Camping with the kids

Although it may still be extremely hot here in HK, I spent the past Monday and Tuesday camping out with two classes of Y9 students (although they are camping for 4 nights). And this weekend I'll be heading out with the Y7's (6th graders!). In a place where everything is so packed in together, it's amazing that there are a number of camping spots here in HK. Located in areas that are not too far from the big city, you still feel like you are out there, as you rock climb, hike, swim, and simply chill.

For me, the coolest part was simply seeing my kids in a situation that was familiar to me, yet completely foreign to them. Many had never been camping, started a camp fire, made a tent, or even cooked themselves dinner. Getting dirty and seeing bugs in their tents was almost too much for many of them. As you can imagine, a number wanted to just go home, but in the long run, I think they'll get a lot out of this and will look back with fond memories.

I'm looking forward to hearing their thoughts. And I really am anxious to see how the Y7's do on their trip (only 1 night).

Hong Kong update

Wow. Time flies, you fall into and out of routines, and before you know it, a month passes in between blog updates. So, as can be imagined, this past month has been busy, now that I am back to HK and back to school.

So, exactly what has kept me busy? I've done a lot at school, but unlike the past two years, it has been much less stressful, now that I have the opportunity to teach in the same place for back-to-back years. For the first time in a while, I don't feel like a brand new teacher, trying to feel my way through things. My classes are going great and I am loving coaching volleyball.

Outside of school, I have developed some good friendships and have been extremely active. Playing volleyball a couple of days a week, a few days of coaching volleyball, hiking about ocne a week, and some tennis. I've also been hitting up lots of other fun stuff, from the museum of history, to karaoke, to a junk trip, and to plays. Oh, yeah. And then there's the frequent trips to all sorts of awesome asian restaurants. Eating is good...

Hong Kong return

So, after two sweeeeet flights (I slept like a champion for about 13 hours), I am back in Hong Kong. It's hot, humid, and loud, but I love it. It's nice to get back to my own place. And for the first time in a few years, I'll be teaching at the same school again, so I won't have to feel like a first year teacher!

I'm excited to get back to work. Sounds crazy, huh? Seriously, I look forward to using some of the things that I learned over the past two summers, as well as being able to refine what I did last year here. Also, I'm looking forward to seeing lots of the people that I met last year. From teachers, to rugby buddies, to flag football players, to the volleyball crew. Yeah, getting out on the beach and playing volleyball is something that I can't wait to do again. And hiking around the islands. At the end of last year I had a chance to hike a lot, so I can't wait to continue that and explore some new trails.

Fishing trip is a hit

The sun made almost a full days appearance (we still had a couple of quick showers)! In the morning Kirk, Des, and I went out on Des' boat to try our luck at mackerel and pollack fishing. The seas turned out to be rougher than we had hoped, but we decided to give it a go somewhat closer to the bay. My line dropped down first and nothing happened. But almost the instant that Kirk's dropped below the water he was pulling back. His first try and he caught two pollack at once. These rigs, if you haven't used them before, have three to five fly hooks on the end, along with a huge weight. You simply drop them down, jig it a bit, and then bang! From there, our luck kind of went downhill. I caught a decent sized pollack, followed by one from Kirk, and then I finished off with a mackerel. That only made three more fish over the next 1- 1 1/2 hours, but overall not a bad day.

I cleaned the fish straight away and got ready to cook them up for the crew. Unfortunately, I was the only one who was game. Four went in the freezer, while I took one of the pollock and baked it in foil with onion, garlic, herbs, butter, and lemon. Simple, but awesome. That now makes two seafood meals that I've had in the last couple of days in which we caught the food ourselves.

Irish eyes are raining

I've been in Ireland now since late on Saturday. The weather has been...unpredictable. A couple of days of mostly sun, with random rain showers out of nowhere have lead to today. A day of clouds and full on rain. But it is peaceful. Kirk's parents live in a beautiful house nestled into a hill, overlooking a small lake. And not more than a moments drive away is the sea.

We've spent the last couple of days getting things ready to head out in the boat for some fishing. Today we finally got it all together and got out there to only find the waves to be a bit much. So, we have the fishing on hold, as I hope that we can get back out there later today or tomorrow, since I have to leave on Thursday morning.

Final days in Plymouth

So, in hindsight, the month in Plymouth was great, culminating in a couple of whirlwind days. With rumors swirling about where the program will end up next year and in what capacity it will run, many of us Y2s looked at this similarly to someone who was in Y3 and finishing the program. We had work to finish in the classroom, and places to see and people to visit one last time out and about.

Fresher, Barbican, Minerva, Drake Circus, the Hoe...they all made it on the list.

TB Continued

Video podcast post

Quick Personal Bio for PLATE

Download the video yourself,

or simply stream it from here.

Audio podcast post for class

Tech Tip Time with Johnny Hogan

Camel River Hike and St. Austell Brewery tour

This morning we piled into the fateful van and headed out for a hike. The road trip was pretty as always, but unfortunately half the group was feeling motion sick by the time we arrived. Those windy Cornish roads with hedges built up high make for tough trips.
The weather started off well, but as we parked alongside the Camel River trail, the weather turned for the worse. It's really amazing how quickly it can go from sun to rain. But luckily for us today, it pretty much remained a mist for the entire walk. Oddly enough, the mist was nice. The walk was beautiful, with the brackish river on one side and the rolling hills on the other. Families on bikes streaming by almost constantly, kept us company along our way. But for me, it was nice to get away from things. I trailed far back, lost in deep thoughts. It was a well needed escape.
After the hike we drove down to St. Austell for a tour of the brewery. Leanny lead a great tour, bringing us through all parts of the brewing process. It was one of those tours where you get to walk through the actual place where they were brewing, not just a setup, touristy place. We even were able to stick our heads into beer that was finishing up fermenting.The beer they make is great. In fact, Tribute Ale is one of my favourites (like the Bristish spelling?) in all of England. Beyond that they have a nice IPA called Proper Job and a handful of other decent cask ales. I think the only bummer, although it's nice in some ways, is that they don't distribute out of the UK. In fact, they don't even distribute anything out of Cornwall, except for the Tribute.

Weekly News and Boat Cruise

HA! HA! HA! The news today was fantastic. I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face. Nice work year 3.

We year 2s came out with a pretty darn funny skit ourselves. Here's the video:



As you may guess, a couple of inside jokes make this video work. Many of the rooms have a distinct carpet odor, the dryers tend to stop working a lot, Rawad actually DID go out and higher a chef to cook us dinner (we have "family" dinner nights for our group, where people rotate the task of cooking and cleaning), and Sean is so relaxed that she often just leaves her key in the door.

After the news, JP set us up with a great lunch down at Heaven (although he had originally wanted to take us to BED!). Nice atmosphere, nice food, and a nice way to start the weekend off after a busy week. From here we trekked down to the Barbican to hop on captain Ben's boat for a trip down the Tamar river. Amazingly, the rain finally broke up and we ended up with a windy, but otherwise perfect afternoon to be out on the water.

PLATE in the books

Hey everyone. The 2009 PLATE (Plymouth Leadership and Technology for Education) conference is now in the books! I was a great afternoon, as we put together a ton of information and came out with 8 separate presentations, ranging from vodcasting and social networking to using simply box and Jing. I'm really proud of the rest of my classmates. I feel like it was stressful at times, but the conference came together maybe even better than we had hoped. Now, only the video research project remains as our only large project left. It's hard to believe that in one week we'll be finished here.

State of collegiate sports

Here's a very interesting article that I found on espn.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/columns/story?columnist=oneil_dana&id=4318816

Penzance and Mouseville

Eliza, Jason, Lauren, Sean, and I hustled out of the dorms and hopped onto a train bound for Penzance. The day was overcast, but as is often the case here in the UK, it did not get any better. In fact, as soon as we began our hike along the coast to Mouseville (actually called Mouse Hole and kind of pronounced Mowzill) the rains came on stronger. A quick stop on a pirate ship and a stroll along the water brought us to an old rusty skate park. Jason did some freestyle moves as you can see here in the video.

We arrived into a village, cold and wet, looking for a place to dry off and to grab some food. Sometimes, it's random stops like this that end up being the highlight of an experience. We did not expect much, but the food was great (some of the best chips I have ever had) and the ambience was fantastic. A cozy space with lots of old tables and chairs, it even had a family cat actually sitting on one. When we arrived, the place was pretty quiet, but as the minutes passed it filled up with locals. Before too long a group had formed in the corner, playing old English and Irish songs that we have become accustomed to over the past couple of years (including my favorite, "Wild Rover").

The rest of the day was quite low-key, as we found our way into Mouse Hole and then took the bus back to Penzance. A couple of hours of great conversation lead us to miss one train, but that was good in the long run. Otherwise, we would have never had the opportunity to hit the Waterford Meadery.

Ramblings from Plymouth

Whew. It's crazy to think that we are half way through are summer program here in Plymouth. I guess time flies when things are insanely busy. Classes have been moving along and the work is piling up, with the PLATE conference around the corner and video research following soon afterwards. And outside of class, the social scene here is buzzing. It all started with food and wine the opening night. With three cool years of MAET students, some fun instructors, and JPs support, that progessed to wine tasting on a ship in the Barbican, a field trip to Riverford, pub crawl, trip to fifteen and Newquay, singing at Minerva, mackerel fishing trip, colorful 80s night, and day trip to Penzance and Mousehole (called Mouseville in some circles). Now I just need to find the time to properly add some insight into each event along with some pics! Stay tuned.

School Assignment - Blog vs. Traditional Webpage

While traditional webpages allow for the highest level of flexibility, blogs provide people with maximum ease of use. In fact, in creating a blog, there is no need for programming knowledge or special service. Blogs provide a simple column based format which allows users to add text, photos, videos, links to other pages, etc. Since they are set up in a wysiwyg format, all of this requires just a couple of clicks.

Other than the above, blogs provide additional advantages. With them, new content is arranged according to the time when it is added, making it easy to find new posts. Also, the addition of tags/labels/keywords allow blog posts to be easily searched through and separated. And finally, there are specific search engines geared towards finding blogs, such as technorati and google blog search.

Beginnings of the Blog and Summer in Plymouth

Hey everyone. Today (9/7/09) marks the launch of this new blog. As I sit here in Plymouth, England, getting my tech geek on with my fellow MSU MAET classmates (check http://edutech.msu.edu/masters.html for more information on this masters program), I am tentatively starting this blog, with the thoughts of using wordpress (I just downloaded it) to create my own blog on my own domain (www.johnnyhogan.com). But until that fatefull day happens, I'll just stick to this blogger account.

So, what's been happening so far? Lots of work, as you can imagine, but also lots of fun. Being the second year of the program, it has been great to get back to a familiar place to see so many familiar faces. We have jumped right back into the swing of things, almost as if the school year hadn't happened. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the program, both this year and next.

Riverford Farm Field Trip

Wow. It would be tough to accurately describe the Riverford farm trip with starting with a "Wow". The farm is an all organic one which is dedicated to pretty much doing it as well as possible in the most environmentally and socially responsible way.We had the day off from classes, so it was pretty much a field trip (not really epected in grad school). We arrived and greated by Darren, who brought us on an incredibly informative farm tour. From breaking down the farms background and philosophy, to simply sharing his expertise about the fruit and veg, he was great. It was obvious that he not only worked there, but truely bought into their ideals.They basically are set up to deliver organic fruit and veg to local people through a "box" plan, in which you can have boxes of fresh produce delivered to your doorstep weekly. Amazingly enough, it only costs about 10% more than what you would pay at the typically grocery store.
Did we get to try some? Yeah we did! Walking through the fields we picked and eat black currants (nice and tart), gooseberries (my first time, but very good), broad beans (surprisingly nice), basil (incredible fragrance), and probably the best tasting cherry tomatoes and cucumbers that I have ever had.

And then we had lunch in their field kitchen. Simply put, this was a far cry from the British food to which I have become accustomed. An amazing spread (check out the full menu in the photo). It just makes me want to live right near a farm again. Oh, and one last really cool side note. They have worked it out with the local school so that they provide the ingredients and prepare the school lunch. These kids are so hooked up! And what's more, they work with the school to get the kids out into the fields on occasion to learn about farming and nutrition.

Check them out at http://www.riverford.co.uk/. And you can see a nice slideshow at
http://www.riverford.co.uk/flash/about_riverford/

Wine Tasting on the Kathleen May

JP finds out about all sorts of things going on in and around

Plymouth, so we weren't too surprized when we arrived into town and were told that he had planed some wine tasting for us. An unusual setting, we found ourselves sipping French wine on an old English schooner. In fact, it is the only one of its kind that remains (after lots of restoration work). But with bills still coming, one way that they have earned money is to ship cargo, and when they ship wine, they buy a bit of it to sell themselves. Great crew and a fun first night in Plymouth.