A mailing list to which I subscribe has recently seen some discussion of language and technology. The posting that follows is a response to some things I saw there.

It's easy to be confused by what happened when.

The printing press was not at first the means of mass production that we may assume - Gutenberg spent years setting up, and taking down, and resetting, the type for his Bibles.

It's interesting that after the invention of press, the number of manuscripts produced by groups of scribes increased in much of Europe. And the luxurious printed books were illuminated by hand.

It's only in the 18th, and more so, the 19th, centuries that printing becomes highly mechanized and affordable to a wide public. Writers like Dickens (especially in the cheap magazines he edited, and in which he published his novels first, serially) both help, and benefit from, the technology.

William Blake is interesting - he's a printer, but uses handwriting, rather than movable type in many cases.

The scene in Shakespeare in Love, where young Will keeps screwing up sheets of paper is deeply implausible - it was far too valuable a material for that. (To see just how much our forebears re-used and recycled, we need only look at the account in Our Mutual Friend.) Yet also it proceeds from an anachronism - we suppose that writers need to draft on paper. But any competent poet of the time would do all this mentally. Much later, Wordsworth tells us that he composed Tintern Abbey while out walking.

There is a further corollary. I lose patience with school inspectors (in the UK) who insist on seeing lesson plans on paper. It seems not to occur to them that anyone can hold a complex or developed set of structures in his or her head. (I think it makes as much sense as asking a stand-up comic to show his or her "plan" for a performance - the point here is that the mental plan can respond, in real time, to the contributions or questions of the learners or audience - and it is impossible to find a piece of paper big enough to show the possible permutations of that.) It may be that some of the new technologies (voice telephony and broadcasting, say) will restore some of the primacy that the spoken word undoubtedly had in a society where many intelligent people were not formally literate.

In Romeo and Juliet Old Capulet gives Peter a written message - he does not suppose that a servant will be illiterate. Peter, looking for someone who can read, knows that gentlemen, distinguished by their dress, may be able to help, and asks Romeo and Benvolio. Shakespeare's plays are full of messengers - but we should think of them not as postmen before their time, so much as message speakers. (Macbeth sends his wife a letter, but only because what he says is unsuitable for delivery by messenger. Sometimes the recipient of the message is honoured by the status of the messenger - so Duncan sends Ross to tell Macbeth of his new title.) Teachers often use Chinese whispers to "prove" the fallibility of the spoken word. But there are many societies today, and others in the past, where the accuracy of transmission would be far greater, if not exact. What that test really proves is that there are a few people to whom you should never entrust an important message. But when you appoint your town crier, you choose someone with a decent verbal memory. When the Player King arrives at Elsinore, Hamlet is able to choose from a wide repertoire - the players carry all of these plays in their heads.

There's more to writing than paper...

A few side-thoughts: I am glad I am not the only one who was irritated by the implausible waste of paper in that film! And do you see teachers as stand-up comics then, Andrew? I do sometimes feel as if we are being treated as a joke by our political masters, it is true.

I don't think I understand the point you are making about language and technology, to be honest.

I am very literal, you see. I need to see concrete examples of what is meant, only then can I work backwards to theories and concepts.

How would what you say affect one's study of language and technology? In what way do you suggest it should change our perspective of what technology is?

Nor do I

I sometimes describe myself as a Language Technologist, i.e as a person who has made a career out of researching and teaching about ICT applications to natural language and second language acquisition: machine translation, computerised concordancing, computer assisted language learning, speech technology, etc. We have a module entitled Human Language Technologies at the ICT4LT website: Module 3.5 at http://www.ict4lt.org

Human Language Technologies is the term used by the EC to replace the former term Language Engineering and embraces a wide and growing field of ICT applications to natural language.

Regarding computers and the printed word, there is no such thing as the paperless office, and I probably waste vast amounts of paper directly as a result of possessing a computer. I always print out longer texts that I find on the Web. There is a reason for this. Web guru Jakob Nielsen writes:


Be Succinct! Writing for the Web, Alertbox for March 15, 1997: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

It was interesting to read the story in The Times (29 November 2000, p. 9) headed "King leaves Internet Readers in Suspense". Stephen King decided not to complete his Internet novel The Plant because - according to King - "it failed to grab the attention of readers on the Web". King found that a surprisingly high proportion of the readers accessing his site (75%-80%) made the "honesty payment" for being allowed to download chapters: "But", he said, "there are a lot fewer of them coming. Online people have the attention span of a grasshopper." The article points out "that digital publishing has a bleak future because it is an unattractive medium for reading long texts and it is difficult to stop breach of copyright". See: http://www.stephenking.com

The Questia library has changed on-line reading habits for me... I now regularly scan texts and cut-and-paste sections for use in my classroom projects. This resource is a phenomental boon to our profession, and a real paper-saver. Naturally, we must still print out copies of text for our students. But as we become increasingly interconnected in our webs of opportunity, I believe this too will change.

Hi, Christine,

I was not making one point, but trying to trace a bit of history, while challenging some myths (like that lie about Chinese whispers, which I have heard many teachers tell).

Broadly, I am describing a process whereby technology increased the standing of the written word over three centuries, and then started to redress the balance by attending to the spoken word.

Our educational culture is deeply conservative, and has not begun to catch up. We carry much of what we value in our own heads, or should do, but have largely lost a knack we once had (and our supposedly primitive cousins in other cultures have never lost) of holding more complex structures and stories there. A few years back, I thought that I had lost this, but writing, designing Web sites, listening to certain things while driving - these have somehow given me even more capacity to hold these structures than I ever had before. I don't need paper, and I have more than enough to "read" inwardly for me never to be bored, when I find myself having to spend time without any visible means of entertainment.

I do not regard this as at all remarkable. But I do think (I see everyday) that in the UK today, this is quite unusual. I still read books, of course, and enjoy them...

I would go further than Cerebrator - we do not need to print things for students. We can leave the digital versions on networks for them to pick up when they want. Better still, I cannot make copies of some things without breaching copyright. But a student can scan and do OCR on his or her own copy - and maybe pass that on. Whereas some spiteful publisher or petty author may try to beat up teachers with the law, they have no chance against all the teenagers in the world...

I resent the terms "spiteful publisher" and "petty author". I am both: an owner of a small publishing firm and an author. This is the way I earn my living. If you steal my work you steal my livelihood.

It is, of course, illegal to make a digital copy of a copyright work and leave it on a school intranet or a public website to be picked up by others - unless given permission by by copyright owner to do so.

If you are unsure about educational copyright, check it out at the BECTA ICT Advice site:
http://www.ictadvice.org
Do a search under "copyright".

See also the Web page that I created at:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm

Watch out for the copyright bounty hunter. To quote an example taken from a website in the USA:
"I've always had people come up to me with examples of friends or neighbors who have been turned in for using Walt Disney graphics and were fined three to five thousand dollars. Many teachers feel they don't have to bother with the copyright law because the "copyright police" aren't going into their classroom to check on them. However, the most common way that teachers end up in court over copyright violation is when a disgruntled employee turns in the teacher down the hall. The copyright bounty hunters are out in force -and, yes, they may very well be in your school."
http://lserver.aea14.k12.ia.us/TechStaffDev/copyright.html
The site contains a good deal of useful advice on copyright. Although the site is concerned with copyright in the USA, there are many similarities to copyright law in the UK - see the BECTA ICT Advice reference above.

Watch out for the disgruntled kid/parent too. Why burn down the school when you can shop the staff for breach of copyright? My local secondary school was reported to the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) by a parent of a child attending the school for illegally distributing copies of a software package that I wrote. FAST contacted me to see if I wished to take action against the school. I told FAST that I had already made an arrangement with the school whereby they were allowed to distribute student copies of my software subject to an agreed fee. I do wonder, however, what motivated the parent to go directly to FAST rather than approaching the school or myself first?

some other ideas about lang and tech posted on the Lang List
(starting with more from Andrew ~ I presume there is not a copyright issue!)

Tim (Shortis) has published a book on the subject.

The Language of ICT: Information Communication Technology see at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...6452482-8948465

------------------
aspect to consider:


pragmatics (say politeness theory)
semantics
language etymology and change
possible gender effects

-----------------------

source data,
go to message boards and blogs, and look at instant messaging.
Of course there are older technologies to consider (print, radio and TV
broadcasting, telephony and so on).

Andrew reckons we don't really need to collect resources - just know where they are and point people at them.

---------------------------
For an informed bit of research look at Susan Githens' stuff:

http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/githens/covr511.htm

See also

http://www.uwe.ac.uk/ictconference/session3.htm

this idea was posted by Mark Boardman - the host of the LangList - plugging his up- coming new book:

'The Language Of Websites' by Mark Boardman, forthcoming title
in the Routledge Intertext series.
ISBN 0-415-32853-5 (hb)

ISBN 0-415-32854-3 (pb)

Catriona Murray at Routledge is in charge of its marketing - Her email is catriona.murray@tandf.co.uk.

Mark reckons that his book:

*explores the ways in which websites use and present language

*covers the main generic types of website, from linguistic, technical,
historical and media perspectives

*considers how the Web has evolved as a medium, and how hypertext has
created fundamentally different types of audience interaction from
traditional mass media

*features a full glossary, which assumes very little prior knowledge and
includes linguistic, ICT and media terminology

*will soon be accompanied by a supporting website at http://markboardman.com

someone called Jennifer Greenald suggestd these sites:
"I have just been teaching a related topic for A level Communication Studies
and found a few sites useful for lang" -

http://www.greenhill.org/facultyfolders/US...uage/index.html

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/research/lwp/resources/op3.htm

http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/emailrel.html and other sections on
this site.

this is a bit of fun - but to be taken with a pinch of salt, ask your students, they already KNOW all about this - they invented it!

http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm

In 1997 I made a decision to stop writing textbooks and instead put all my written work on the web. I have therefore given some thought about how this new medium has changed the way I write. I have come to the conclusion that the following has taken place:

(1) When writing textbooks you have to take full account of the potential market for your work. For example, it is a much more attractive financial proposition to write a book on Nazi Germany than the United Nations. It goes further than that, textbook publishers have to make commercial decisions about giving contracts to authors writing textbooks. Since the emergence of full-colour textbooks, publishers need to sell at least 10,000 copies to get a return on their investment. This has further restricted what you can write about. For example, a school textbook about the United Nations is now out of the question.

The main advantage of web publishing is the freedom to concentrate on subject matter that interests you. You are still rewarded financially for producing popular material (the money raised is largely dependent on the popularity of the pages created) but you are not completely controlled by the market-place.

(2) Writing for the web gives you an international audience. The web also provides a convenient way to interact with your audience (by email and forums like this). As a historian I have found this very useful. Authors are invariably influenced by their own cultural upbringing. Feedback from people reading my work in other countries have made me fully aware of this and has I am sure has had an influence on what I write.

(3) I always found the publication of books a painful experience. I have never been pleased with the end result. It is not long before readers begin pointing out mistakes in the text. Therefore, you have to wait until the book is reprinted before these corrections can be made. Large print runs of colour books makes this a greater problem than before. Publishers are also not keen about making minor corrections to existing printing plates (this is a fairly expensive business).

The web of course is very different. When mistakes are pointed out they can be corrected immediately. As I also include a “source section” I can also add different interpretations of past events. For example, I write about people who are sometimes still alive. When people go on the web for the first time they often type in their name into a search-engine. Therefore, if I have written about them, they are likely to come to my website. The same is true of children and grandchildren of famous people. They invariably are unhappy about something I have written and the result is a dialogue between the author and the subject. This sometimes results in changes to the narrative. I always give them the right of reply and their comments are added to the sources section. This is therefore the greatest change to the writing process. This is completely different from the kind of writing that one does for a book.

(4) Last year Larry Hancock published a book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Someone Would Have Talked). It is the best book I have read on the assassination but without the web it would probably not have been published. It is extremely difficult to get books on the JFK assassination published in America (for political rather than commercial reasons). Although it appears in book form, it has been published by a popular website, JFK Lancer. It also comes with a CD with 1,400 pages of reference exhibits. The book is currently being discussed on this forum.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=693

This forum has resulted in the author being put in direct contact with other researchers as well as people (and their relatives) who appear in the book. This has enabled Larry to make changes to his original text. It seems to me that as far as history books are concerned, this approach is likely to become fairly common over the next few years.

Another possibility is that writers will in the future produce a draft text for the web. After a period of dialogue and with all mistakes removed, the material will published in book form.

thanks for that John - I found that really interesting!

meanwhile I am continuing to trawl through the Lang List old emails, and transfer tips from there to here, as a way of reviewing the materials for myself, as well as being philanthropic!

Louise suggests this link for language of emails, a fairly academic presentation by an American scholar :
http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feat...AgeofEmail.html

which I thought looked interesting, but not likely to be the sort of thing I'd expose my average students too! We had a more accessible one than that, which I have used for lang change teaching this year --- by brenda danet

*wanders off to look for it *

http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/email.htm

which was really easy to convert into a worksheet - indeed, I DID convert it into a worksheet - dunno if I can post it on here though?

ANDREW???

---------------------------

We have photocopies of an article in our files called "the Joy of Text" from a broadsheet - which I wanted to locate for you - when trawled in Google (using the whole phrase in inverted commas) - there were zillions of offerings - that in itself becomes something we could set as a homework .. to explore the way ppl are writing about txting on line! (and using dreadful puns!!)

the one that came out on top was a nice looking little thing from the BBC, which looks very student-friendly

and here is the link to the Guardian Article, which is pretty good, actually!
http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/email.htm

---------------------------------

and here is another one that a few ppl have said they think is useful from the university of washington - crispin thurlow ...
http://www.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a...low2002003.html

this has some up-to date info and interesting links

I write mainly for the Web these days. Web guru Jakob Nielsen's site contains useful advice on writing for the Web:
http://www.useit.com

One must bear in mind that reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper and that people tend to read less accurately from the computers screen, tending to skim-read and often miss important information - various research projects have come to similar conclusions. All the materials that I produce for the Web can therefore be printed and you can read them sitting in a comfortable armchair with a cat on your lap.

This subject has recently cropped up in the EUROCALL discussion list at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

Markus Ritter initiated the discussion by writing:
>From our own e-learning environment I have found that the majority of students very much prefer to do "normal reading" offline, based on a well-designed print document. In the long run they are really only prepared to consult the platform for more genuine electronic purposes (eg CMC, Flash animations etc.). This is not only for technical reasons (dpi) but also for more general reasons, eg efficient text processing. Or should students just be told not to be so old-fashioned and adapt their reading habits to the new E-world?<

I replied, referring list members to Jakob Nielsen’s site (above) and also to the following paragraph that appears on the homepage of the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org
>It was interesting to read the story in The Times (29 November 2000, p. 9) headed King leaves Internet readers in suspense. Stephen King has decided not to complete his Internet novel The Plant because - according to King - "it failed to grab the attention of readers on the Web". King found that a surprisingly high proportion of the readers accessing his site (75%-80%) made the "honesty payment" for being allowed to download chapters: "But", he said, "there are a lot fewer of them coming. Online people have the attention span of a grasshopper." The article points out "that digital publishing has a bleak future because it is an unattractive medium for reading long texts and it is difficult to stop breach of copyright". See: http://www.stephenking.com<

Fred Riley added:
>In my experience, users are happy to read (often skim-read) short texts on screen, but for anything longer than a page or so prefer to print to paper. I think that if you try to force your students into reading online then you're going to become very unpopular very quickly. Indirect evidence for the difficulty of screen reading comes, I believe, from the marked failure of 'e-book' technologies to take off amongst the general public. I well remember, nearly a decade ago, going to an educational technology conference at which some Suit gave a plenary on how the book was dead, and how everyone was going to be reading books and magazines and papers on cheap portable screens. He even boasted how, instead of taking a book to bed, he took his laptop (which I thought was rather sad, in the modern sense of the word). Back in the 90s there were dire predictions that books and libraries would become obsolete, and pundits wrote portentous articles lamenting the impending loss of the printed word. More recently, more portable LCD e-book readers have come on to the market with a number of e-books, and have signally failed to make any serious impact on the mainstream public. When, in the future, 'screens' are developed which can be treated like paper - folded, wrapped up, legible in all light conditions, truly portable - then perhaps traditional paper printing will come under threat, but until then I can't see screen text taking over from hard copy. After all, you can't read screen text in the pub, or the bath, or on the toilet...<

I've just been looking through the contributions to this thread, and I'd like to go back to the difference between oral and written communication.

In 'Roots' Alex Hailey relates how he came across Kunta Kinte in the first place. He'd gone to Liberia (I think) and found a village where people thought that someone with that name might have come from. At a village meeting the 'history-teller' comes forward and starts reciting the story of every single person in that village, going back several hundred years. Kunta Kinte's story, in the 1700s, was part of that. So … we human beings definitely have the capacity to keep a lot of information in our heads!

I've recently been using a desktop video-conferencing system, which makes it very easy for people to link up, see each other and talk to each other, at a very low cost. The most interesting effect has been to see how much more lively and full of vitality the exchanges on that are, compared with written contributions on fora like this one.

OK, there are plenty of people like me who have the interest, and patience, to formulate our ideas, put them down whole in written words, and then wait days or weeks for responses … but we're the weirdos! Most people aren't like us!

I'm always telling IT-freaks that computers will really start making an impact when we can get rid of the keyboard, but the ability to put people into fairly instantaneous contact with each other, no matter where they happen to be, is a good start.

I can't remember who said it and exactly how he formulated it but it was something like:

"The best database is your grandmother."

I seem to recall it being said by an American academic working in the UK during the 1980s.

I have been researching my own family tree. The best database has proved to be my 94-year-old aunt.

What a useful thread and many thanks for collecting recommendations together and spurring on other very helpful contributers, suzie. Nice to meet you on here (under my pseudonym ).

cheers, brinn - I think this forum will take off when a few more of us get into the habit of using it, and recommending it ...

I thought your little burka-esque icon was well chosen - that's enough IT skill for anyone, I'd say, the ability to choose the right smiley

harry from bede college suggests these websites, which he says will be a bit "media" focussed - but potentially useful:

THE LANGUAGE OF TELEVISION

1. Exploring Language The "Grammar" of Film and Television
http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resource...ar_film_tv.html

2. Do we learn to ‘read’ television like a kind of ‘language’?
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/kjh0001.html

3. Language And Television

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/L/htmlL/...anguangeand.htm

4. Television and language development in the early years: a review of the literature

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/sfh9901.html

5. Do we learn to ‘read’ television like a kind of ‘language’?
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/sfh9901.html

here are more tips from Louise!
There is a comprehensive if partial history of weblogs @
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html


and a discussion of /linkpage to excellent examples of the genre @
http://www.camworld.com/journal/rants/99/01/26.html

Someone called Jennifer Greenald here!


The website associated with Tim's book is very useful with some great links.

http://www.netting-it.com/

Your starter for ten on this from the AQA support training yesterday (Manchester, 22nd June, 2004) seems to be that we need mainly (not exclusively) to focus on discourse, how the technology shapes the language use. So, as Andrew has said several times, not so much text books, as looking at the data and seeing what you see!

David's comments deserve a response.

Our society has become over-dependent on writing. I have watched teachers use the game of so-called Chinese Whispers, to "prove" the fallibility of spoken transmission. But there are many parts of the world today where the message would pass around without any change, so long as the participants were able to leave out the few people whom they knew not to be reliable.

In Shakespeare's time, complex messages travelled by word of mouth - as the various messengers in various plays show us. Moreover, while the theatre companies did not keep many written copies of their plays, as there was no copyright to stop others from performing them, nonetheless people did manage to make bootleg copies. How? By attending the play repeatedly, then recalling what they had heard - which seems impossible to modern people who rely on written records.

This has several relevant implications. An Inspector comes to see me and asks to see my lesson plan. I reply that it's in my head - and necessarily so, as the possible responses of my students mean that I do not know which of various structured accounts I may have to call on before the lesson is out. The inspector may be so stupid as to suppose that a text is only real if it is written, but centuries of drama and a century of broadcasting say otherwise.

My students (there may be a gender difference at work here) try to make copious written notes for "revision". Eventually they amass hundreds of hand-written pages, that make no sense - and the ideas, such as they were, remain on the paper. Although the exams will require the students to write, the best ways for many of them to learn things is to say them or hear others saying them. Or it will be, if they can practise this approach. Instead of spending hours "revising" by staring at these pages of notes, while listening to music or TV in the mistaken belief that "it helps me concentrate", the student can spend half an hour, listening to or saying (or chanting) stuff that he or she needs to learn - a potted account of some language theory with a few examples, say. And then he or she can stop work, and listen to the music or watch TV properly. Advertisers know this works - which is why they fire their slogans at us.

The speaking and listening approach can also give you back your life, as a student - make recordings, and then you can play them while getting ready to go out, in the bath, the car. That may seem swotty, but is the opposite if it means you can get to the pub, play football, ride your horse (I live in a county where the pupils still do this), or do whatever else it is that exams want to steal from you.

I would urge David to try Instant Messaging - this allows instant real-time communication across any distance. It's more intimate than speech, and you have a record at the end, should you wish to keep it - for personal or academic reasons... But the general point - that users want an immediate response - I wholly endorse.

Interesting comments, Andrew. As a language teacher I've long known the absolute necessity of using a variety of ways of taking something in, if the student is going 'own' the language I'm trying to teach. I have a lovely quote in Danish from a leading educationalist there which translates as "knowledge is something which each individual creates within herself". I.e. we can teach and teach until we're blue in the face, but someone else's learning is something we have very little control over.

Dr Dunn and her team's research into learning styles (http://www.learningstyles.net/) also has interesting things to say about the limitations of text-only ways of taking in new information. I was at a conference about learning styles in Sweden a couple of years ago which was addressed by Dr Dunn. One of her comments in particular made a great impression on me. She said that although we all have certain learning styles which we tend to adopt, the point of education is to help people to become more proficient in the learning styles which don't come naturally to us. If she's right, then it doesn't mean that we have to swing the pendulum away from text-based learning styles over to something else, or to spend hours trying to create diversified lessons dedicated to all the different learning styles our pupils happen to have.

IM hasn't really taken off in Sweden, as such. It's a bit unnecessary in a country with the kind of mobile phone coverage that Sweden has. 3G phones are the big fashion accessory here at the moment. We're at the stage where the companies are giving them away free if you sign a 2 year contract (at about £17 per month).

Here's a paragraph from an article I'm writing for a US publication at the moment:

"Text-based communication definitely has its uses. However, I am not yet convinced of the advent of homo digitalis – digital people – who have evolved away from spoken communication. Synchronous text demands very highly-developed typing skills, if you are going to participate fully, whilst asynchronous text requires you to be able to formulate your ideas precisely … in just the same way that we don’t when we speak. In other words, what if our current dependence on text-based communication is a temporary phenomenon, brought about by the limitations of the medium, on a par with the telegraphese which developed in the 19th century to limit the expense of a communication medium where you paid by the word? (ASAP – as soon as possible – is one of the remnants of telegraphese.) If this is the case, then what I am calling the preferred method of most human beings will reassert itself as soon as technology permits – just as speech came back into its own as the telegraph was superseded by the telephone. And that is just what technology is on the verge of permitting."

Interesting comments, Andrew. As a language teacher I've long known the absolute necessity of using a variety of ways of taking something in, if the student is going 'own' the language I'm trying to teach. I have a lovely quote in Danish from a leading educationalist there which translates as "knowledge is something which each individual creates within herself". I.e. we can teach and teach until we're blue in the face, but someone else's learning is something we have very little control over. [David Richardson, Jul 6 2004]

A few quotations that might help us understand this process.

“Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.” George Halifax

“One does not actually learn anything new. What we call learning is really nothing but recollecting true knowledge that we already have within us.” Socrates

“We learn what we do.” John Dewey

“Knowledge is not “to know” but to schematise – to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as suffices for our practical requirements.” Nietzsche

However, all this was written before the arrival of the web. We can now develop what Pierre Levy, has called “collective intelligence”. Levy claims we are in the early moments of an historical paradigm shift of the magnitude of the Renaissance. In his book Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (1994), Levy argues that the “unfettered exchange of ideas in cyberspace has the potential to liberate us from the social and political hierarchies that have stood in the way of mankind's advancement”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence

http://www.arenotech.org/Levy/Levy_-Ottawa/

Others, including Tom Atlee, prefer the term “community intelligence” to describe this process.

http://www.community-intelligence.com/

It was this idea of collective or community intelligence that inspired Tim Berners Lee to create the “World Wide Web”. In 1980 Berners-Lee joined the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). His main role was to support CERN’s community of physicists in the retrieval and handling of information. CERN is a vast organisation doing research of unimaginable complexity. The physicists were based in several different countries. Berners-Lee’s task was to create a system which CERN could consolidate its organisational knowledge. He set out to create a system that would allow individual scientists to access data being created by other members of the CERN team.

http://www.funet.fi/index/FUNET/history/in...c/proposal.html

Although scientists were the first to benefit from the web. It soon became clear that this new system had to offer other subject areas. Historians are now for example use forums to make good use of “collective intelligence”. This process also has also the potential to change the way all students learn.

I believe that texting and instant messaging do not have the same potential as forums. What is more, forums rely on sophisticated communication skills and traditional forms of education will be necessary if its full potential is to be achieved.

Hi, John,

You are, I think, quite right about txting - even the most ingenious of us can do little with 160 characters.

I think that you may not be so right about Instant Messaging. In typical use, it can be as rambling as the mindless stuff we see on some chat forums. But, like conversation, its potential is as great as the capacity of the users. I cannot show you exchanges in which I have been one of the participants, for obvious reasons of the privacy of my friends and colleagues - but I have often found after a time of conversation that the transcript has an eloquence rarely found in live speech, and more akin to the kind of thoughtful interaction that playwrights invent for their characters.

I think, though, in sympathy with your assertion, that it may be less good for dispassionate or cool academic discussion than the message-board, as it is more revealing and intimate. It's a bit like being able to leave your front door open, not knowing who may come in, but knowing that only people you want to meet will do so. It's also a great means of seeing the effect of different time-zones, so that you simultaneously think in terms of the one where you are and the one where someone else is. (Which seems to me more complex than merely advancing or retarding one's watch on arrival somewhere.)

Strictly speaking, there is nothing that I can do here, that I cannot do in either Instant Messaging or a Net Meeting. But there are some things (to do with spontaneity and immediacy) which I can do there, and cannot do here. In fact there are some kinds of sophistication that are quite appropriate there (because I know my partner in the interaction) that would be out of place here. (For example, to move between two, or among several, languages that we share.) To use such methods here would be cryptic or look like showing-off, and, thus, discourteous. In private, one can be sillier - but that is not necessarily less sophisticated...

Texting

See Patrick Kiernan & Kazumi Aizawa (2004) Cell phones in task-based learning. Are cell phones useful language learning tools? ReCALL 16, 1.

ReCALL is a refereed journal, the mouthpiece of EUROCALL, and published by Cambridge University Press. The above article is based on a paper presented at the EUROCALL 2003 conference in Limerick, Ireland.
http://www.eurocall-languages.org/recall/recall.htm

EUROCALL is an established professional association that aims to provide a European focus for the promulgation of innovative research, development and practice relating to the use of technologies for language learning:
http://www.eurocall-languages.org
This year's EUROCALL conference will take place in Vienna, 1-4 September.

The current issue of the online MED magazine (issue 22) has an article about computer based words, with another to follow in the next issue.


http://www.macmillandictionary.com/med-mag...azine-cover.htm




Jennifer Greenald

nice link jennifer ....

and on a lang / gender issue - aint it just the truth that men ramble on more than women!

*sits back and waits for lengthy flak*

Do we?

No!

The Website associated with Tim Shortis's book is very useful in identifying some of the more important areas of study of the relation of (information) technology and language. It's at:

www.netting-it.com/

The Macmillan dictionary article that Jennifer mentions I find much less helpful.

That information technology begets new lexis is not especially remarkable - the same is true of any activity from water-polo to cookery to stamp-collecting. Looking at a large collection of lexical items does not really show us what is distinctive about the interaction of modern technologies with language. (So what is? I hear you ask. More of that soon...)

The Macmillan article reads like the work of someone who does not really know or use this lexis without some stiffness and formality - it suggests the work of an anthropologist looking at the culture of an exotic tribe (Coming of Age in Samoa, or whatever). This, for instance, looks very patronising, to me:



Not only patronising, it's not even very accurate. (I work with that industry, and see no evidence that everyone therein is young, alas. And people in any occupation other than business will see themselves as different from business people - plasterers, lorry-drivers, teachers and brain-surgeons, police officers, pharmacists, and so on... The reference to suits is gratuitous and daft.) In fact, this paragraph tells me much more about the writer's attitudes in representing technology, than about the thing represented. There are all sorts of people who have reason to speak or write about things relating to the use of technology - but the idea that we belong to some common "cyberculture" is silly. I might as well suggest that people who clean their houses with vacuum cleaners belong to a hooverculture.



That's not so much inaccurate as meaningless, since "computer words" is not a sensible description of anything. But to take, for instance, the abbreviation FTP - commonly used by people who want to upload a document to a remote fileserver (or download one from such a location), that denotes "file transfer protocol" - not especially short, and very far from simple, since it is a short description for a process of digital communication that can be expressed in detail only in terms that would make sense to an expert in electronics. In fact, it's an illogical claim, since the writer goes on to say that there are lots of abbreviations of longer terms. What the writer really means, I submit, is that he or she mostly knows the short and familiar terms like "mouse" and "keyboard". Much of the discussion of ICT on this forum, which is mostly conducted by people (I'm one) who are very far from being experts in network technologies should serve to refute this claim that the lexis is mostly "simple".

The writer of the article finds one interesting thing - that much of the lexicon is metaphorical.

The article is dated - "cyber-" is very much a prefix of the last decade or even the one before that. Think of "cyberpunk", popularized as a description for the kind of fiction typified by William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer. Doctor Who, of course, gave us the Cybermen in the late 1960s...

That's all a bit negative. But I started with the positive suggestion that the site for Tim's book does a good job of mapping the territory for the language scientist. I hope shortly to start posting some of my explorations of that same territory...

After looking at Tim's headings, I have attempted to sort out my own outline. This is what I would expect to look at - and it's the working agenda for a guide I've started to draft.

What do the examiners say about this subject?
What is technology?
What does it have to do with language?
New kinds of text
How the medium affects the message
-Telephone
-Radio
-Television
-Computer

Social functions of technological media
-Social functions in interpersonal communication
-Social functions in mass communication
Discourse features
-Telephone
-Radio
-Television
-Computer

Representation of technology and language
Attitudes to technology and its language
Technology and the lexicon
-New forms and new meanings
-Special and general usage
Technology as a source of metaphor in general usage
Technology and grammar
Researching and investigating language and technology
Readings of example data

I will have missed some things out, and may find this is not the most satisfactory arrangement. But it gives me a way in.

I tend to agree with Andrew. There's nothing special about computer technology and language. While it is true to say that computer technology has generated a lot of new language most of it remains a mystery to the layman although words such as "input" and "output" have found a home in wider realms of language. The computer business is full of people in suits who use impenetrable jargon.

I was told once that the origin of the computer term "stack" can be traced to the arrangement of plates in a pile with a spring underneath in self-service restaurants where early computer scientists used to eat.

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com

I often wonder aloud what would have happened if women with children had dominated the early computer industry, instead of single men working out of garages. Imagine if a 'menu' (used by nerds who didn't know how to cook) had been called a shopping list, for example. Perhaps 'catalogs' would have become boxes, with some of them on the shelf and some of them under the bed or in the attic. 'Disk utilities' might have been a sewing kit, and 'miscellaneous' might have been leftovers ("Are you going to make these leftovers into a meal, or do they go in the rubbish?".)

I can't help thinking that we'd have saved a huge amount of time and money that we spend trying to make IT more accessible to real people.

To be fair to the developers of visual interfaces (Windows-Icon-Mouse- Pointer - like the original Xerox design, the Mac OS, MS Windows, Linux and so on), they have taken up many metaphors that are gender-neutral, by starting with the real-world office environment - thus desktop, wallpaper, trash (which soon became the recycle bin for reasons that are not really to do with environmental awareness). The absence of some common sense - which David suggests is more typical of women - may explain the fact that we can put wallpaper on the desktop...

I've just been looking at some "jargon-buster" type glossaries, which tend to refute the Macmillan claim about things being simple.



This comes from www.dtg.org.uk/reference/tutorial_ca.html

I shall be using this for some glossing and comment of my own later - but I would challenge the Macmillan lexicographer to sustain the claim of simplicity behind this phrase that uses two seemingly familiar lexemes. I like the way that a term such as "encrypt" has so much history (cultural and linguistic) in, or behind, it...

The culinary metaphor in stack seems probable - there are many uses of food in technical lexis. A notable example is Java - a computer language named after an epithet for coffee, which in turn is named for the island state of Java.

Graham's examples of input and output lead to others - interface and feedback, for instance. Once these leave the technical domain they are very often subject to rapid change (usually simplification) by the lay user. The point about audio feedback is that the amplified sound leaves a speaker, enters a microphone, gets amplified again - so in a second or so, it has reached the peak output of the system and becomes meaningless. In common speech it now simply means any kind of response.

Those who know about mental health will have seen something similar with schizophrenic which is popularly (and mistakenly) used to refer to a dual personality, whereas psychologists understand it to denote various disorders characterized by a weak or distorted perception of reality. The schizo- prefix indeed denotes splitting - but in the sense of splitting (the person) from reality, not division into two or more personality parts. So the popular error derives from inappropriate use of sound information. "A little learning is a dangerous thing..."

David's premiss (that interface metaphors are a male invention) does not bear scrutiny - these systems are the products of teams (often credited deep in the bowels of the software), and there are plenty of women among them - and more to the point, people of either sex with expertise in psychology and ergonomics. But in spite of that, Mr. Gates' operating system requires you to click on a button marked "Start", if you want to stop it or close it down... This helpful feature arrived only in 1994 with the then forward-looking Windows 95 ("Where do you want to go today?") Worse still are the error messages that tell the user we have done something illegal or have committed a violation. The alert boxes might as well have a skull and crossbones on them. Mind you, an experienced user would rather see one of these any day than the Windows' "Blue screen of death" - which is a nickname coined by the users, but pretty ubiquitous in any end-user general interest mag. Search on Google for "blue screen of death windows" and you get almost half a million hits, of which the first takes you to a site that links to another where you can buy a T-shirt that ridicules the software. Follow the link, and you will see an ironic message suggesting there is an error with your URL - see www.errorwear.com/huge-bsod.html

Behind David's claim lurks a dangerous and unfair assumption. It is certainly true that many pioneers of IT were/are blokes (who had the time and leisure to pursue an interest). But I would vigorously contest the idea (dangerous because it can become accepted, and so limit openings for women) that IT generally is hostile to women. The way that demand massively outstrips supply mean that, in England anyway, it is very open to both sexes. So far more men than women have chosen to make a career in it. But so long as there are no unfair barriers, then that reflects people's choices. Of course, the current situation, where there are so many more blokes, can sustain attitudes that deter women from joining.

"Nerd" is no less pejorative than a term that shows disapproval of people for their colour, culture, sexuality, appearance and so on. Like the complaint of the student who finds everything "boring", it tells me much about the speaker's insecurities and prejudices, and nothing about the person to whom it is applied. I accept that many people use it half-affectionately of themselves, but it perpetuates one of the few kinds of bigotry that our society still allows. Expert computer users, like brain surgeons and dog-breeders and fashion models, may have personalities of various kinds. I have not found them to be radically different from the general population. The "nerd" is an invention of arty and media types who want to justify their fear of this stuff that they can neither know nor control. I reckon, from many previous postings, that David would not wish to share that prejudice, and used the noun lightly.

Do you really wonder "aloud", David? (That's a serious question, not intended to be a criticism.) If so, that's something I find very interesting. I think I never wonder aloud, but certainly wonder in connected sequences - many of which find their way into written text (as here) later on.

>It is certainly true that many pioneers of IT were/are blokes (who had the time and leisure to pursue an interest). <

One vestige of "sexism" in IT is the way Word's spellchecker flags up "rounders" and "netball", both games mainly played by girls, as orthographical errors. And neither of these sports has generated much in the way of clipart when compared to what is available image-wise for traditional men's sports. This state of affairs used to irritate me greatly when I was word-processing my school's termly newsletter.

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

I was writing without thinking seriously, of course, Andrew, but I'm sure that some of my deep prejudices have come through!

However, although the IT world has definitely changed, the original teams which set up most of the metaphors we use today were male-dominated, and, in my view, reflected a male-dominated world at the time.

If nerd is a pejorative term, then I think badly of myself, since I must be one of them too. However, I try hard all the time to escape from a fascination with the 'mechanics' of the technology so that I can see a little more objectively how it can be used, and what some of the consequences of using it are.

I don't think that there is a specific 'male' and 'female' way of looking at the technology … but when I do my wondering aloud, I'm often doing it with groups of my predominantly female students to try to get them to be less put off by the fact that they're going to have to use machines during their English courses. Often, they haven't separated what they think about what the machines look like (and what machine-enthusiasts usually say about them) from the way they can be used, and how they'll fit into the lives of the students themselves and their study groups.

Incidentally, our IT unit here in Kalmar is still predominantly male, but we've managed to arrange it so that one of the few women who works there is the one who fields all the issues connected with our department. It's lovely to have someone you can talk to at last.

I wholly concede David W's point about what seems to be passive (unthinking) sexism by default. But I had a version of Word that would challenge husband and wife and suggest spouse, among other gender-neutral tricks. (I should see if the current one does that.)

But I think there is relatively little sexism by intent. The prejudice against the "nerds" often includes surprise that they give so much away for free (which becomes a cynical suspicion about their generosity). One meets a lot of old-fashioned courtesy and chivalry. David R.'s Kalmar scenario is one that I recognize and have seen elsewhere.

Even on this forum, I have recently seen some very fair-minded and self-deprecating responses from gentlemen (some admitting to being chronologically gifted) to quite overt provocation of an anti-bloke kind.

In a European education context, use of ICT seems well-balanced - there are as many women as men, broadly, at all the European Schoolnet meetings I have attended. Perhaps the male-bias to technology is balanced by a female strength in languages (and thus transnational meetings) and travel... Moreover, I know of many message boards that are more or less bloke-free zones. For younger users, this is especially true. Go to www.neopets.com and see this for yourself...

As an olive branch to David R., I should add that the noun "nerd" is used with more affection and ironic pride in US English (which I guess is closer to your international usage in Scandinavia) than in the UK, which is where the more spiteful attitudes appear.

My error in asking about your thinking aloud was to assume that this was something you did when alone (for which there is no reason at all, other than putting you into my situation, sitting at a computer, now). I see now that you use it for what I, as a teacher, used to think of as flying kites (or flying by the seat of one's pants) - the sort of thing that Socrates used to do. That's not at all surprising to me - it's a very good way to teach and learn, for some kinds of student. (For me, certainly as both teacher and learner.)

… you mean talking to myself? Well, it has been known!

However, as a language teacher, I often need to 'sound out' ideas and phrases too - as I'm sure you know, our audio 'crap detector' is much more highly attuned than our visual one. So, yes, sometimes I wonder aloud, even when I'm on my own!

This is the opening of my draft guide

What does technology have to do with language?

All technology influences language, in ways that are not always obvious. The development of transport systems, for example, leads people to move around so that language forms used in regional varieties may move into other regions. We use a metaphor such as “all guns blazing” to suggest the idea of an action performed with energy or aggression – so the technology of weapons extends the usage of everyday speech or writing.

Since technology is a means to extend man’s reach, then it is necessarily connected to language, in the sense that both natural languages and technologies will be important in enabling us to do all sorts of things in almost any area of human activity. For example, we use aeroplanes to fly people and goods around the world. And we try to make this safer and more efficient by developing an air-traffic control system.

This uses one kind of technology (radio communication) to support use of language in conversations in an adapted form of international English, that pass on information derived from other technologies (radar, weather-forecasting systems), to the users of yet another set of technologies (the pilots of aircraft).
This may help us to distinguish between the technology in itself, and the things we do with it, from a linguistic perspective. In terms of modelling our ideas about technology and language, we may think

- first of the different technologies (printing, telephony, radio, e-mail)
- and only then about what we do with them.

Alternatively, we may think first of the kind of language interactions we make, and then of the technologies that enable this. In this kind of model, we might usefully think of

· levels of openness and privacy – is the language used in a public or restricted context?
· ownership of the communications – does an interaction or any of its results belong to anyone and if so, in what way?
· topology – are these one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many interactions, or something else?

We may then find that particular technologies are designed for, and well suited to, some of these kinds of language use. And we may be less likely to make daft claims such as that the Internet is CB (citizen band) radio for the 90s (as many cynical people once said).

We will certainly find that the designers of the technology do not always anticipate the new kinds of language activity that will come from the ways that people use and adapt it. Think, for instance, of gramophone recording (a late 19th century technology) and text-messaging from and to mobile telephones (a late 20th century invention). In both cases, the technologies developed in ways that their inventors did not foresee, but which we can now explain readily after having seen it happen.

· The first gramophone or phonograph recordings were made to capture the spoken voice. Yet in time, this technology would emerge as especially well suited to recording musical performances for later playback. (We might add that Edison’s idea for recording sound gained massively when it was used in conjunction with Marconi’s idea of radio broadcasting: the sound recordings made music affordable to a wide audience, but the playing of recordings on radio gave the music a reach that is almost ubiquitous.)

· Text messaging is an adaptation of the idea of mobile phone designers to use a simple text display to give the user information about the functions of the handset. Since this information was being displayed on a phone, it soon became apparent that one could use it for entering free text, that the user could transmit, by using the same underlying technology as the voice calls – and that these packets of information would be far smaller, and less costly to transmit. What the service providers could anticipate generally (but almost certainly without foreseeing the scale of its later popularity) was that users would like to be able to do this. (The assumption was more that we would use the technology for broadcast messages, such as weather or traffic information, rather than for personal interactions.

As an Italian teacher of English I think I would like to change the question into "What does technology have to do with English?" or rather into "What does technology have to do with other languages?".
I have been recently asked to translate technical terms from English into Italian for a glossary on electronics and I have wondered if it really makes any sense trying to find Italian equivalents for Input/output, browser, intranet, internet (either with small or capital "I"), host, etc.
Maybe my slightly "provocative" message could find its location in another thread, but I think that through IT, English has really become the most frequently used language for professional communication in the world. The presence and use of IT in every kind of job and business implies that all working people necessarily use the English language at least some times a day now, maybe much more often in the future.
Will English become the language of all technology?

>I have wondered if it really makes any sense trying to find Italian equivalents for Input/output, browser, intranet, internet (either with small or capital "I"), host, etc.<

It all comes down to usage. The French authorities take a pride in inventing Gallic equivalents of "Anglo-Saxon" technical terms, e.g. "oléoduc", while the French public will often simply opt for the original English term ("pipeline") instead. I don't know enough about Italian to comment. However, I do know that the best glossaries of terms, including multilingual ones, are those containing definitions or explanations of the terms in laymen's language. The precise meaning of terms such as intranet or host is not always clear even to native speakers of English. ICT glossary compilers must know their audience: ICT specialists, technology-using members of the public, or both?

David Wilson
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Caterina writes:


You might take a look at the ICT4LT (ICT for Language Teachers) website, which was produced with the aid of EC funding in four languages, including Italian. The Italian version was produced by Prof Roberto Dolci, University of Venice, one of our partners in the project.

The 15 original modules are available in English, Italian, Finnish and Swedish - and there is a Glossary of Terminology in three of the languages (Swedish is the odd one out): http://www.ict4lt.org
Most "international" terms such as "input", "browser", etc are not translated in the Italian version of the Glossary.

The ICT4LT site gets around 600 hits per day, mostly from the UK, with Italy a close second.

Prof Roberto Dolci has run several courses in Italy centred on the ICT4LT website. I contributed to one of his seminars in Venice a few years ago. The University of Venice has a well-equipped multimedia centre: http://venus.unive.it/cli/
Prof Dolci use to manage the centre, but he's recently moved back into Dipartimento di Scienze del Linguaggio and continues to lecture on languages and technology.

One of my more bizarre jobs was once to teach Swedish to Swedish people (despite me being English). In fact, they were unemployed adults doing a computer training course, and there were lots of terms in 'Swedish' that they just didn't understand, such as 'databas', 'formatera' and 'hård disk'.

And I was once at a presentation in Swedish about computer systems where we counted up the number of 'real' Swedish words on the screens. It amounted to the Swedish equivalents of words like 'and' and 'the' ('monitorera' was my favourite).

This presents problems to an Englishman in Sweden speaking Swedish. I'm never sure whether the word I'm using is now part of the language, or is one which I've just made up by putting a Swedish ending on an English word.

One of the interesting aspects of this for me as a language teacher is the way English is being taken over by all the people around the world who use it with the result that English is slipping out of the grip of native speakers. 'Shit' is an English word commonly used in schools here, both by teachers and pupils. The Swedish word, 'skit', just means dirt, but it's pronounced differently. The 'English' word is being used as it would be in the UK or the USA, but without any hint of 'swearing'. It's thus important for me to constantly point out to Swedish teachers that they mustn't use it in formal discussions with passing acquaintances in the UK.

I wonder how long it will be before 'shit' and words like it are part of mainstream English …

There's a concept called 'Majority English' which you'll find on a site in Sweden: http://www.bentarz.se. The newsletters are a good way of keeping up with developments in contemporary English.

If we (mistakenly) think of English as belonging to the UK and/or USA, then one can see why speakers of other languages might resist what look like imperialist tendencies.

I think this is profoundly mistaken, simply because English is a global lingua franca. There are, I know, daft people in Britain who think of it as theirs, and try to regulate it, and bemoan change. What they are regulating (or failing to regulate) is merely a national variety. But it's the international variety with which the future lies.

In the mediaeval and renaissance periods, there were real arguments about the appropriate use of national vernaculars and the academic/scientific common language (Latin). But an English Dominican wanting to move from Oxford to Paris to Bologna (a common enough career path) would write and speak in Latin. On the other hand, after long deliberation, Milton chose to write his Biblical epic (Paradise Lost) in English, rather than Latin. He wrote both languages expertly, but today no-one much reads his Latin stuff.

The French call the PC an ordinateur and the Norwegians call it a datamaskin - which sounds closer to English than it looks (which is the case with a lot of the language). But it would be silly not to use a common international lexicon for all of the detailed features - and, in practice, no-one does it, save in terms of adapting the spellings and pronunciations, as with David's 'hård disk'.

It would be silly, because in the absence of an existing term in the language in question, the use of the international English version promotes global intelligibility. In any event, whether we like this or not (I do), most of the world agrees with it. Here might is right.

The short answer to Caterina's question is yes and no. The global lexicon of ICT is mediated through English, but the true origins of the lexis (in a historical/etymological sense) often lie in other languages and loans - as with, say, Java, Javascript, interface, virus, Trojan. We use them in English, but they come from everywhere. Among many reasons why English is so readily used as the global language is its promiscuousness - it already helps itself to lexis from anywhere, and its speakers feel no need to find an Anglo-Saxon alternative. We may Anglicize the orthography for practical reasons, but otherwise we are happy with frangipani trees*, patchouli oil, chicken tikka masala, fjords, bagels, robots and so on. We use French loans to describe cuisine and ballet, and we use Italian loans to describe classical music; we use Greek for natural sciences and we use Latin and Latinized Greek for the taxonomy of plants and animals. We may use a greeting that is standard in Scandinavia (Hi/Hei) and say goodbye in Italian (ciao).

*Named after an Italian parfumier (a French loan there) - the scent of the tree supposedly resembles one of Sr. F's concoctions.

In ICT terms, two Italian or Japanese techies can speak their own language to explain a process, but do so while using the international lexicon which is standard in English, but also in every other language, save for literary French as dictated by the linguacrats of the Academie.

Microsoft, by the way, does not enforce this international lexicon in its interface designs - as anyone will know who has tried to use a PC in Finland, Portugal, Greece and the Netherlands, without being a native of any of these places. (Yes, I have, and I did not find it easy in any of the four cases.)

Andrew writes:

Yes, I agree that the future lies in the international variety. Sometimes I get confused, however. As a regular visitor to Canada, where I have relations, I slip into North American English almost automatically, as it avoids raised eyebrows, especially when talking about cars, but when I come home I find I am still talking about “gas”, “hood, “trunk”, “fender”, “windshield”, etc. North American English is now making such an impact on the variety that we speak on this island that I am no longer 100% which variety is which. I recently wrote an encyclopaedia article for Elsevier, who insist on US spelling conventions. No problem – easy if you set your spell checker to US English – but now I find myself writing “traveled” instead of “travelled” and failing to distinguish between “practise” (verb) and “practice” (noun).

Andrew writes:

The Academie has tried to impose French ICT terms instead of the more common English-based international terms. On a couple of occasions when preparing to lecture (in French) in France I tried to familiarise myself by learning the French terms, only to find that all the computer technicians I met habitually used English-based terms in preference to the French terms.

Andrew writes:

Using the different interfaces is a great way of learning the terminology in different languages: i.e. learn by doing. One of the CALL programs that I have written allows the teacher to set the interface to match the target language of the learner, thus “File/Open” can be made to appear as “Fiche/Ouvrir” or “Datei/Öffnen”. My language centre at Thames Valley University used different versions of Word with interfaces in French, German and Spanish.

Yes, I also agree that the future lies in the international variety.
Thank you, Graham, in fact most Italian teachers of English try to teach both 'pavement' and 'sidewalk', 'lift' and 'elevator', which means double work for their students who have got to learn two terms instead of one.
Anyway, it is really interesting to see how English is used, modified, enriched, etc. all around the world: as far as most English/American people can really accept its changing without regretting its original forms or imposing regulations as the French have been doing, it could become the "global" language of mankind.
This is what is already happening, and, as Anrew wrote, "Here might is right".
What about the other foreign languages, then? Will there be many people interested in learning them, if not for the sake of reading literary works in their original forms?