Graham Davies

I agree with Derek that people should try to do "the right thing" - although "the right thing" is an incredibly woolly term. However, I think I know what he means. The silly examples that I have cited are cases of people getting it wrong, however. The more examples of this sort that abound, the more the term "political correctness" becomes a negative rather than a positive term. There's an entry "worsened words" in Fowler's Modern English Usage, which discusses the way in which some words start out having a positive meaning and end up having a negative meaning, e.g. "collaborator", which originally meant someone you worked with. When this happens you have to find/invent another word/term that conveys the original positive meaning. It's just one of those quirky things about natural language. Americans avoid the use of "toilet" or "lavatory", preferring euphemisms such as "washroom", "restroom", "bathroom" or even "comfort station". Interestingly, "lavatory" was once a euphemism too, deriving from the French "laver", which means "to wash" and not to do the main things that one does in a lavatory - as well as washing one's hands, of course! I suspect that the term "political correctness" is already on a downward path and that it will have to replaced by another term that has connotations of "doing the right thing". I agree that one should also try to avoid being abusive to others, but it depends on the context. I am quite used to being called "a dickhead" in my local pub when I put forward an argument that others disagree with. I don't take offence, because I know it is not meant seriously and that whoever calls me "a dickhead" will probably buy me a pint sooner or later. I have on my bookshelf a copy of the 1992 edition of "The official politically correct dictionary" (ISBN 0 586 21726 6). It includes military terms such as "soft targets" (i.e. human beings) and medical terms such as "negative patient care outcome" (i.e. death). All the terms in the dictionary have been gleaned from authentic (mainly American) sources. And we all know what "friendly fire" means - yes, this is also documented in the 1992 edition of the dictionary.

Thanks! I may take you up on this kind offer when things settle down a bit.

Derek cites the following statement by Godfrey Bloom: That's terrible! My daughter (and business partner) has just had a baby (Rebecca -an absolute darling) and is on maternity leave from our small family partnership. It means that my wife and I are having to work harder for the time being, but the joys of being grandparents more than compensates for the extra work. Are businessmen not interested in the next generation? Who will run the businesses in the future if women don't bear children and are given adequate time off and help to bear them and look after them in the crucial early months of their lives? Babies are extremely demanding. Working a 12-hour shift is easy in comparison! However, there are many examples of political correctness gone mad and this gives it a bad name. I recall a feminist colleague saying in all seriousness that the word "manager" should be dropped because it includes the word "man". This simply showed up her ignorance about natural language: "manager" derives from French "ménager". The BBC has a page entitled "Has political correctness gone mad?", centering on the use of the expression "nitty gritty" by a politician addressing the Police Federation, which - it was claimed - should not be used as it dates from the slavery era and is said to have its origins in the 18th Century slave traders' phrase for the debris left at the bottom of a slave ship after a voyage: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/1988952.stm But this origin is suspect anyway, and if it were the origin would the politician have known about it? According to reliable sources, the expression appears to be Black American in origin and only appears to have been in common use from the early 20th century onwards: http://www.hippy.freeserve.co.uk/nitty.htm And how many people know that they are using rhyming slang when they refer to someone as "a right berk"? The full expression is "Berkeley Hunt" (Gloucestershire) - not "Berkshire Hunt", as is sometimes claimed ("Berkshire" is pronounced "Barkshire" - I live there!) It's a load of old cobblers, I say - and that's rhyming slang too!

Andrew writes: Thanks, Andrew. I've had a quick look, and it seems to be just the sort of thing that I need. A friend suggested something like this some months ago, saying how "easy" it was to implement, but when I tried to do it I just didn't understand what was going on. I'm not a "techie", I'm afraid - but I may be able to find someone who can help now that you've shown me what can be done.

Andrew writes: It certainly helps to have a contact form on your website, but buried beneath that contact form in the HTML code is your email address. A colleague of mine pointed out in another forum to which I subscribe that the robot software used by spammers can certainly detect email addresses that are hidden in this way - and I have personal evidence to substantiate this. It has been suggested that removing the <mailto> link at the front of your email address helps, but I experimented with this by posting a new email address at my business website without the <mailto> link. The first spammer found it within 24 hours! I then killed the address. However, I am not talking about receiving spam, which is bad enough. I am talking about spammers spoofing my address so that the spam that they send out gets bounced back to me and identifies me as the spammer. This is a much more serious problem.

Derek writes: I'm not so sure. I was optimistic when the new anti-spam legislation was introduced in the EU and in the USA in late 2003 and early 2004. Sceptics prophesised, however, that it left businesses vulnerable. The sceptics have been proved right, at least as far as my business is concerned. At the turn of 2003/2004 spam accounted for 70% of incoming mail to our business. This week it reached a whopping 86%. We've lost the battle! Actually, because we deal mainly with schools and colleges, we don't depend on email. 99% of schools and colleges place orders with us by fax or snail mail. This is because most LEAs insist on an official order form being completed and signed by the relevant budget holder - which makes sense. Derek writes: You're so right! I refuse to use Outlook (a.k.a Look Out!). I use Eudora for business emails and CompuServe Classic for my private emails.

David writes: I'm beginning to think that she has a point. Now that it's the summer holiday season I am getting increasingly irritated by out-of-office replies to emails, including those that are sent to discussion lists. I just bounce and zap them all, blacklisting the sender for 30 days. People who send out-of-office replies don't seem to have their brains in gear. Firstly, if you send an out-of-office reply, especially if you include dates, you are advertising the fact that you may be on holiday and that your house may be empty. There has been an increase in the number of incidents where organised criminals fire off hundreds of emails to people on email lists that they have bought and wait for the out-of-office replies to come in. If the reply is from an institutional address, e.g. port.ac.uk, you can assume that the person probably lives somewhere near the university at which he/she works, i.e. Portsmouth, Hampshire, and then all you have to do is find their name in the BT online phone book and then you have their address! Far-fetched? No, trawl the Web and you'll warnings everywhere, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2540307.stm http://www.nthsomnw.org.uk/article.php3?id_article=113 Secondly. why should you put yourself under stress? People who receive out-of-office replies from you will then badger you when you return home. In the good old days of snail mail the mail just piled up while you were away and then you dealt with it according to its urgency when you came back. No, keep 'em guessing and let the buggers wait!

My business has had to take the unprecedented step of temporarily blocking all emails addressed to our business email address, as from 20 July 2004. This is because our publicised email address appears to have been hijacked by purveyors of spam. We have suffered from the effects of viruses and spam for several years but, thanks to the efficient email filtering system that we use, these intrusions have been no more than an annoyance. On 15 July, however, we suddenly began to receive hundreds of bounced "undeliverable mail" messages per day. It is not entirely clear why this has happened, but our ISP's explanation is that our business email address is being spoofed as the sender's address by a number of different spam companies and now we are the recipients of their bounced emails. We do not anticipate a loss in sales as a result of this measure as virtually all our genuine customers – mainly schools and colleges - contact us by telephone, fax or letter. Is this the predicted "death of email"? http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1599324,00.asp

John writes: The best public-funded agency as far as modern foreign languages is concerned is CILT, the National Centre for Languages. They have a good and frequently accessed website, they are aware of ICT and how it can by applied in MFL teaching and, above all, they understand pedagogy. They were one of the few NOF training providers that received mainly positive feedback both from OFSTED and from their trainees. They have a wide range of publications, including a dedicated series on ICT and MFL: http://www.cilt.org.uk The professional association ALL (Association for Language Learning) is also very good: http://www.all-languages.org.uk They produce an informative newsletter and high-quality journals. Their annual conference is well attended. They are a strong lobby group. If some of BECTA's money were directed to CILT and to ALL I am sure it would be spent more wisely.

I began my career as a teacher of German and French in secondary education in the 1960s, moving into higher education in 1971. I have been involved in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) since 1976. In 1982 I wrote one of the first introductory books on computers in language learning and teaching, which was followed by numerous other printed and software publications right up to the present day. My work in CALL was recognised in 1989 by the Academic Board of Ealing College of Higher Education (later to become part of Thames Valley University) when I was conferred with the title of Professor of CALL – the first chair in this subject area in the UK. I retired from full-time university teaching in 1993 but I continue to work as a free-lance consultant. I was the Founder President of EUROCALL, holding the post from 1993 to 2000. I am a partner in Camsoft, a CALL software development and consultancy business, which was founded in 1982. I have lectured and run ICT training courses for language teachers in 22 different countries and I sit on a number of national and international advisory boards and committees. I have been actively involved in WorldCALL since 1998 and I currently head a working party that is in the process of setting up WorldCALL as an official organisation that aims to assist countries that are currently underserved in the area of ICT and the teaching and learning of modern foreign languages. I am fluent in German, I speak tolerable French, and I can survive in Italian, Russian and Hungarian: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/cvgd.htm

David Wilson is right in pointing out that BECTA has a good reputation in the area of Special Educational Needs. The people working in this area seem to be more clued up. I regularly search the BECTA site for information relating to MFL, but what I find appears to be becoming increasing out of touch. Three examples illustrating what I mean: 1. Some time ago I looked for information on automatic speech recognition (ASR). The only reference I found was in the context of SEN. ASR has featured in MFL for many years, dating back to the early TriplePlay software produced by Syracuse, and it features in more recently produced packages such as Talk to Me and Tell Me More by Auralog. 2. I also looked for examples of the uses of text manipulation software. I found references in the SEN sections but not in MFL. 3. BECTA’s “compliance police” (part of the Curriculum Online initiative) hauled my business over the coals for tagging a text manipulation package as suitable for SEN children. I pointed out that text manipulation does indeed play an important role in SEN and that their own website recommended it! One hand does not seem to know what the other is doing. All three of the above examples date back more than a year. Maybe things have changed – but I doubt it. If BECTA would only look at the ICT4LT site they could be much better informed.

I have always found a "can do" list helpful when teaching a group of people how to use a new ICT application or to acquire almost any kind of new skill. It serves three basic purposes: Firstly, it helps the teacher identify what the group already knows; secondly, it helps the individual members of the group identify what they can already do; thirdly it helps both the teacher and the individual members of the group monitor their progress. In MFL we make a good deal of use of "can do" statements, e.g. such statements form the backbone of the six levels of proficiency of the Common European Framework for Languages and they are being incorporated into the Languages Ladder at the DfES site: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/DSP_languagesladder.cfm I was involved in NOF training - as an ICT in MFL specialist - and I became very frustrated by the different levels of knowledge and skills of my trainees. Some did not even have basic keyboard skills while others were pretty good at using Word and a browser. This made it very difficult to get on with the job of delivering MFL-specific ICT training. I therefore began to draw up several different "can do" lists relating both to generic packages and to MFL-specific packages in order to make my job easier. You can download them as a Word doc from the ICT4LT website at: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/ICT_Can_Do_Lists.doc Some of the "can do" statements are MFL-specific, such as knowing how to enter characters with diacritics in Word, but you may find the lists generally useful. Feel free to make use of them. Feedback welcomed.

It’s the holiday season again! How can I tell? My mailbox is constantly being bombarded by: 1. Out-of-office replies to messages. These often include dates – which means that if I were a dishonest individual I could look up the sender’s name in the online BT phonebook, having worked out roughly where they might live from the email address of their institution, and then send someone round to burgle their house while they are away. Far-fetched? No, it’s quite common these days. In fact, there is an increasing number of documented cases of such occurrences. 2. Automatic “returned mail” or “rejected mail” replies to emails containing virus attachments that I have supposedly transmitted. This is because many educational establishments have not caught up with the fact that modern viruses conceal the real sender’s email address and spoof a sender’s address – which is usually lifted from the address book of the person whose computer is infected with the virus. There is therefore no point in replying to an email address from which a virus appears to have been sent. It’s high time that educational establishments stopped using these stupid automatic reply programs. It always gets worse during the holiday period, as the ICT managers are often not around to exercise manual control over such programs. I’ve received around 400 “returned mail” and “rejected mail” messages in the last four days – so I’ve now set my filtering system to delete them automatically. 3. Viruses emanating from laptops that teachers have taken home from their educational institutions – which has already been mentioned elsewhere in this forum. The laptops are often poorly equipped with anti-virus software and firewalls – or maybe they have such software but it is not set up properly to retrieve updates from the Web automatically. I can’t pinpoint individual culprits, but I can tell from the nature of the spoofed addresses that the infected computer probably belongs to a school or university.

The headteacher of the first school in which I taught insisted that all teachers wore academic dress on two occasions in the year: Prize Day and the annual Christmas service at the local church. I realised that hiring this gear twice a year would be expensive in the long term, so I bought it. I then tried to claim what I spent on my gown and hood to be offset against income tax on the grounds that such gear could be considered "working attire", but the local Inland Revenue office was not sympathetic and pointed out that my gown and hood were not exclusively "working attire". I then wrote them a letter arguing that my neighbour, a lorry driver, was able to claim for the boiler suit that he wore during working hours and that he was able to wear the same suit to protect his clothes when painting his garden shed, so his boiler suit was not exclusively "working attire" either, and I still had not found a use for my gown and hood outside school - such gear was inappropriate for wearing while painting my garden shed, for example. I can't remember how the Inland Revenue office replied - I don't think they bothered to reply, actually. I am not particularly against the idea of people dressing up for special occasions. My elder daughter splashed out on a beautiful wedding dress and looked gorgeous on her wedding day. I was so proud of her! Her mum and I didn't look bad either

Maggie writes: Maybe it's not so daft as it seems. I live in Berkshire, which is where the Mars factory is located, on the outskirts of Slough. I understand that Mars is regarded as very progressive in its management style. This may not be 100% true, as it is only what I have heard in local pub chat: Managers and factory floor workers all wear the same boiler suit while at work, so that there is no obvious distinction between "the suits" and the rest. There is no such thing as the "executive toilet" and everyone eats in the same canteen. However, I do know for a fact that Mars is very paternalistic towards its employees. I have a friend, a former factory floor worker at Mars, who was helped to overcome his alcohol addiction by a concerned management that understood his problem. He hasn't drunk alcohol for years and now draws a good pension from Mars.

John writes: Yes, one wonders whether money spent on BECTA is money well spent. Few MFL teachers use the BECTA site; they tend to look at the subject specialist sites first, e.g. CILT, the National Centre for Languages: http://www.cilt.org.uk John writes: A month is far too short. And I'm sure that BECTA will turn you down!

John writes: My own specialism is ICT and Modern Foreign Languages – and has been since 1976: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/cvgd.htm I can draw on the advice and experience of many teachers who are active in this area in all sectors of education. Many such teachers are members of EUROCALL, the longest-established European professional association dedicated to ICT and Modern Foreign Languages: http://www.eurocall-languages.org John writes: You can count me in. John, I imagine you know about the BECTA “Ask an expert” section at their ICT Advice site: http://www.ictadvice.org.uk So far it hasn’t covered Modern Foreign Languages, which is an area that looks a bit thin and outdated at the BECTA site in general. Moreover BECTA seems to be unaware of the Web’s largest collection of ICT training materials for language teachers, namely the ICT4LT site at http://www.ict4lt.org, and does not seem to have heard of EUROCALL either – possibly a symptom of the not-invented-here syndrome? ICT4LT is a member of the Association of Teachers’ Websites: http://www.byteachers.org.uk I am currently working with two colleagues on a guidance document regarding the use of digitised resources in digital language labs and multimedia language labs. It will be published on the Web in the autumn.

A shame, indeed! Unfortunately, this is a growing trend. I get around a lot of schools in the UK as a free-lance trainer. In many schools Internet access is so restricted and filtered - even for staff use - that most of its facilities cannot be used. My local school has a language centre that has no Internet access for students. The Head of Modern Languages regards the Web as too dangerous/distracting and only uses software installed locally, over which he has tight control. He does, however, encourage the kids to access the Web at home - but then he's not responsible if they wreck their own computers. I run a small private business. A few years ago we regarded email as a blessing. We are now so overwhelmed with spam and viruses - 70% of incoming mail - that I am no longer so convinced of its virtues. We are, of course, well-protected against invasions, but the odd virus might slip through, and spam is like the Hydra: cut off one head and...

I have two daughters, who are now well into adulthood, successful in their careers and now starting their own families. They have certainly brought me a great deal of happiness and are continuing to do so. But I recall a few years of tension, frustration, frayed tempers and anxiety (I'm talking about myself and my wife, not my daughters!) when they were around 13-16 years of age - it's usually a bit later with boys, I think. But by the age of 18 they had turned into pleasant, mature people.

David’s latest contribution to this discussion reminds me of a personal experience. In 1982 I was invited by The British Council to give a paper at the first major South African conference on computers in education at the University of Stellenbosch. At the time I had developed a few programs for modern foreign languages on a Commodore Pet microcomputer, which I had been using with my students at a college in London. When I arrived at the conference venue I immediately noticed that representatives of the Control Data company were there in force, promoting the mainframe-based PLATO computer assisted learning system. Academics from the USA associated with PLATO had the lion’s share of the keynote papers. I was one of the few presenters working with microcomputers. Control Data had pulled out all the stops. The conference was clearly a hard sell for PLATO. The reason behind this was that the then (pro-apartheid) South African government had perceived a mainframe-based learning system as a means of improving education and had installed PLATO on an experimental basis in a number of “black” and “coloured” universities. It was a way (they thought) of overcoming acute shortages of teachers, and they favoured mainframe systems because they offered more control over educational content. At that time British universities and schools were moving in the opposite direction, putting more effort into developing programs for microcomputers - a development that The British Council was helping to promote worldwide. A couple of years later a teacher trainer from a black township in South Africa came to work with me at my college in London, having won a British Council scholarship. He had been using PLATO. He hated it. One student, he told me, came into his training college to work on PLATO, only to be told by the system, after working on it for about 20 minutes, that she was being logged out as she had not reached a satisfactory grade and needed to put in more work on the subject – and she had made a one-hour bus journey in order to get to the college! I taught the teacher trainer all I knew about using microcomputers and one year later went to visit him in his college in South Africa. He had set up a microcomputer with a projector (in 1985!) and was using it for whole-class teaching. He showed me a couple of videos of himself working with students of English – great stuff, with the computer being used mainly as a stimulus for oral work. The PLATO system had been removed.

David writes: Congratulations! I became a grandfather just three weeks ago - same joy but no 3am wake-up calls: that's the parents' job!

One of the messages that I hammer home in my ICT training courses is that teachers using computers at home must ensure that they are adequately protected with antivirus software, a firewall, adware/spyware removers, etc. Korea as a whole is constantly trying to send me spam and hack into my system.

Derek writes: Do a search with Google for the phrase "death by PowerPoint". I found 2420 occurrences! In my 25-year teaching career I have also had near-death experiences with overhead projector slides and film strips. The main problem in the UK, as I see it, is that the government regards ICT as the panacea. They've wasted money on ICT. We have the National Grid for Learning, BECTA, the e-Learning Strategy Unit, Curriculum Online... ...and what have they achieved? There's nothing special about ICT. It is just as easy to bore the pants off someone with ICT-based materials as it is with chalk and talk. ICT in itself is not exciting - v. the spectacular crash of the UK E-University (UKEU) last month: it simply failed to recruit. ICT has a role to play, but ICT-based materials have to interest, stimulate and provoke in the same way as all other types of educational materials. But ICT continues to encroach upon education, while we see schools cutting muscilessons, sports activities and offering modern foreign languages only up until age 14. We've seen it all before, i.e. technology as the panacea. Oppenheimer sums it up: In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that 'the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and [...] in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.' Twenty-three years later, in 1945, William Levenson, the director of the Cleveland public schools' radio station, claimed that 'the time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard.' Forty years after that the noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, referring to the first days of his 'teaching machines,' in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote, 'I was soon saying that, with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom.' (Oppenheimer 1997:45) The cycle began with big promises backed by the technology developers' research. In the classroom, however, teachers never really embraced the new tools, and no significant academic improvement occurred. (Oppenheimer 1997:45) Oppenheimer T. (1997) "The Computer Delusion", The Atlantic Monthly 280, 1 (July 1997): 45-62: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jul/computer.htm

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 Web as a whole has a habit of slowing down or locking up on certain days. I am never sure whether it's my system, my ISP or some external force. But I think I can trace a couple of "slow days" to the release of new viruses over the last few months. New variants of the Lovgate virus appeared in early July, and SomeFool (aka Netksy) is bombarding my mailbox 20-40 times per day.