Graham Davies

Andy just about sums it up: I would add: It also is becoming increasingly obvious that online learning is not what it is cracked up to be. The waste of public money - my money and your money - on the Curriculum Online initiative is a scandal. I have written to my constituency MP complaining about it.

I don't take offence easily - but I am a good mixer and don't spend all of my time talking to other teachers. I visit my local pub at least three times a week, which is frequented by a wide range of people, from bricklayers and road sweepers to accountants and lawyers. We have very lively discussions, where the level of debate often descends into "Come off it, you're talking a load of b*ll*cks!" After a few exchanges of a similar nature we usually end up buying one another pints. How about inventing the "virtual pint"? It sounds like a great idea

John writes: I see things differently. When free materials began to appear in large quantities on the Web I began to get a bit worried about the future of my business partnership, which specialises in the development and retailing of software for computer assisted language learning (CALL). But as things began to settle down I realised that I was unduly worried. Firstly, the quality of most of the free materials on the Web leaves a lot to be desired. Teachers often imagine that their websites are better than they think they are, and most of the commercial sites offer very little compared to what you could buy at a modest price from your high street bookshop, e.g. a language learning pack consisting of a book plus audiocassette, audio CD or CD-ROM. Secondly, there are many things that are desirable in CALL that cannot (yet) be implemented on the Web or that you would not want to implement even if you could. For example, I have not yet seen a website that presents listen / respond / playback activities – an essential part of language learning – i.e. the kind of activities that have been available since the advent of the AAC tape recorder over 40 years ago and that can easily be implemented on a standard multimedia PC. Watching a foreign language feature film on DVD with closed captions is another language learning activity that is probably best done in a non-Web environment. I prefer to do this sitting in a comfortable armchair with a remote control in my hand rather than two feet away from a computer screen. I have broadband at home, but Web materials delivered via broadband cannot compete with the immediacy and quality of materials that I access via the hard disk and CD-ROM on my computer or via the DVD player and digital TV set in my lounge. I use the Web a lot, but mainly as a reference source. There is still a thriving market for commercial educational materials in a non-Web format. The problem is that the big companies expected to make millions from the sales of CD-ROMs and from licences to access websites. There is relatively little money in this business, but there’s enough for me and my partners to live on for many years to come.

The TES has been less kind to COL See my letter dated 3 January 2003: http://www.tes.co.uk/search/search_display...d=373337&Type=0

It's The Guardian newspaper, isn't it? They wrote to me, asking if I wanted my products to be evaluated at £420 per product - or £350 as an introductory offer. They must be kidding! TEEM, Evaulate and Schoolzone are three of a kind!

I like this site: Michael Quinion's World Wide Words: "Investigating international English from a British viewpoint" - a useful and amusing site that takes an oblique look at the English language: new words, weird words, fun words, slang, etc. http://www.quinion.com/words/

I have a friend who own a small software company that he operates from home. He sent Schoolzone a copy of one of his best-selling packages for evaluation - which he paid for. The evaluation was generally positive, but it was clear that the evaluator was very inexperienced in the subject areas (Modern Foreign Languages and EFL/ESL) targeted in the package. The evaluator actually failed to mention, for example, which subject areas were targeted, failed to mention that the package was a suite of programs which could be bought all at once or singly, failed to mention what the different components of the suite did, etc... If a student of mine had produced such an evaluation it would have received a fail grade.

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.

Andrew's view on COL is close to mine: I agree that I agree that And the 80:20 rule is just plain daft. As a COL-registered suppplier I have just received a warning from COL's "compliance police" at BECTA that I must ensure that all my products comply with the 80:20 rule. Big Brother is watching you! This is what I have written about COL and posted on my personal website: "A government initiative, launched in January 2003, which has the noble aim of providing ring-fenced funding (e-Learning Credits) to schools in England to enable them to buy software and online services to support their teaching. The initiative has been surrounded with an atmosphere of controversy from the outset, resulting in court action against the BBC and accusations of high-level bungling. My personal perception of COL is that it is a technological and bureaucratic sledgehammer that has wasted far too much money on the technical infrastructure and is in the process of creating a cosy clique of suppliers who will dominate the market place and force smaller specialist suppliers into liquidation. The whole initiative has a pre-1989 East European flavour. Having gained control over teachers with the introduction of the National Curriculum, the DfES is now trying to gain control of the educational suppliers. Tom McMullan describes the COL initiative as being a government plan for "backdoor nationalisation of the UK educational content marketplace" (Wired to Learn, Adam Smith Institute). The COL website has been revamped (December 2003) in response to feedback from teachers, making it possible to search for a specific software title or supplier. However, the listing of a product at the COL site is not a guarantee of quality as only random checks are carried out. There is an evaluation process, currently operated by two agencies, Schoolzone (http://www.schoolzone.co.uk) and E-valuate (http://www.learnevaluations.co.uk), but for an exorbitant fee that a small business cannot afford."

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...<

David writes: I agree. Starting with the platform was a stupid idea. Starting with the technology in general is a stupid idea. The Open University, as David says, has been doing a good job in delivering distance learning, but it's largely low-tech. The OU holds off introducing technological solutions until it is sure that its potential user base has access to the technology - it's a political thing and all to do with inclusivity. This is not to say, however, that the OU is ignoring new technological developments. It is doing valuable research in this area, e.g. in the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET). See, for example, Robin Goodfellow's keynote at EUROCALL 2003, where he mentions Lyceum, an environment in use at the OU that creates the possibility for a mixture of modes of interaction between participants, including real time speaking, and collaborative document creation: http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.goodfellow/Euroc03/talk.htm

This confirms my impression too. My business has not been overwhelmed with orders. But a lot of useful software packages are not eligible to be bought with eLCs because the businesses (mainly cottage industries) that produce them are not registered Curriculum Online suppliers. One of the reasons why such businesses do not register is that it is an excessively bureaucratic process, involving the suppliers in filling in a complex 9-page electronic form for each product that they wish to make available for purchase with eLCs and declaring their income from eLC-funded purchases to Curriculum Online each month. Essentially, Curriculum Online is an overpriced white elephant of an initiative. It will probably go down the same tube as UKeU.

The nomination for the award is described at the Curriculum Online website as “a reflection of the unique collaboration between Government, educational software suppliers, technical specialists and teaching professionals that is Curriculum Online.” I like the euphemism "unique collaboration" . As an educational software supplier (and theoretically one of the collaborators), I find the whole initiative technologically top-heavy, excessively bureaucratic, time-consuming and generally symptomatic of the control freak mentality of the current government that we have in power. The Curriculum Online website is labyrinthine. So far I have not met a single teacher who finds it usable or useful. Regarding “control freak mentality”, educational suppliers have just been issued with a warning from Curriculum Online's "compliance police" (BECTA) that some of them have not been obeying the "80:20" rule, namely that all Curriculum Online certified products must: >Be digital products and/or services. DfES requires that a minimum of approximately 80% of a Product’s constituent parts be digital products and/or services, with up to 20% being support materials i.e. non-digital products and/or services that are designed to support the classroom use of the Product. For a delivery-staggered Product, the 80% digital and 20% support criteria may be measured over the expected life of the Product. "Digital" should be interpreted to exclude material which, although delivered digitally, in the reasonable opinion of DfES offers the user no significant additional ICT functionality of relevance to education than the equivalent, non-digital form would offer. However, with Products not paid for using eLCs, "digital" may include products and/or services not offering such significant extra functionality. The 80:20 approach provides flexibility that is beneficial to suppliers and schools. It supports the overarching aim of increasing the quality, quantity and usage of multimedia resources in the classroom, which, of course, has direct benefits to growing the market and increasing business opportunities. One should be clear that this flexibility should, in no circumstances be used to shift the focus of eLC spend away from high quality educational software that is aligned to the curriculum as taught in England. Frankly, some suppliers have strayed beyond flexibility and these actions if left unchecked will undoubtedly bring Curriculum Online and eLCs into disrepute and could attract serious challenges.< I have written back to the compliance police asking how one measures the the 80:20 proportions and, in view of the weight of research evidence concluding that reading from the computer screen is around 25% slower than reading from the printed page and that most people find reading from the computer screen unpleasant, if it is really a good idea to be going down the 80:20 route anyway. I await their reply with interest, but they often don't reply.

I’m not really surprised about the collapse of UKeU. I was involved as a consultant to a project that probably would have been incorporated into UKeU if it had got off the ground, namely a venture known as the Language House, which was initiated by HEFCE in early 2001 and to be linked with another project (for schools) called the Language Village. HEFCE clearly had in mind a full-blown set of online languages courses in a VLE, which they thought was a cheaper alternative to delivering language courses face-to-face . But most of the HE language lecturers on the Language House steering committee were in favour of a more loosely structured set of online resources – and this was my view too. Anyway. the Language House never got off the ground, one of the reasons being that the estimated costs of setting up the online courses in a VLE and maintaining them - as calculated by a external team of consultants - were frightening. Around the time that the UKeU was being discussed I recall reading the following, which I mentioned to a number of key players at the time, but I don't think the message sank in. “In 1997, facing a projected 50 percent increase in the state’s student population over the next decade, Utah governor Mike Leavitt announced the formation of Western Governors University, a cyber-college backed by governors from 19 states that now offers online courses from 40 schools. “We are turning around the old notion that to be educated one had to go somewhere,” Leavitt declared in a speech before the U.S. Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. “We are going to bring the knowledge and information to the learner,” providing students with a high-quality education “while holding costs in check.” By January 2000, Western Governors University had enrolled a mere 200 degree-seeking students.” Press E. & Washburn J. (2001) “Digital Diplomas”, Mother Jones Magazine, January/February 2001: http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/JF01/diplomas.html

I was very conscientious about doing homework at school, and I left school with a stack of good examination qualifications. When I went to university I quickly realised that the lecture was a pretty inefficient way of imparting knowledge. I therefore attended the minimum number of lectures that I could get away with, spending my time more fruitfully reading recommended works in the university's excellent library. I got a good honours degree. When I developed an interest in ICT I attended a one-week course on Computing in the Humanities (back in 1979). This was enough to get me going. Since then, everything that I have learned about ICT is the result of self-tuition.

Jay writes As I said, there were always badly behaved kids, but behaviour standards are significantly worse now. I used to go out for a drink in the pubs our town centre at weekends when I first moved to the area in the 1970s. I would not dream of going there now. Every pub in the town centre has at least two bouncers on duty at the door, there are CCTV cameras all over the place, and mounted police appear in the streets at closing time. We are talking about the Royal County of Berkshire, by the way...

Bad behaviour in schools is not a new phenomenon. I was confronted with very bad behaviour in the school in South East London where I did my teaching practice in 1965. I was very green at the time, the product of a posh grammar school in Kent, and I had never before experienced such disruption in a school. I was not good at coping with bad behaviour, and neither were most of the trainee teachers who were my contemporaries. Our tutors were poor at offering advice. They tended to come out with unhelpful statements such as, "If you make your lessons interesting then you won't have any discipline problems." Rubbish! Some kids set out to disrupt every class, regardless of how interesting it might be. I got better at coping with bad behaviour, mainly thanks to the teacher responsible for looking after me at my practice school. I didn't follow his advice to the letter, however, and I certainly did not copy all the ways in which he handled bad behaviour. He would lash out quite viciously at disruptive kids, hitting them with heavy textbooks and sometimes holding them upside down by the legs for several minutes so that the blood rushed to their head. Very few kids attempted to misbehave in his classes. The most useful tip that I learned from him was to make eye contact with a single child that could be seen to be misbehaving - i.e. rather than shouting oneself hoarse at the whole class - note down the child's name and make sure that the child received some kind of punishment. Sometimes this had to be repeated three or four times with different troublemakers. In really bad cases the child would be sent straight to the headmaster, i.e. removed from the class where the disruption was taking place. It worked - more or less - but I don't know if it would work now. The level of rudeness and lack of respect among young people is noticeably worse than it was in the 1960s. I am happy to be retired from full-time teaching.

Dear Colleagues At this time of each month I carry out an analysis of visits to the ICT4LT website. The results of the analysis are published on the homepage with an invitation to comment on them. This month I thought I would share the most interesting results (for May 2004) with you: - The ICT4LT website received an average of 722 visits per day in 2004. - Google (as usual) was the most popular search engine used to locate information at the site. - CILT (Centre for Information on Language Teaching) was the only identifiable publicly funded UK website that referred visitors to the site. - The most visited Module was No. 2.4, Using concordance programs in the MFL classroom. - The second most visited module was No. 2.2, Introduction to multimedia CALL. - The least visited module was No. 2.1, CALL methodology: integrating CALL into study programmes. - The second least visited module was No. 3.3, Creating a World Wide Web site. - The two most popular document downloads were: (i) a CALL software and website evaluation form (based on a form originally produced by CILT), (ii) A PowerPoint presentation on French pronouns. - The ICT website was visited by people from 57 different countries in May, headed by the UK, Italy, Poland, Netherlands and Finland. Comments, reactions welcomed!

Derek writes: This is the problem with copyright law. Back in the 1980s I was the victim of a blatant breach of copyright. I had written a program for the BBC microcomputer and subsequently adapted it for the PC. I was approached by an LEA microcomputer centre that wanted a version of the program for the Archimedes – because the LEA had decided to support only Archimedes computers. I contacted the centre to say that I did not have the resources to reversion the program for the Archimedes but I would be prepared to negotiate with anyone who could take on the job, e.g. I would be happy to receive a royalty from sales of an Archimedes version produced by a third party. This appeared to be the end of the story. I heard nothing further from the microcomputer centre. Some months later, a friend sent me an Archimedes version of my program, complete with a teacher’s handbook and professionally produced packaging. The producer was the LEA microcomputer centre! However, the name of my program had been changed, and the names of the seven different sections within the program had also been renamed – although they appeared in exactly the same order as the original seven sections. One additional section had been added. The handbook consisted of adaptations of the text that I had written for the original handbook. I immediately contacted several different people at the LEA, who closed ranks, defending the actions of the microcomputer centre. They argued, for example, that I could not copyright an idea and that the microcomputer centre had merely adapted an idea that was well established in the language teaching world. I then contacted FAST, who were completely unhelpful. They said they had no resources to check the code of an Archimedes program for breach of copyright and that I would in any case have to employ a lawyer if I wanted to take legal action against the LEA. A friend who owned a computer business offered to have a close look at the Archimedes version of the program and concluded that I had a watertight case against the LEA. The program was indeed a blatant rip-off – one of my fudges in the original BBC micro code was still there! I then contacted our family lawyer. He pointed out that, even if I had a watertight case, legal action could be expensive and there was always a risk that I would lose the case, faced by the LEA’s legal heavyweights. So I asked him what I could do. His advice was that I should contact other LEAs, government agencies (e.g. BECTA and CILT), professional associations, friends and software houses, informing them about the LEA’s behaviour and asking them to spread the word. I took his advice. Within a matter of months the LEA’s name was mud and they were ostracised from presenting the program at national conferences and workshops. They found it very difficult finding anyone willing to publicise their version of my program. The rip-off version of my program quickly disappeared into oblivion. The latest upgrade of my own version is still doing very well...

Derek writes: That's an understatement! There's a difference, however, between a major corporation such as Disney and free-lance authors (often former teachers) trying to make an honest living from writing coursebooks or developing websites.

I am proud to say that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, "Ich war dabei!" ("I was there!") I was on university business at the time, visiting my students in West Berlin and on the way to a conference on Computer Assisted Language Learning in Rostock, East Germany. When I returned to England I began to write my conference report, but the amazing events that I had witnessed got the upper hand and the conference report turned into an eye-witness account of the fall of the Wall. Read all about it at: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/berlin.htm I had been to East Germany twice before, once on a study visit to Berlin in 1963, which was not long after the Wall had been constructed. I recall seeing wreaths and flowers hanging on the Wall, commemorating people who had been killed while trying to escape. My second visit was in 1976, when I attended a 4-week refresher course for teachers of German at Karl Marx University, Leipzig. I stayed with a family in Leipzig – interesting experience. Life in East Germany was dire. There were always shortages, and queues could be seen outside butchers and grocers every day. A highlight of the period I spent in Leipzig was a trip to Colditz Castle, a former prison for allied officers in WWII – but, interestingly, this was not mentioned in any East German guidebook.

Derek wrote: There's a thriving new profession emerging, namely the "copyright bounty hunter". MediaForce is a typical example of of copyright bounty hunting business. Breaches of copyright on the Web are easy to track down. I've found dozens of such breaches at schools' websites and LEA resources sites - quite by chance, not by actively seeking them. Fortunately, however, I'm a nice guy and I write to the webmasters advising them to remove copyright material before they get caught by the copyright owner. But some people are not in it for the money. I found this at a website in the US: "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 I can cite a real case involving my own business, whereby a copyright bounty hunter (probably a parent) reported my local school to the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) for distributing software produced by my business to pupils at the school. What the bounty hunter did not know, however, was that my business had an agreement with the school, subject to a licence fee, whereby the school was allowed to distribute the software to pupils. I had to write to FAST explaining the situation. When the money ceases to roll in from the software that I write I know that I can always find an alternative source of income...

Heh! Do you mean you actually earn MONEY from your educational website? Sounds like a novel idea! The ICT4LT website that I maintain gets 600-700 hits per day, but it doesn't make any money. The main problem with ICT resources on the Web is that everyone expects them to be free. I'm thinking of giving up website maintenance and becoming a plumber instead - have you ever heard of a plumber doing anything for free?

I was once invited to a salmon barbecue on Vancouver Island, organised by members of the Coast Salish First Nation. The Chief said a prayer before the barbecue, thanking the Great Spirit for the food and thanking the salmon for giving up their lives so that we could live - nice thought. I just got back from Alaska - a 7-day cruise through the Inside Passage. We were joined by members of the Tlingit First Nation at the Hubbard Glacier, who talked about their culture and language.

Re: David's latest comments: "Would you like any tea?" is more likely to be used by a waiter in a restaurant. Cf. "Any tea or coffee, sir?" "Would you like some tea?" is likely to be used if someone is inviting someone to have tea (drink or food) in their home. Cf. "Would you like some more tea?" The students have therefore been taught a rule which does not work. This is where a KWIC concordancer and a a decent corpus would prove that "some" is more common than "any" in this context. Type both sentences into Google and see what you get! (I often use Google as a concordancer.) I remember Tim Johns (of Data-Driven Learning fame) often used to highlight the absurdities of grammar and usage reference works, focusing particularly on the usage of "some" and "any". I'm out of email contact for the next two weeks, as from 1pm today.