Graham Davies

Forwarded from CILT, the National Centre for Languages Re. Invitation to take part in a pilot of the new 'learner support' sections of Lingu@net Europa, the multilingual centre for language learning Philippa Wright and I are looking for volunteers to give us feedback on a pilot version of the new 'learner support' sections of Lingu@net Europa. Lingu@net Europa is a free service for language learners and language teaching professionals. Piloters' feedback will be used to make improvements to the site before it is re-launched in early 2006. When it is re-launched, Lingu@net Europa will: - be accessible in 20 European languages; - give access to over 4,000 on-line resources many specifically for adult learners; - have a new design which improves accessibility for all users including those with special needs; - include the new 'learner support' sections. To take part in this trial, piloters need to have: - a good level of English - either access to the Internet at home or the opportunity to come to CILT to use the facilities here - between 45 minutes and 2 hours available to look at the site and fill in the on-line feedback questionnaire The pilot will run from Monday 14th to Monday 28th February 2005 (inclusive). Please note, all feedback will be treated in the strictest confidence and be anonymous to those analysing the data. If you would be willing to help us by taking part in this pilot, please let me know immediately by e-mail to imke.djouadj@cilt.org.uk . I will then send you details of how to take part in the trial. Thank you for your time and interest. If you have any queries about the project or the trial please do not hesitate to contact me. With all best wishes Imke Djouadj European Project Officer CILT, the National Centre for Languages, UK

John Simkin writes: I would NEVER get involved in an EC-funded project as a member of a commercial company. The EC is very good at driving SMEs into bankruptcy - or at the very least creating cash-flow problems for them. The EC is well known for delaying payments for unacceptable periods. I waited 6 months just to get the costs of a flight (full-fare - 350 pounds) to Brussels reimbursed on one occasion. On another occasion I recall an SME waiting 18 months for the final payment for work done on an EC-funded project. There are many reports of SMEs pulling out of projects during their 2nd or 3rd years because they simply could not afford to continue to be participants. While educational institutions can weather delays in receiving payments, SMEs cannot wait very long for payments to be made. Even larger companies - such as the airlines who were partners in one EC-funded project in which I was invloved - will pull out at the drop of a hat when money gets tight.

John writes: In principle I am interested in the idea, but as I am no longer attached to an educational institution I am not in a position to play a major role. Submitting and managing a Comenius project is something I would never undertake without institutional support - having had a lot of experience in the past! I don't mind putting in the odd day as an independent consultant, however - at standard EC-approved rates. I'm already playing such a role, as an evaluator, in the Ling@net Europa 2 project: http://www.linguanet-europa.org/y2/ As I have indicated elsewhere, the outcomes of the ICT4LT project, which was funded under Lingua A (and would now come under Comenius 2.1), are already on the Web and could be built upon: http://www.ict4lt.org

David writes: Indeed - and was actually taking place in the week following the opening of the Berlin Wall, namely: The CALL conference at the University of Rostock, organised by Edith Buchholz, 15-17 November 1989. I was there, presenting the Expodisc interactive videodisc package. I intended to write a report on the conference, but it turned into an eye-witness account of the fall of the Berlin Wall: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/berlin.htm I guess we all got a bit distracted by the amazing events taking place around us as we tried to get on with the serious business of our conference

Leslie writes: Eclipse was developed from a program called Storyboard, originally written by John Higgins, published by Wida Software and now forming part of Wida’s package, The Authoring Suite. Storyboard was originally called Rebuild, which was derived from a program known as Masker by Tim Johns, University of Birmingham. A variation of this, also written by Tim Johns, was Textbag, which first appeared in the early 1980s. John Higgins and I adapted Storyboard for the BBC Microcomputer, and it was published in by ESM under a new name: Copywrite. Copywrite now forms part of Camsoft’s Fun with Texts package: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/fwt.htm There are numerous other variations of the same idea: Developing Tray (Bob Moy / ILECC, London), TextPlay (Simon Fenn / Cambridge University Press), Storyline (Martin Phillips / British Council), Storycorner (Wolfgang Meyer, Germany) and a Swedish version by Åke Hägg, published by Corona, Malmö and known as Memory. John Higgins went on to produce yet another variation of Storboard, known as Rhubarb: see Higgins J. (2001) “Text reconstruction: what else happens in Eclipse?” TELL&CALL 1/2001: 17-19: http://www.e-lisa.at/magazine/tellcall/01_01.asp All these programs fall into the category of what is known as Total Cloze text-reconstruction or text-manipulation activities. See Section 8 of Module 1.4 at the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org Fun with Texts continues to be a best-seller and is currently used in over 3000 UK secondary schools. By the way, John Higgins and I wrote one of the first books on CALL: Computers, language and language learning, CILT, London, 1982. This was revised in 1985 and reissued as Using computers in language learning. Regarding language testing, see Module 4.1 at the ICT4LT site and the DIALANG diagnostic language testing website: http://www.dialang.org Yes, a lot of things would not be possible without ICT. The Total Cloze activity would not be possible using pencil and paper - or rather it would, but it would be a completely different kind of exercise and require an awful lot of time. Footnote: I was in Hungary in 1989 too. I attended the 1989 conference on CALL at the University of Debrecen.

English is becoming the de facto lingua franca of the EU - which is probably one of the reasons why our government plays down the importance of languages. Why invest the money in learning foreign languages when everyone speaks English? No, this is not my personal opinion, of course, but the opinion that seems to be widespread in government circles and in the business world. I heard a controversial keynote speech by Dr Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, Germany's former ambassador to the UK, at the European Year of Languages conference in Berlin in July 2001: "Multilinguales Europa: Illusion oder Zukunftschance?" One of the problems alluded to by Dr von Ploetz is that the dominance of English as lingua franca throughout Europe has pushed its main competitors, i.e. French, German, Spanish and Italian, into very poor second places in most European countries. The trend now is to study English plus the language of a neighbouring country in border areas, e.g. Danish in Northern Germany, or French in Northern Spain. This more or less kills off the EC's vision of a multilingual society, especially when one of the major players, the UK, is resolutely monolingual, i.e. the vast majority of UK citizens don't even achieve the CoE Threshold Level in a foreign language, and in the rest of Europe French, German, Spanish and Italian have lost considerable ground. As usual, I went skiing in Austria in January this year. It's getting more and more difficult to speak German in the Tyrol. The level of English of most people working in the tourism industry is very high, and they always use English as a lingua franca when talking to visitors from Holland, Denmark and Belgium. I can usually persuade the manager of the hotel in which I stay to talk to me in High German, but High German is a foreign language to him and not easy for him to sustain for a lengthy period, so we often end up speaking English or - depending on the number of beers we have drunk - I end up struggling to understand and speak Tyrolean. I have found myself habitually using local words such as "Jänner" for "January" and "heuer" for "this year" - and even "er chimmt" instead of "er kommt".

Hubert writes: Continuity is certainly a problem. After the funding period comes to an end you are on your own, i.e. you have to sustain the project out of your own funds or commercialise it so that it pays for itself. Neither option is easy. Writing a proposal for EC funding is time-consuming. Reporting on what you are doing / have done with the money is also time-consuming. Referring back to the ICT4LT project that I have already mentioned: We got funding from the EC for just two years: 50% came from the EC and 50% came from the partners in the project, namely four universities and CILT (Centre for Information on Language Teaching), a non-governmental organisation (NGO). This is the norm for projects funded under Socrates. Now the project sustains itself. It requires my personal intervention only for around 3-4 hours per week. I was also a member of a Leonardo project, in which 60% of the funding came from the EC, with the remaining 40% coming from partner universities and commercial partners. No money in either case came from national organisations, but we did have to make the funding applications via our national representatives of the EU funding bodies (operated by The British Council, in the UK) and report back to them. Yes, “learning languages is good for going on holiday”, as Hubert says, but language professionals (e.g. translators and interpreters) have to be trained to a very high level, and this takes time and money. Although English is becoming de facto the lingua franca of the European Union, we cannot ignore the other languages, as many people feel comfortable working only in their mother tongue, and this is why a lot of money is spent on translating and interpreting and on language education. A good deal of work on advanced language education is being done by the European Language Council, which is a consortium of universities that acts as a kind of lobby group, advising the European Commission on language education policy in higher education: http://www.fu-berlin.de/elc/ Speakers of what the EC calls LWULT languages (Least Widely Used and Least Taught languages) have to put a lot of effort into learning a language that gives them access to a wider range of speakers. It is estimated that around 350-400 hours of language learning are required to get a learner up to Threshold Level, Common European Framework Level B1, which is the level at which you begin to communicate with some degree of confidence. The first choice of a foreign language is normally English, followed by French, German and Spanish (not necessarily in that order). For speakers of LWULT languages it is taken for granted that the school system will provide several years of training in a more widely accessible language – and this costs a lot of time and money. In the UK and Ireland things are different. The UK and Ireland fall at the bottom the EU league as far as language learning is concerned. As everyone appears to be learning English we simply don’t invest in language teaching. The UK government has recently decided, for example, that foreign languages need only be taught in schools in England for the first three years of secondary education, i.e. to children aged 11-14. This is hardly enough time to bring them up to a level where they can use the languages on holiday. So the next generation will remain tongue-tied.

János writes: A couple of references to resources on telecollaboration and webquests: See Module 1.5, Section 14 at the ICT4LT website, where we discuss email videoconferencing, chat rooms, MUDs and MOOs in the context of language teaching: http://www.ict4lt.org See especially, the references to Robert O’Dowd’s website: - Videoconferencing: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/videoc.html - Telecollaboration: http://www3.unileon.es/personal/wwdfmrod/collab We mention webquests in Section 7 of the same module, especially: - The WebQuest page: http://webquest.sdsu.edu - LanguageQuest: http://www.ecml.at/projects/voll/our_resou...quest/index.htm - TalenQuest: http://www.talenquest.nl (in Dutch - but many of the links are in other languages) - Treasure Hunt: http://www.well.ac.uk/wellproj/workshp1/treasure.htm The second of the above references will take you to the European Centre for Modern Languages website in Graz, which has offered several courses in the use of ICT in language teaching in the context of VOLL (Vocationally Oriented Language Learning) and where outcomes of the courses have been published. You may find my personal list of links (300+) to language-related websites relevant: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm

Caterina writes: Yes, I have worked as a project evaluator for the EC The starting point is a detailed needs analysis, most of which should already have been carried out before the proposal is submitted. The needs analysis should continue as part of the project for fine-tuning purposes. Any project proposal that does not include a needs analysis will be rejected. Similarly, evaluation by independent assessors should feature in the proposal: formative evaluation (i.e. ongoing throughout the project, keeping it on track) and summative evaluation (at the end of the project, evaluating its successes and failures). As you can see from the figures quoted in my last email, we spent most of the budget on PEOPLE, i.e. paying them to do the work. This seems to have met with the EC's approval. Watch out, however, when paying consultants. Consultants should only be called in to fill gaps that cannot be filled by the members of the project team and they can only be paid a fee up to a limit set by the EC. The EC is also aware of a common fiddle: e.g. when a member of staff of an educational institution also works as a free-lancer and channels consultancy fees into their business. I run a business, but when working on the ICT4LT project I kept my business activities completely separate from my academic work on the project. I was on the payroll of the university responsible for managing the ICT4LT project and paid a salary at standard rates to cover work done on the project. Moral: be honest! Finally, dissemination of the project's outcomes is important, and it is important to identify a publisher or some other agent to help do this. In fact, it is advisable to identify them before the project starts, calling them in as an adviser while the project is in progress. Most EC-funded projects fail to disseminate their outcomes effectively. Educational institututions are not very good at doing this. It is better to appoint professionals. See my chapter on Commercialisation of project outcomes at: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/Courseware_Directory.pdf

A number of people have mentioned Comenius as a source of funding. The ICT4LT project, which I have mentioned several times in this Forum, succeeded in obtaining funding (Phase 1) under Lingua A (European Cooperation Programmes for Language Teacher Training (1999-2000). Following restructuring of the EC funding programmes, we were advised to apply for an extension of the funding (Phase 2) under Comenius 2.1, Training of School Education Staff (2001). The main outcome of the project, a (free) collection of Web resources, can be viewed at http://www.ict4lt.org ICT4LT is a set of ICT training materials for language teachers in English, Finnish, Swedish and Italian. We failed to get the extension for Phase 2, which would have involved reversioning the training materials we had created into French, German and Spanish. One of the reasons why Phase 1 succeeded was that the materials were to be made available in LWULT languages as well as in English - an important point to bear in mind when applying for EC funding. LWULT = Least Widely Used and Least Taught. The Phase 2 application failed mainly because we were focusing on the "big" languages rather than LWULT languages. The budget for the project (Phase 1) was 465,900 euros, of which 50% was provided by the EC. 75% of this budget was used to pay staff to work on the project: 70% releasing staff from their normal duties at their institutions in order to work on the project, 5% to pay consultants to write materials for the project. The remainder of the budget was divided as follows: 10% production of printed materials: books, publicity flyers, etc. 7% travel 5% administration and overheads 3% acquisition of software, e.g. Dreamweaver and other tools for creating Web pages We only employed one ICT specialist, who designed the structure of the website for us and wrote CGI scripts, etc. There was one person from an administrative background who managed the budget and paperwork for us. One person had a backround in publishing and handled the production of printed materials. All of the others who contributed to the project had a background in language teaching or language teacher training in secondary education and higher education. The division of the budget and the work in this way was obviously acceptable to the EC. Essentially, I think the message that I am conveying is that this successful project was subject-driven and content-driven, not technology-driven. It has received glowing reviews.

Derek writes: I thought the BBC was doing quite nicely squandering your licence fee money on the Digital Curriculum instead of doing what it is good at, namely producing radio and TV programmes. The BBC has already decided to cut down on TV broadcasts of language programmes for adults in favour of inferior Web-based materials.

The question of being paid for work done often crops up in discussion lists. It came up recently in the Linguanet Forum, where a member asked what a teacher could be expected to be paid for making a contribution to a book. The answers indicated that teachers are often expected to work for nothing at all or for a very modest payment. The most I have ever been paid for producing a piece of writing (for an educational website) is 550 euros – for an article of around 13 000 words on which I spent many, many hours. I am only prepared to do this occasionally, however, and only if I find the work particularly interesting. As a free-lancer (I retired from full-time teaching in 1993 in return for a modest pension) I have to earn my living and pay for my groceries, heating and lighting my house, running my car, etc. I would normally expect to be paid around 600 euros per day, e.g. for running an ICT training course. 600 euros per day is more or less the standard rate for this kind of work in the UK. Such work, of course, does not present itself every day and when it does it involves preparation time, travelling time and possibly an overnight stay in a hotel. I firmly believe that paying people is the best way to get good work out of them. One specifies what is required, sets a deadline for delivery and pays for work done. As an editor of a website funded in part by the European Commission, I achieved good results working this way, and I never had shoddy work presented for publication. My plumber charges 60 euros just to come and investigate a problem and then charges 40 euros per hour to fix it. My garage charges astronomical fees for maintaining and fixing my car. Why shoud education be treated so differently? Teachers work in return for a salary, don't they? Those who work overtime on projects should be properly rewarded.

It looks that the discussion about the demise of the VS has degenerated into a bit of a bun-fight. As an outsider – and as a consultant who has worked for the European Commission as an evaluator of project proposals – I think you probably need to get back to basics, namely: Establish that there is a NEED for a Virtual School of the type that you propose. Conduct a proper needs analysis among potential staff and students and find out if such a school will really be in DEMAND. If you cannot come up with concrete evidence that there is such a need and a demand, a funding proposal will not get anywhere. Personally, I have my doubts about the need for a Virtual School embracing a wide range of subjects. As a teacher (and occasional learner) of foreign languages, I always look first at specialist websites for information and for teaching and learning materials – and there is a VERY wide range of such materials for my subject area on the Web. Language teachers seem to have got themselves very well organised as far as ICT is concerned. There are several professional associations devoted to ICT in language learning, e.g. CALICO, the largest and oldest such association, based in the USA: http://www.calico.org EUROCALL, the largest and oldest such association of European origin, currently based in Ireland: http://www.eurocall-languages.org Other associations are emerging in the Far East. We all work together and are in the process of uniting under WorldCALL: http://worldcall.org Two WorldCALL conferences have already taken place: 1998 (Melbourne, Australia), 2003 (Banff, Canada). A call for bids to host WorldCALL 2008 will be made later this year. Members of the Education Forum do not appear to be all that interested in foreign languages. I have tried to get things moving, but have been very disappointed by the response. I think Mike has a point when he says:

John writes: "Although I did attend one meeting in Sweden where the organizers tried to insist we all had a mixed sauna. Nick Falk and myself, being typical Englishmen, declined the offer." Coward! Show us your credentials, John! I've just got back from a skiing holiday in Austria, where mixed (nude) saunas are the norm. Finland, in my experience, tends to have single-sex saunas, and I recall attending a business meeting in Tampere that culminated in the men going off to a lakeside sauna and finalising the details of a business contract - if you're naked you have nothing to hide! Afterwards we enjoyed a barbecue accompanied by lots of beer. Names can be a problem in Finland, but I'm getting better at identifying male and female names there. The same problem arises in Hungary. I recall a Hungarian colleague called Károly (Charles not Carol) being allocated to a female section of the accommodation where we were staying on a course in Denmark. Hungarians tend to put their first names last, e.g. Horváth Csilla (female unmarried). If she were married to a Mr Horváth she would call herself Horváthne Csilla.

I was interested to read about János's background as an EFL teacher in Hungary. I was Director of the East European Computer Assisted Language Learning project (EECALL) in Hungary from 1991 to 1996. The project was funded under the EC TEMPUS programme and involved setting up the EECALL Centre at Dániel Berzsenyi College, Szombathely, which offered in-service training courses in ICT to teachers of English and German, as well as to students undergoing initial teacher training. Over the period of five years we trained hundreds of Hungarian language teachers in ICT, as well as offering language courses to former teachers of Russian who were required to undergo retraining as teachers of English or German. The culmination of the EECALL project was the 1996 EUROCALL conference, which was hosted by Dániel Berzsenyi College: http://www.eurocall-languages.org/confs/pastconfs.html EUROCALL awards an annual scholarship in memory of the late János Kohn, who was the first Head of the EECALL Centre. The annual scholarship enables a young Hungarian teacher or researcher to participate in a EUROCALL conference by providing €400 towards the cost of attendance: http://www.eurocall-languages.org/research/kohn.html This year's EUROCALL conference will take place in Cracow, Poland: http://www.eurocall-languages.org.pl I have fond memories of my regular visits to Hungary. I even managed to learn a little bit of Hungarian: Egy kicsit beszélek magarul. A magyar nyelv nagyen nehéz, hanem érdekes!

Anders MacGregor-Thunell writes: This is fairly typical of most virtual learning environments: v. my earlier email in which I criticised the idea of starting with a learning platform. Most VLEs get in the way of the dissemination of good learning and training materials. My philosophy with regard to Web-based materials is KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid! I maintain two websites, my business website (which also contains a large collection of free resources) and the ICT4LT site. The structure of both sites is simple – because that’s the only way that I know how to design a website. I have complete freedom to amend and add materials to both sites at any time of day or night. I can create an addition or make an amendment in Dreamweaver and in five minutes it will be uploaded. As for discussion lists and bulletin boards, again, the KISS rule applies. One of the most active discussion lists for teachers of foreign languages is the Linguanet Forum, which is hosted by Mailbase and can be found at: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum It’s easy to join the list, post a message and search the archives. I totally agree with the views expressed in David Richardson’s most recent posting, especially:

John writes: I think that this is true of most of the EC-funded projects in which I have been involved. I can, however, cite one success story, which has resulted in a large body of ICT training materials for language teachers being developed and made available free of charge on the Web: namely, the ICT for Language Teachers project, which was funded by the EC for a period of two years, ending in December 2000: http://www.ict4lt.org We did travel a lot while the project was running - to Venice to Jyväskylä (Finland) and to London - but all our meetings were productive and the team was very hard-working. We were able to pay consultants a decent fee to write materials that fell outside the team's area of expertise, and we were very careful about copyright and acknowledging authorship of the materials. All the authors are acknowledged - which is their right now under EU copyright legislation: so-called "paternity law" - see the ICT4LT page on copyright at: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm I now keep the English-language section of the site updated as a labour of love - which is not dificult to do as we opted for a very simple structure for the site, with no fancy pop-ups or animations. Every page of the site can be printed for ease of reading. Research shows that it's much easier and quicker to read from the printed page than from the screen. See Jakob Nielsen: "Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this human factors research usually say that they feel unpleasant when reading online text." Be Succinct! Writing for the Web, Alertbox for March 15, 1997: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

I think the basic mistake that people are making with regard to setting up virtual schools and virtual universities is that they start at the wrong end, e.g. UKEU started with a learning platform. Virtual schools and virtual universities are essentially distance-teaching organisations, and perhaps they should begin by looking at the most successful distance-teaching organisation in the world, namely the UK Open University. My wife completed an Open University degree in the early 1980s, having failed her 11-plus examination at school and having failed to get a single O-level qualification. After nine years of study at the Open University she ended up with a Second Class Honours Degree that included a 4th-level module on Wittgenstein. Her success was, I believe, due to: - High-quality learning materials. These were mainly in book format, supplemented by materials on audiocassette and by radio and TV broadcasts. The format of the media is less important than the quality. Nowadays it is possible to distribute reading materials and audio/video materials via the Web rather than by snail mail. I would not, however, neglect radio and TV broadcasts. I think it is a great pity that the BBC has decided to cut down, for example, on language learning TV broadcasts in favour of inferior-quality Web materials. The Web cannot replace TV broadcast series such as A Vous la France and Buongiorno Italia. - An excellent tutor support system. My wife could contact two tutors by telephone for each year of her course: one tutor who remained her pastoral care tutor for the whole nine years, and a second tutor who was responsible for the module that she was studying in each year. - Regular assessment: computer marked assignments (multiple-choice tests – but VERY well designed), and tutor marked assignments (essay-format). - Regular face-to-face meetings with tutors and other students at the local technical college. - One-week residential summer schools each year at various UK universities. - A properly conducted examination at the end of each year.

Andy asks: The UK E-University collapsed spectacularly last year, due to high costs and poor recruitment: it managed to attract just 900 students, at a cost of 44,000 pounds each. Perhaps virtual schools and virtual universities are not as attractive as they were anticipated to be. See David Noble's thought-provoking series of articles: Noble D. (1997-2001) "Distance Education on the Web", a series of five articles: http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl See especially No. 3, "The Bloom is off the Rose".

I think Sumir Sharma brings out an important point. In spite of the high use of technology in language teaching in the UK and in Ireland, both our countries remain at the bottom of the language competence league in Europe. In India, however, motivation is the key factor. Most immigrants from the Indian sub-continent to the UK have a respectable level of English when they arrive. Professionals, such as doctors, usaully have a high level of English. And those whose English is a bit shaky learn very quickly. The young lad (a Sikh) who works in my local corner shop arrived here around a year ago. To begin with his English was a bit difficult to understand and he often did not understand me. Now I can have quite "normal" conversations with him.

There's an article here at the BBC website that is relevant to this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/business...allcentre.shtml It highlights the importance of call centre operators being able to speak with an intelligible accent over the phone. Getting pronuncation right - UK English when speaking to people in the UK and North American English when speaking to Americans or Canadians - is considered very important. Most complaints about call centres focus on being understood by the operator and not being able to understand his/her reply. This applies to call centres based in the British Isles too. Certain regional accents in the British Isles come across as "friendly", especially Scottish, Northumbrian, Irish and Welsh. Ireland has done pretty well, training young people to handle calls in French, German, Spanish and Italian - you need a university degree level of language training, topped up by specialist training. To quote from the above article:

I was not really an idealist back in the 1960s and early 1970s. I have always been cynical. I could see a lot wrong both with the Capitalist systems of the West and with the Socialist/Communist systems of the East. I suppose that my view at the time can be summarised by "a plague on both your houses". My view changed radically when I went on a one-month refresher course for teachers of German at Karl-Marx University, Leipzig, in 1976 and experienced at first hand what living in a Communist (or Socialist, as they called it) state really meant: secret police everywhere (I am convinced that I was closely watched), shortages of fruit and vegetables and fresh meat, censorship, and the general drabness of life. I returned from the GDR firmly believing that, although the Capitalist West had got a lot of things wrong, on balance it had got fewer things wrong than the Socialist/Communist East. I a felt lot of sympathy for people who had to live under such repressive regimes but at the same time felt helpless to do anything to change their lives. We were all a bit naive at the time. The information flow East-West and West-East was coloured heavily by propaganda and we were all fooled by our respective governments to a lesser or greater degree. I was delighted when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. I was in Berlin at the time and can never forget the sheer joy that was evident on the faces of East and West Berliners alike. It went a bit sour, of course, and there are many, many problems that still need to be resolved.

Jean, I value your posts, which I read with interest. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum in the UK, we have been far to prone to gaze at our own navels. Contributions from our extended "family" bring in a breath of fresh air. I have many valuable contacts in other European countries and in Australia, Canada and the USA who work in the same area as I do (computers, language learning and teaching. There is a new research centre at Monash University, Melbourne, devoted to New Media in Language Learning. I am a member of its Advisory Board: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/lcl/newmedia_in_langlearn/

Andy asks: I have logged on one again, only to find that the Education Forum looks like the JFK Assassination Forum I have sometimes managed to liven up discussion lists by being deliberately provocative, e.g. my making statements such as: "There's no point in leanring foreign languages, as most business negotiations throughout the workd are done in English, and in the end it's money that counts." But sometimes people just agree with such statements

I have been a member of dozens of educational forums (languages, linguistics and humanities) on various occasions since the early 1990s, when I first discovered listservs (sic). NOT ONE has ever been as active as the JFK section in this forum, and I doubt that I will ever see a section as active as the JFK section in any forum or section relating to the subject areas in which I am interested. I guess it's because we rarely have issues to discuss that can sustain anyone's interest for more than a few days, whereas unsolved or disputed crimes such as the JFK murder go on for years...