PC Talk Session at Paya Lebar Kovan Community Club

The first PC Talk Session organised by the IT Committee was held at Paya Lebar Kovan Community Centre (PLKCC) foyer on 27 August, 2009 at 7.00 pm.

The idea to hold the PC Talk was mooted by Alvin Lee Ken Wah, Vice-Chairman of Paya Lebar Kovan CCMC when he was approached by trainees of the SIJ Basic Computer and Internet courses conducted at PLKCC to recommend them personal computers and notebooks which are suitable for their needs. Mrs Evelyn Lee, together with SIJ Trainers Lesley Tay, Eric Lee and Jonathan Lee then set out to organise the talk for the benefit of the trainees, family and friends.

The Silver Infocomm Junction (SIJ) is aimed at providing training and facilities for senior citizens to learn, upgrade and persue their interest in infocomm skills and knowledge.

Jonathan Ng, a young and knowledgeable computer nerd, presented the talk on "How to buy a personal computer" with a series of slides of various PC models and hardware components to the attentive audience in both Mandarin and English. He avoided computerese and jargons, in a no-frill and interesting way.

He even showed slides of PC/Notebook ads at unbelievable prices and gave helpful tips on how to read between the lines of the ads. Jonathan is indeed resourceful and had done a great deal of research on the topic.

As guest speaker at the talk session to speak about my favorite topics - "Blogs and Facebook", I was delighted to see some familiar faces of students who had attended Internet courses I conducted previously at the CC. Their interest in surfing the Net had not waned and some have become even more Internet-savvy than I. That's a good sign. At least they did not store whatever they have learnt in the fridge or freezer.

During the talk, I was posed a challenging question (well, challenging to me at least because I do not have a ready answer as most of my handout material are based on stuff I found on the Internet)

A gentleman asked me: "Can you please explain blogs in a simple way so that an ordinary layman can understand?"

That's tough! I've never been asked a question like that before.

What does he mean by 'a simple way'....what is simple to him is not simple to me...

I then tried to use an analogy:

Assume that 'BlogSpot', Blogger's hosting service for blogs is a huge public reference library which provide the brick-and-mortar facilities, amenities and space for publishers and writers to display their books free-of-charge 24/7 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and visitors could browse through the books at any time convenient. The publishers and writers have to be registered members though.

Some publishers and writers do not wish to have their works publicly displayed, so these books are kept in locked shelves and the keys will only be provided to those authorised to view the books.

So, the books are the blogs and the bloggers are the publishers and writers.

Bloggers.com is the owner of the reference library facilities.

Blogs which are protected with privacy settings are books which are kept under locks and keys.

I don't know whether he understood my analogy although he nodded his head. I hope I did not confuse him as much as I confused myself...

Facebook was slightly easier to understand when I mentioned that it is a "virtual community populated by real people".

How's that for simplification...or is it oversimplified?

I love to hear your views on the definition of blogs. Comments are welcome.

Thanks in advance.


Sent from my Treo 650