a faux Submit button. Webmissy did all these herself because I didn’t know the first thing about the tech side. It felt odd having to rely on Webmissy to polish my work; I’m such a control freak. But make no mistake, I was happy with how it finally turned out. Kudos to the site-boss!

Nonetheless, I resolved to do my next post differently, and I did. I went straight to the blog Webmissy had set up for me (called Celebrity Sound Alike since I had the same sounding name as this young male singer romantically linked with Ruffa Mae Quinto, and not because I sound like him when I sing; nice touch, Webbieboss ). I figured I’d better learn asap how to use the Wordpress MU platform so I could do my own editing and not have to bug Webmissy for every tiny little thing I wanted to tweak in my future posts.

So out came the first draft of An Inconvenient Truth (A Shameless Way to Publicize Our Launch, etc.). There was just one small problem: My first draft was LOUSY and unfit for public viewing. But rather than Save, I had already clicked on the Publish button, which meant it was “out there” with my byline on the Celebrity Sound Alike blog page, warts, grammatical errors, unidiomatic expressions and all. I panicked and wanted to roll over and die of literary shame, or commit the first act ever of hara-kiri online (how to do that, I had no idea).

Then, before I could scrounge around for a tantō (the short sword or dagger for performing seppuku, which is the more formal term for hara-kiri), I hit upon The Perfect Excuse. Why don’t I just say that both the site and the article are Works in Progress!?!

After all, as far as HEdCen.com was concerned, it still is in the building up process. A lot of the links don’t work yet (patience, patience) and we’ve got empty pages galore to drive cenophobes up the (blank) wall screaming “Horror vacui, horror vacui!” (We’ll have more on phobias later. This is what they call in courtroom practice Laying The Predicate.) Thus, even the original title of the article An Inconvenient Truth (A Shameless Way to Publicize Our Launch, etc.) has since mutated to A Work In Progress: The 24 March 2007 Official Launch of HEdCen.com – Our Third Home (99.97% Draft).

I know, I know. It’s a cop-out, but somehow it made sense. So long as I have The Perfect Excuse, whatever I’d already written didn’t have to be (by my standards, at least) The Perfect Post. I could always claim in self-defense that “Well, ack-chuayllee, you know, it’s not yet 100% finished. Just like the site, it’s, you know, a Work In Progress, and I’m a merciless editor of my own work, so, you know, the Final Product may turn out, you know, radically different, you know, as in, you probably won’t remember what I wrote when it originally came out, which is, you know, lousy.”

Yet, even armed with the Perfect Excuse, I couldn’t completely shake off the dread I felt whenever I’d think of the possibility that the crawlers at Google might have taken a snapshot of that lousy draft and made it the No. 1 result for [“lousy draft” or “bad blogging”].

So here I am again, all set to try and overcome the resurrected fear of blogging. (I’m also wondering if it’s already a recognized psychological disorder, this fear of blogging.) So what did I do?

You guessed it. I procrastinated… and just Googled [“fear of blogging” phobia] (the brackets represent the Searchbox, so you know exactly what keywords I used) and lo and behold, there were 22 results, several of them referring to blogophobia and those who suffer from it as blogophobics (logical but, uh, unimaginative).

(For comparison, try Googling [“fear of commitment” phobia] and you’ll get 12,800 results. Strangely enough, it’s called commitment phobia. The rule is, to find the, or create a, name for a phobia, you take the Latin root of the English word you are afraid of, then add –phobia, which means that the Latin root of the English word “commitment” is, wouldn’t you know it, “commitment.” I suppose the same reasoning goes for blogophobia.)

There you go. It’s official. Blogophobia exists. And chances are, you may have it even before you (never) make your first post.

I’ve got this theory. While it’s certainly not the sum of all our fears, methinks the fear of blogging is the sum of one’s several fears. Why so? Allow me to illustrate rather than explain.

Example:

Cyberphobia: Fear of the internet +
Scriptophobia: Fear of writing in public = Blogophobia.

The above equation is straightforward and self-explanatory. Also predictable and insipid.

Let’s try another one. Here’s what I call the Triple C:

Cyberphobia: Fear of the internet +
Coprastasophobia: Fear of constipation +
Commitment phobia: Fear of commitment or intimacy = Blogophobia.

Ahh, a bit more pizzazz, but (except for the first phobia) rather obscure, and I’d rather not get into the details, even if you threaten to slice me up with a tantō.

And then, here’s my personal favorite, a 6-phobia kombination I kall the K Formula:

Kainolophobia or Kainophobia: Fear of anything new +
Kakorrhaphiophobia: Fear of failure +
Katagelophobia: Fear of being ridiculed +
Kathisophobia: Fear of sitting down +
Kenophobia: Fear of voids or empty spaces +
Kleptophobia: Fear of stealing = Blogophobia.

While the above examples are no slouches, I know you guys can do a heckuva lot better. Therefore, I propose to hold a contest. Put those Kumon-honed skills to the test (note the Japanesey theme as we segue from hara-kiri to Nippon-style math, and don’t you just love those anime theme songs and can’t wait to have Sir Roi and Mr. Eddie K do a guitar-sax arrangement so we don’t have to sing those unintelligible lyrics). Come up with your own equation to show why the fear of blogging is the sum of several phobias.

There’s a catch though. The only way to join this contest is …

You guessed it. You have to WRITE YOUR OWN BLOG.

P.S. Despite the mistakes I’ve committed so far, blogging wasn’t the life-threatening experience I thought it could be, not with the help of some positive rules I’ve adopted. Here they are, my Personal Blogging Guidelines (not yet complete; thus also a work in progress):

I SHOULD:
1. Come up with a catchy title.
2. Customize for HEdCen community. Mention specific teachers, students, events, etc. Include football, ecology and other HEdCen concerns.
3. Embed reference links such as The Core Rules of Netiquette. (See Blogging Tips 101 tutorial on how to create hyperlinks.)
4. Give information and tips for newbs (short for newbies, or newcomers to cyberspace).
5. Poke fun at myself.
6. Use the active voice.
7. Include English grammar rules and examples. Check the dictionary for definitions and the thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms.
8. Italicize lahat ng Filipino words.
9. Put HEdCen.com in bold font.
10. Coin a new catchword or phrase, e.g. Hedless Mutants, Our Third Home.
11. Edit, edit, and then edit again. And again.
12. Insert emoticons only when necessary, because they’re baldies like me, and cute (not like me).
13. Include Study Guide and Review Questions.
14. Post a fake or genuine Online Survey once in a while.
15. Have Related and Referenced Links at the end, even non-existent ones for HEdCen people mentioned.
16. Edit, edit, then edit again. And again. And a couple of times more, ‘til I believe it’s the best it can be, given the limits of my skill and talent.

Please feel free to accept, adopt, modify, use, or not use, any, several or all of the above. A few aren’t new (nos. 1, 6, and 11 have been around for decades); some have evolved in recent times (nos. 3, 4, 12, the second part of 14, and the first part of 15). Nos. 4 and 7 lend an air of legitimacy to this HEdCen.com post, while most of the rest are quirks I just enjoy. And finally, there’s just no escaping two of the Guidelines (actually just one, the repetition at no. 16 was upon the insistence of my OC persona, who hovers over my shoulder every time I write). So there.

Remember: Write or die. Publish or perish. Blog or commit hara-kiri online.

STUDY GUIDE AND REVIEW QUESTIONS:

1. True or False: According to the article, blogging is a better alternative to suicide.

2. Which of the following did William Shakespeare not write?
a) Romeo and Juliet
b) Macbeth
c) As You Like It
d) Futbol Mania and the Mutants of the HEdless Center (Our Obsession With The Beautiful Game)

3. Horror vacui literally means “fear of empty space” and according to Wikipedia (see link below) the term is applied in visual art as “the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision.” The question is: If a painter has horror vacui, does she scream the whole time before she finishes her painting until she fills in that last unblemished bit of canvass with a dab of permanent ink?

4. Can you forever traumatize a cenophobic writer suffering from writer’s block by giving him a blank piece of paper?

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. For you cenophobes out there, stop screaming and would you like to write out your own questions for nos. 5 to 11 just to fill up all that horrible white space?

13. If you have triskaidekaphobia, would you dare read this question?

RELATED AND REFERENCED LINKS:

Hamlet’s Soliloquy: To Be, Or Not To Be
Hara-kiri or Seppuku
Tantō
Horror Vacui
The Phobia List

Posted in: Blogging 101, HEdCen.com launch | Comments(2) | March 2007

A few weeks ago, as we were conceptualizing HEdCen.com as a site that everyone in HEdCen could enjoy, we stumbled upon An Inconvenient Truth.

We’re all responsible for global warming.

We’re kidding…actually, no, not really. If you’ve already seen Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, you might have this terrible urge (as I do) to atone for some sins of omission, such as not planting trees.(Planting trees is one of the ways to help stop global warming.) If you’re feeling especially guilty about this (as I do), the school’s Art Teacher, Ms. Jeanne Tan, will be more than happy to help us make amends. She’s got Brazilian Fire Tree seedlings you and I can have for free (but only until supplies last). Those trees are lovely, like Teacher Jeanne’s paintings. Which the site hopes to feature one day. The paintings I mean. Which, unlike the trees, we can’t get for free. (Sigh.)

We Googled the tree and discovered that it’s a native from Brazil to southern Mexico where it’s called Bacarubu or Guapuruvu (scientific name Schizolobium parahyba), while its other common names include Brazilian Fern Tree, Golden Tower, and Yellow Jacaranda. (To Google is to use the internet’s most popular search engine by the same name to look up anything you’re interested in by using key searchwords, e.g., Brazilian fire tree or global warming). We’re providing a hyperlink below that gives some facts and pics of this wonderful shade tree. There are online stores that sell the plant for as high as $38.00 (excluding shipping and handling costs of $7.00-$10.00), but we can get it from T. Jeanne for free! Imagine that, each of us would save as much as $48.00 which at the current exchange rate of P48.75 to $1.00 would be, let me see, umm … you do the math. (Better yet, take Kumon.) So, what are we waiting for? Go get them plants.

(Note to Self: Better check with T. Jeanne if she still wants to give them out gratis. Maybe she might want to dole out her paintings for free instead? Nice try dummkopf. Everyone knows you can’t plant them paintings. On the other hand, you can paint them plants.)

But we digress. (It’s fun to do from time to time.)

Our problem was we didn’t know how many of us in the HEdCen community had regular internet access. Sir Henry said it seemed like a lot of parents and students did, if not at home, then through internet cafés, but he wasn’t sure. We were hoping the site would attract not just a few casual visits but frequent active use by most everyone. But how could that possibly happen if a significant number of HEdCen people still didn’t have internet access?

Then it dawned on us. “In crisis, opportunity,” as the Chinese saying goes. HEdCen.com itself could serve as an incentive, or even better, as the catalyst, the tipping point, to get the “un-connected” members of the HEdCen community online.

So here we are to convince the “un-connected” (should they, by a bizarre combination of circumstances, accidentally happen to dial an internet connection number, launch a browser, stumble upon this site and read this) to:

Invest In The Future. Get Connected.

As our Webmissy says:

If, however, you’re strangers with the internet (i.e., you don’t have internet connectivity at home), there might be some added expense. But try to look at it this way: instead of treating it as an expense, why not consider it as an investment? We’re already investing a lot in our children’s education, so why not give them the extra edge to make them even more competitive? Computers and the internet are the future. Virtual offices are becoming common. Why not allow them the chance to explore this new medium?

Getting online is no longer as expensive as it once was. You don’t even need to have your own PC or landline, as internet cafés can be found in nearly every corner of the metro. For those with the hardware and a landline, prepaid cards abound for as low as P100.00 a card, at around P0.50/minute rates, or about 3 hours of internet time. Postpaid rates for residential users have gone down in recent years. Some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) offer 20-hour internet time dial-up subscriptions for as low as P250 a month and unlimited dial-up subscriptions at P399 a month, while the big telecom companies have broadband or DSL monthly service packages at P900 or so. More and more public places like coffeeshops have Wi-Fi zones (Wireless Fidelity, i.e., no cables are necessary for connecting to the internet, as long as your laptop has a wireless card thingy), some of which are even free of charge (genuinely so, or only if you at least get the cheapest but still overpriced cup of the house java).

In this “connection,” we are pleased to announce that the school will soon have some designated Wi-Fi areas, genuinely free of charge, natch! The school might open one for parents too, maybe a cozy café nook where we can order a reasonably priced cup of The Little Farm House Java to go with cookies and other scrumptious goodies like what Teacher Ana used to bake (back when she still didn’t have major distractions like that hunk of an English teacher). We’d really like it if she could whip up a batch for us every so often but right now, she’s got something more exquisite gradually taking shape in her oven, ‘di ba, soon-to-be-Lola Emma?

Anyway, for whatever it’s worth, we were thinking maybe we can call HEdCen’s coffee-internet-cookie corner - drum roll please…… “Java-i-Ana’s” (which rhymes with Havaianas)! Wajjathink, T. Ana? Catchy, ‘no?

We digressed again. (Kasi nga, fun siya eh!)

Back to the topic at hand. Assuming most of us have internet connectivity, how do we draw in as many people as possible to the site? And keep them coming back?

The answer was both a cinch and a challenge. Copy what the school has done for all of us. Make the site as progressive and intimate a community as the HEdCen nestled in the hills of Taytay. In the somewhat daunting expanse of cyberspace, we can create Our Third Home.

For parents, the benefits are invaluable. This is another way to increase our contact and communicate with our kids, the teachers and the school. Whether we’re at home or away at work, the fact is we are physically separated from our children the majority of the waking hours of the day. We’re the ones with the least face-to-face time with them on weekdays, and we try to compensate in some manner (e.g., phone calls, going out on weekends, and so on). Pretty soon, with HEdCen.com, we can add e-mailing, IM (Instant Messenger) and blogging to boost opportunities for interacting with them. So let’s get into the Web and for the newbs (short for newbies, or newcomers to cyberspace) among us, we can start learning how to insert those amusing emoticons Webmissy has at Blogging 101.

There’s more. Since we’ll be exploring the internet quite often, one goal of HEdcen.com is to make responsible Netizens of us all. For this purpose, we’ve chosen The Core Rules of Netiquette (as excerpted from the book Netiquette by Virginia Shea) as a quick reference guide to what we can and can’t do online. Not exactly the Ten Commandments nor the school Manual, but good rules to “virtually” live by nonetheless. It’s amazing, really, that there are people who do care and strive to make online existence a humanizing experience. Exactly what HEdCen in its bricks-and-mortar form endeavors for our children’s education in the real world.

Come 24 March 2007, at the school’s culminating activity, we’ll officially launch the website. We’ll have a live demo of the site to be projected on a screen and take you on a brief guided tour of Our Third Home. To help us find ways to make HEdCen.com more inviting, we’ll survey parents and ask them questions like:

1. Do you have internet access at home?
2. Do you have internet access at your place of work? If you do, are you allowed to use it for personal matters, i.e., non-work related surfing and e-mail?
3. Do you have an e-mail address?
4. Would you like your own username@HEdCen.com e-mail address?
5. Would you like to have your name, profession/occupation/business, work address and contact details posted on the site?
6. Would you like to write and contribute articles to the site?

If you like, you can download the HEdCen.com Parent’s Survey Form and HEdCen.com Parent’s Data Sheet, print them out, fill them up, and bring them with you on Saturday. The download links are at the lower right portion of the Home Page on the Downloadables sidebar.

Our HEdCen.com is a work in progress, and so is this post. Ordinarily, I don’t care to have what I’m writing read by others before they’re completed (I’m rather obsessive-compulsive in editing my documents). I’m making an exception in this case for a couple of reasons: 1) Though I write a lot in my line of work (mostly boring legal stuff), blogging presents an entirely new form for me, so I have to practice using the WordpressMU platform our Webmissy has so graciously installed for us (so far, it’s living up to the hype of being nearly idiot-proof, except that I still have to decipher what some of those tags above the writing box are for); and 2) Uhmm, … I forget what the second reason was. As I said, work in progress … (now, how do I insert that smiley emoticon here…dang, newb rin nga pala ako! Still have a lot to learn…don’t we all? )

RELATED OR REFERENCE LINKS:

An Inconvenient Truth: What You Can Do To Help Stop Global Warming
Teacher Jeanne’s artworks
Brazilian Fern Tree or Yellow Jacaranda

Posted in: Better Earth, Internet 101, HEdCen.com launch | Comments(1) | March 2007