That'SLife

There’s a ridiculous posting over here in the Washington Post about college lecturers banning laptops in their classrooms. I haven’t got a lot of time to dissect the gross stupidity in this action, but here are a couple of points from the article:

Georgetown had only recently begun requiring that first-year law students own laptops, after painstakingly upgrading the campus for wireless Internet access.

So everyone’s obliged to buy one, but nobody’s allowed to use one… go figure, as I believe they say over there… Then there’s:

“This is like putting on every student’s desk, when you walk into class, five different magazines, several television shows, some shopping opportunities and a phone, and saying, ‘Look, if your mind wanders, feel free to pick any of these up and go with it,’ ” Cole said. Read the rest of this entry »

As noted elsewhere on this blog, I’m off for a long and busy trip around bits of Asia, and a trip that means I’m stuffed to the gills with hardware, cables, batteries and the usual clothes, etc. With that in mind, and having thought about it for quite some time (and even waited for the disappointing iPad), last week I went ahead and ordered a Kindle, which arrived whilst I was in Croatia over the weekend. In preparation I did some jiggery pokery and downloaded some books from Amazon to the PC desktop version of Kindle, ready to be transferred.

I also got the iPhone app, and did a little reading on that whilst away, but the small, bright screen means eye fatigue pretty quickly (and page turn fatigue even more quickly). Read the rest of this entry »

Just a short post to say that things are coming together for the British Council / IATEFL Harrogate Online conference which aims to bring as much of the annual IATEFL conference to a wider audience via a free online community with video, photos, moderated forums, streamed plenaries and events and – this year – six hours of live TV per day. You can find more information here: http://bit.ly/9TYjbE .

We’re currently looking for moderators for the online forums (http://bit.ly/bSTlNt) – online work which can be done from home if you’re not coming to the physical conference but want to be involved, and we’ve also just launched a ‘Teaching’s Got Talent’ competition to find our final live TV presenter. The lucky winner of this competition will have an all expenses paid trip to the conference plus GBP 500 to spend at Betty’s tea room (or similar)! More information on that can be found here: http://bit.ly/9FvQA0

Looking forward to meeting you f2f or online in April…

A corollary to the Padulike post below is I’m off on one of those mad trips where something like the Kindle would be a godsend. I don’t leave until next Tuesday 9th (Kindle delivery date is claimed to be sometime between the 4th and the 8th) but then I have six countries in twenty days – a return visit to do a follow-up consultancy on the British Council Access English project. Looking forward to re-visiting a few places, and discovering a couple of new ones (Malaysia and Taiwan), but sad that in the end I’m not going back to Vietnam, where I had the best clams I’ve ever had last year. Though it does save me a trip to Madrid to try to get a visa!

Got a bit of a clothes conundrum too: everywhere is nice and warm (mid-twenties and above) apart from Seoul, which today has a windchill-factored temperature of -17. Don’t want to drag a winter coat around the region just for those two days, but…

The route map looks like this:

For more on the Access English project, see here: http://bit.ly/dtAUVp

Excited though I was by the launch of the iPad last week, after a lot of thought I’ve decided that it really isn’t for me, at least in its prototype, beta version 1.0. The one thing that doesn’t bother me about the whole gadget is its name, since not once last week did I think it sounded like a modern, personalised sanitary towel… If that were the case, then I would have had a mind full of sanitary towels over the years (notepad – like a sanitary towel crossed with a Post-It…. launch pad – like a sanitary towel from which rockets are launched…. pad thai – a sort of noodle dish made out of sanitary towels…. Paddington Bear – a sort of Dington Bear made out of sanitary towels…) and I haven’t, so it’s a ridiculous snigger conclusion drawn by many. I don’t think that’s a purely male perspective, a close female friend DM-ed me on Twitter to say she found the whole name issue rather childish and schoolground titterish, and I agree.

No, the problem with the iPad for me is not with the name, but with what it does, and what it doesn’t do. I already own an iPhone and that suits me fine – do I really need a huge iPhone that doesn’t make calls, and with a screen that’s begging to shatter… an iPhone that it takes two hands to hold (therefore making it tricky to use on the go)…. an iPhone that needs a flat surface in order to type (my eyesight and RSI are already bad enough, thanks), and then probably wobbles due to a slightly curved back surface… an iPhone promising the ‘best browsing experience ever’ but doesn’t feature Flash… an iPhone that makes all my apps much bigger (ooh!)? To be honest, I don’t think I do. Read the rest of this entry »

Haven’t ever done a ‘what’s on your phone post’, so here’s what’s on mine… What’s on yours?

Anything really, really good I’m missing? (I’ve got quite a few sitting in iTunes that I’ve tried and don’t use, and a few of these on screen will be headed that way soon…)

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the end of January we’ll be issuing a call for proposals for the fourth annual Second Life Languages Conference (SLanguages 2010), and the last one we (The Consultants-E) will be organising in Second Life. There are a couple of reasons why this will be the last one we’re organising:

• we need to re-focus our energy elsewhere as the company
  continues to expand
• we’d like to ‘donate’ the conference to a wider community

As our work progresses and changes, we have less time for work in Second Life. With that in mind we’re scaling down our presence from three islands to one in the autumn of 2010, and turning over the two rental islands to people or organisations that have more time to run them effectively.

At the same time, we feel it is the right moment to donate the SLanguages brand to a wider community of language professionals, and work towards a rolling committee who will take it forwards from 2011 onwards. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, they were good… did some work, met some people, travelled to some places and things like that [ photos of famous people, dinners, etc. available on request... ]

image courtesy of @esolcourses

See comment five for more details on this image…

Well, this is the last day of work for me for a week or so, and indeed until the start of next year. I sat down to write a list of people to thank, but it got ridiculously long and I was painfully aware that somebody, somewhere was going to scan the list for their name and I would have forgotten to include it. So, there’s no list – but you all know who you are.

Thanks for the input on the blog, for the invitations to conferences, for the writing opportunities, thanks to the great network of people on Twitter, the people who email and everyone else out there on the InterWeb who has made this past year an incredibly stimulating, challenging and satisfying one. I hope you enjoy the festivities (if you celebrate them) and have a good rest and a holiday (if you have one) and I’ll see you on the other side.

Long live the noughties, ten days and we get to act like teeenagers again…

I know I said I wasn’t going to blog for a while, but this has just come my way – it’s a fake letter doing the rounds in Spain that makes reference to poorly-planned government initatives to get technology into the classroom. Haven’t got time to translate this before the ‘company Christmas Dinner’ this evening, so you may have to use Google (which really doesn’t do it justice at all, but hey)… [ update: a quick and ditry translation is now available further down the post... ]

“Hola,

Me llamo Elena y soy alumna de 6º de primaria y la mejor.

La semana pasada nos trajeron un montón de ordenadores, para todos menos para el profesor. Nos pusimos muy contentos porque pensamos que también nos pondrían calefacción (nos morimos de frío) y aire acondicionado (nos morimos de calor) y que traerían una pizarra nueva sin reflejos, sillas y mesas nuevas adecuadas a nuestra estatura, estanterías y una taquilla para nuestras cosas. Pero no, sólo trajeron ordenadores.

Y sin lupa porque son muy pequeños, pero eso da igual. Read the rest of this entry »

This blog will be taking a break for a little while, I think – at least over Christmas and the New Year. In many ways it’s served its purpose this year in reaching out to a wide range of people and hearing their experiences and attitudes to technology: an area I’m hugely interested in, and one I hope to be writing and presenting about next year. I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed to it over the last twelve months and wish you all a very happy end of 2009 / beginning of 2010. Hope to catch up with a lot of you at conferences this coming year!

Being public is not a decision to be taken lightly…. tweeting, keeping a blog – all these things expose us to a wider public, a more critical public and – more importantly – a more documented public than we’re likely to find at a conference, in a journal article or in a chapter in a book. There’s more immediate feedback, and a feedback which will probably outlast us in purely mortal terms. There’s a come back…. a payload – and it doesn’t go away simply because you want it to.

I used to use newsgroups back in the old days – when Google acquired the rights to all those newsgroups, suddenly everything I’d written online since 1996 was searchable… In those circumstances you have to be ready to accept your public fate, and back up (or renounce) everything you’ve ever said online…

So, how to go about this? Read the rest of this entry »

So it appears that from next year (September 2010) many classes in my neck of the woods (Catalonia) will be equipped with smart boards and a set of netbooks for the learners. There will be some kind of ‘learning platform’ (yes, it’s that vague) and a ‘digital textbook’. What there won’t be, as has been made very clear, is Net access for any of the netbooks – which makes a mockery of their name. Take the ‘net’ away and you’re simply left with ‘book’, albeit an expensive one which breaks when careless people drop it on the floor.

Oh, and you have to charge the book up…

As I said on Twitter yesterday, the kids are going to be partying like it’s 1999, because that’s how it’s going to feel. “Sir, can we use the plastic bricks today?” “No Xavi, you may not, because they’re useless, and I haven’t had any training. Put it away, boy” Read the rest of this entry »

This blog has been a bit quiet for the past few weeks due to a lot of travel, and also to the fact that I’ve been the Guest Writer over on the British Council Teaching English site. But I’ve been busy keeping up with Twitter and various blogs and now I thought I’d turn my keyboard to the matter of terminology, and making too big a thing out of technology.

Over on her blog, Marisa Constantinides has a recent posting trying to put the focus back on the pedagogy and away from the terminology, and of course she has a point. But I also think the point is over-laboured by some people with negative attitudes to technology (that doesn’t include Marisa, who is a technophile) who opt for the ‘they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid‘ lazy attitude when talking about people who do like technology and actively use it in their classes.

It seems to me that most teachers come to technology AFTER they come to pedagogy. They learn the tools of their trade first, then they work out how technology fits in with that knowledge. This will, of course, change as more people grow up with technology firmly embedded in their lives and see (one day) decent uses for it  exemplified by teachers and trainers who know what they’re doing – but I do feel that this is a lazy critique of technology: they’re dazzled by the flashing lights and forget anything they ever knew about teaching. The teachers I know who use technologies regularly do not fit into this description at all – they’re teachers (first) who like technology (second) and see a use for it in their teaching (third). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m Guest Writer over on the British Council Teaching English site this month. Why not come over and drop in for a chat? You can find me here:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/gavin-dudeney

Gavin