Graham Davies

In five years? No chance! I have been involved in the DIALANG project, which has resulted in the development of online diagnostic tests for language learners, geared to the Common European Framework for Languages: http://www.dialang.org The project has eaten up a lot of European taxpayers' money and the tests are not at all bad. However, only the three skills of reading, writing and listening are tested online. Testing speaking is fraught with problems. If the QCA are willing to learn from the DIALANG team they may stand a better chance of implementing their plans. Skills-based subjects, such as Languages, Art and Music are notoriously difficult to assess online. See the ICT4LT Module 4.1, which deals with computer aided assessment of language skills and its limitations: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod4-1.htm

The high cost of housing in the UK reduces one's disposable income considerably. Most peope buy rather than rent. Private landlords charge outrageous prices in big cities, and council housing (which is generally affordable) is difficult to get. A modest 3-bedroom house with a small garden in the area where I live costs around 250,000 to 300,000 pounds. A "starter" house or flat costs around 150,000 pounds. A mortgage of 800-1000 pounds per month is not unusual here. Renting a small house would cost about the same. My yardstick is the cost of a pint of beer: around 2.30 pounds in my local pub.

I took early retirement (as a university professor in the UK) in 1993 at the age of 51, when I was earning an annual salary of around 32,000 pounds a year. I continued working for the university as a part-time consultant (they found they they could not entirely do without me) up until 2001 when my contract with the university finally ended. Interestingly, the pension that I received in combination with the part-time consultancy fees resulted in a higher net income: net, not gross, because I was able to register as a self-employed consultant and therefore able to offset expenses such as running a car, maintaining a home office, purchase of a computer, etc against income tax. I began by doing 100 days consultancy work per year for the university, gradually reducing this figure to 40 days. Consequently, I spent far less time travelling to and from work. In fact, I was able to work mainly from home. I now run a small business in partnership with my wife and daughter. Contrary to popular belief, most people in small business partnerships don't earn as much as the average teacher, but a small business partnership offers a better life: slightly precarious at times, but blissfully free of megalomaniac senior managers peering over your shoulder and government bodies telling you what you should do. Retirement is generally better: no mortage (paid off with part of the tax-free lump sum that I received on retirement), an annual tax-free fuel allowance of 200 pounds for heating my home in the winter, free health prescriptions, cheaper railway tickets, reduced green fees at local golf clubs, reduced fees for my ski pass in Austria...

Adrian is quite right about finding a good reason for creating a website. There are an awful lot of completely pointless websites around. I state the following reasons on my Web page entitled "The Internet: write your own Web pages": http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/webcreat.htm - To advertise yourself or your institution. - To provide information and resources for staff. - To provide learning materials for students. Teachers who create websites don't realise that they require constant maintenance. I have found dozens of sites that contain lists of (mainly unannotated) links to resources. I maintain the ICT4LT website at http://www.ict4lt.org Around 30-50 of the 1000-plus links listed at the site disappear, go down temporarily or move each month. I use Xenu Link Sleuth to check the links, but this only tells me if a link is alive or dead; it doesn't tell me what lurks beneath each link, so a regular manual check is also necessary. Xenu Link Sleuth can be found at: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html I have found many sites maintained by teachers who are completely unaware of copyright. I have sent several warnings to schools that have clearly been in breach of copyright; it's better that I warn them before they get caught by the copyright owners. See the guidelines that I have drawn up: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm One also has to watch out for cybersquatters who grab existing domain names when their owners forget to renew them and turn them into something sinister. See: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/DodgyLinks.htm

That's true from my experience. Segregation in housing tends to be more marked in working-class areas, however. As for sport, I mentioned rugby, which cuts across the divide, but you find, for example, that Catholics tend to favour the Gaelic games such as Gaelic football and hurling. Belfast, like Glasgow, has two soccer teams, Linfield Rangers (Protestant) and Celtic (Catholic), and these are divided along religious lines. (Don't forget that Belfast and Glasgow are very similar in many respects regarding the segregation of Protestants and Catholics.) The press is certainly divided - you get a different view of things according to which paper you read. Education, as I said, is one of the roots of the problem, owing to the fact that schools are largely sectarian. So the children get a different view of religion, history and politics according to which schools they attend. There are only two universities in Northern Ireland: Queen's Belfast and Ulster - which are both mixed. There is a good deal of collaboration between universities in the UK and in Ireland as a whole (North and South). I have worked, for example, as an adviser to the University of Limerick on several occasions. Our higher educational systems are very similar. Last year's EUROCALL conference took place at the University of Limerick, and Limerick is now the headquarters of EUROCALL: http://www.eurocall-languages.org I don't know of such a forum, but I'll see if I can find one. The Peace and Reconciliation Group's website may be helpful: http://www.peaceprg.co.uk Unfortunately, dwelling on the past and opening old wounds have been features of Northern Irish life for a very long time. You only have to look at the slogans painted on the walls in working-class areas: "Remember 1690" (Protestant) and "Remember 1916" (Catholic). People have long memories!

The annual conference of EUROCALL, the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, will take place at the University of Vienna, Austria, 1st-4th September 2004. I was in Vienna in March checking out the facilities. This promises to be an excellent conference, attracting 300+ people from all over the world. Early bird registration (at reduced rates) finishes on 31 May. Hurry! The theme of this year's conference is: TELL and CALL in the Third Millennium: Pedagogical Approaches in a Growing EU-Community See: http://www.eurocall-languages.org and http://www.e-lisa.at/eurocall/

For the use of interactive whiteboards in language teaching see Section 4 on whole-class teaching in Module 1.4 at the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org See also Section 7 in Module 1.3 on using PowerPoint in whole-class teaching. There are two commercial products designed to be used in whole-class teacching: Games Box: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/gamesbox.htm TaskMagic: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/taskm.htm

For statistics relating to Northern Ireland, see the NISRA website: http://www.nisra.gov.uk There is no question that Catholics were prevented from working in certain industries, e.g. ship building, in the bad old days, and the old electoral system (based on property ownership) operated in favour of Protestants - which led to the (legitimate) protests in the 1960s, finally escalating into the violence of 1969. There are still differences in evidence, but rather than dwelling on the gap between the communities it makes more sense to look at the enormous progress that has been made in reconciling their differences in recent years. Furthermore, relations between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland have also improved considerably. The border between the 26 counties and the 6 counties is no longer as obvious as it used to be and many of the unsightly army checkpoints and watchtowers have been removed. In fact, I have driven across the border many times without being aware of it. Ulster, by the way, is not synonymous with Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland consists of 6 counties of the province of Ulster: Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry (Derry), Tyrone. The remaining 3 counties of the province of Ulster are in the Republic of Ireland: Cavan, Donegal, Monaghan. Interesting Fact No. 1: St Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland, is closely associated with Roman Catholicism, but he is also the Patron Saint of the Church of Ireland, which is Protestant. St Patrick's grave - which he shares with St Colomb and St Bridget - is located in the cemetery of the Protestant Church of Ireland Cathedral, Downpatrick, County Down, Northern Ireland. I've been there - beautiful place! Interesting Fact No. 2: There are separate national football teams for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland but only one rugby team representing the whole of the island. With the Ireland rugby team representing both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, a new anthem, "Ireland's Call", was written to help cross sectarian and national divides and adopted as the rugby anthem in 1995. However, at home matches in Dublin the Irish national anthem, "The Soldier's Song" ("Amhrán na bhFiann"), is also sung. As you have probably gathered, I love Ireland - North and South. I have visited the country at least 40 times.

I am inclined to agree with Peter Taylor that it will take at least another generation (25-30 years) for the militants on both sides of the divide to give up their weapons and abandon their militant tactics. This has been part of working-class Northern Irish culture for so long that it won’t disappear overnight. There are (and have been) an awful lot of weapons around for many years. When I was caught up in the street battles in Belfast in August 1969 I was astonished at the number of guns that suddenly appeared on both sides of the divide – obviously having been concealed in private houses for such an occasion. It was also evident during the daytime that whenever a minor incident arose lots of young (unemployed) men suddenly appeared on the streets and the minor incident would turn into a street battle, which the police of the army had to break up. One of the deep-seated roots of Northern Ireland’ problems has been unemployment – lots of young, energetic people with nothing to do except fight. As a visitor in the 1960s, I was surprised to find that the social class system, with its inherent divisions, was much more marked in Northern Ireland than in England. It seemed to me that the middle and upper classes (and the politicians) just didn’t really care enough about what was going on in the working-class areas. As my wife used to say, “The politicians in Stormont make the balls of xxxx and the people on the Shankill Road and Falls Road fire them.” Things have changed, albeit slowly. The province is wealthier and this has undoubtedly made a difference. As for the paramilitary organisations, it has proved difficult for journalists to penetrate them, but the leaders (now elected to parliament) were well known to the police and to the army from the earliest days of the troubles. It is common knowledge that the British Army was involved in undercover operations as early as the 1970s – not just during the Thatcher era – and that they worked in liaison with the pro-British paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland, although there were occasions when the British Army ended up shooting at Loyalists too. It was always an uneasy relationship. Now the Loyalists are fighting one another, with the UDA/UFF on one side and the UVF on the other side. Regarding mutual relationships, now that there is more money around young people tend to go out more, visiting the pubs and clubs that have sprung up in Belfast city Centre, and on Botanic Avenue and the Lisburn Road. Each time that I go back to Belfast there seems to be a new, lavishly decorated pub or club, built at huge expense and full of young people almost every night of the week. Such places are, as far as I can ascertain, mostly non-sectarian – one can tell from the mixture of names that one hears: e.g. Robert, William, Susan (Protestant) alongside Patrick, Sean, Niamh (Catholic). There has also been a growth in “integrated schools” in Northern Ireland, where Protestant and Catholic children are educated side by side. I believe the first was opened in 1981. There has been resistance to integrated schools from church leaders and extremist politicians, but many of the new schools have had to turn new entrants away because they have proved so popular with parents. These schools are still in the minority, but they probably point the way ahead. Education may be the answer to Northern Ireland’s problems. See: http://www.ief.org.uk/files/news/readnews.asp?newsID=23

Slightly off the track perhaps, but here goes… I’ve been a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland since 1965 – my wife is from Belfast and grew up in one of the working-class communities most affected by the sectarian divide. I observed at first-hand the growth of the violent political movements in the late 1960s that set the two working-class communities against one another – the middle and upper classes have hardly been affected as they have always lived in “nice” areas where people don’t throw stones at one another. I was on the streets of Belfast in August 1969 as the bullets ricocheted off the cobblestones dangerously close to me, and I experienced sheer terror for the first time in my life. I avoided visiting Belfast in the early 1970s when the “troubles” reached a peak – my English accent could have been construed as “suspicious” by either of the two communities – but I began to go back from 1976 onwards. Belfast was tightly controlled in those days. The city centre could only be accessed via metal gates and one was constantly subjected to searches by the police and the army. Terrible crimes were committed by organisations that had more in common with the Mafia than with organisations that supposedly had a “political” agenda. Of course, the British government does not have a clean record, but neither does the Irish government. Things have improved immeasurably. Since around the mid-1980s Belfast has become a vibrant city. The metal gates around the city centre were removed many years ago. The city centre is clean, largely pedestrianised, full of great pubs and restaurants, and it has an excellent shopping centre. The music and club scene for young people is probably better than that offered by any city on mainland Britain. My wife and I celebrated the dawning of the new millennium in Belfast, and Belfast was my first choice for the celebration of a special birthday for my wife in April last year. We began the celebration with a liquid lunch for the whole family in the Crown Bar, one of my favourite pubs worldwide: http://www.ireland-info.com/cities/belfast...ractions/crown/ We went back to Belfast in September last year to attend the “Proms in the Park” concert – a great selection of music played by the Ulster Orchestra in the open air outside Belfast City Hall, including guest appearances by Julian Lloyd Webber, playing Elgar's Cello Concerto, and Paddy Maloney of The Chieftains, who played a moving rendering on the uillean pipes of the haunting ballad "My Lagan Love". I suppose that I’m saying it’s time to look forward. The future of Northern Ireland looks bright. The old politicians are beginning to look anachronistic and have failed to inspire young people to exercise their right to vote. I see more and more evidence of young people, regardless of their religious differences, coming closer together and sticking two fingers up at the politicians. For an offbeat look at the working-class divide, see the Web pages of the BBC’s TV series “Give My Head Peace” and watch the video clips. You may have a bit of trouble understanding the dialect: “Dis yous think I came up the Lagan in a bubble?” See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/gmhp/ If you get a chance, see the film "Divorcing Jack" (1998), which is based on Colin Bateman's novel of the same name. It's rude, funny and - like "Give My Head Peace" - takes a sideways look at the sectarian divide.

John writes: As I said, I was only three when WWII ended, so my recollections are very hazy and only the most vivid events are imprinted on my mind. My recollections of the post-war period are still very much alive: troops returning home, rationing, etc. Jack McMahon, by the way, grew up in Belfast and volunteered to join the RAF in 1940 at the age of 19. His book "Almost a Lifetime" is still in print but now published by himself.

WWII I can just remember WWII. I was 3 years old when the war ended. My parents were living in Kent at the time, a couple of miles away from the West Malling airfield. I can remember barrage balloons in the sky all around us. I can remember searchlights and the air raid warning sirens. I can remember sleeping in an air-raid shelter, a sort of metal box construction, on the ground floor in our house. I can remember the victory celebrations and being terrified when they lit a bonfire bearing an effigy of Hitler (I thought it was a real man). My most vivid memory is when my father took me into our back garden to watch a Spitfire from West Malling engaging with a V1 on its way to London. The Spitfire shot it down and it landed nearby in the hop gardens. On another occasion the pilot of a German fighter plane that had been shot down by a Spitfire bailed out over our house, but too late for his parachute to open, and was impaled on a pear tree in our next door neighbour's garden. My father, a male nurse, and the neighbour had to help remove his body. My wife's cousin, John ("Jack") McMahon, is in his 80s, fighting fit and living on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. His book "Almost a Lifetime" is an account of his first and only bombing mission and its consequences. He was shot down over Holland, sheltered by a Dutch family for a short while and then imprisoned in Germany. He survived a 400-mile forced march across Germany in 1945 as the Russians advanced from the East. For a review of his book see: http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol2/no1/almost.html Jack often gives talks to children in Canadian schools. He has recently written a romantic novel entitled "Dunraven House" - nothing to do with WWII. John, if you send me a private email indicating what you think Jack might be able to offer, I will forward it to him. Jack owns a computer and uses email regularly. We'll be visiting Jack on Salt Spring Island towards the end of May.

One thing that I have noticed among male colleagues who work in ICT is that they are often interested in ICT because they are fascinated by the technology itself rather than its applications – i.e. the “trainspotter” syndrome. My female colleagues, however, are often competent users of ICT but have relatively little interest in processor speeds, hard disk storage space, etc – only insofar as it they are adequate for the applications they wish to use. I tend to lean in the same direction as my female colleagues, I guess. I have a similar attitude to motor vehicles, i.e. I have little or no interest in motor vehicle technology. All I require is that my car starts first time in the morning and gets me from A to B without a hitch – like my 1982 Mercedes 200, which has nearly 180K miles on the clock and has never let me down since I bought it second-hand from my brother in 1988. My 4-year old DELL 650 running Win98SE is just as reliable. Query: Are there many female trainspotters?

I work as a member of the MELTEC team, Kingston University, which offers courses in multimedia: http://www.meltec.org.uk We use the following devices on our introductory courses. They have proved ideal for novices, most of whom are extremely nervous about entering into the world of multimedia. Audio A useful product is Digital Blue's Computer Sound Morpher (also known as the Animation Station), a microphone with a built-in storage facility, i.e. you can make a recording on the move and then upload it to a PC via the USB port at a later time. It is accompanied by software embodying a range of editing and of animation facilities. You can record up to four minutes of sound away from the computer. This does not sound like a great deal, but in practice you will find that it is more than adequate for capturing dialogues, and of course they can be pieced together and edited in other ways using the Sound Morpher's own software or software such as AudioSurgeon (above). Available from Tag Learning: http://www.taglearning.com - search under "D" for "Digital Blue". Video A companion device to the Sound Morpher mentioned above is the Digital Blue Digital Movie Creator. It records up to four minutes of video or a number of still photos and includes editing software. Stop-frame animation is a feature of the editing software - i.e. you can produce stop-frame movies along the lines of Nick Park's Wallis and Grommit. The camera and editing software are very easy to use and ideal as an introduction to digital video both for teachers and students. The camera connects to the USB port for uploading videos and still photos. Available from Tag Learning: http://www.taglearning.com - search under "D" for "Digital Blue".

Adrian writes: Pragmatic? Hmmm... It was difficult enough to persuade girls to join the Electronics class in the first place. Timetabling Electronics against Typing just reduced the already small number of girls and reinforced old stereotypical values. Another local headteacher found that the after-school class in vehicle maintenance was over-subscribed, so his solution was to limit the class to boys. The result was a volcanic eruption from the parents of girls who had applied to join the class. As the father of two daughters I constantly found myself in battle with the authorities who had more conservative values than my wife and I - but I am going back to the early 1980s.

Andrew writes: I agree. As the father of two (now adult) daughters, I often found myself at odds with their former headteacher and his prejudices. My elder daughter chose to do a CSE in Electronics in her third year of secondary school. She did very well in the first year of the course, showing that she understood the basic theory and producing some very neat coursework (circuit boards, etc). She was one of three girls in two sets of around 25 pupils each. In the second year of the course Electronics was timetabled against a one-year course in Typing (I am going back a few years) offered at the local tech college. My daughter's two female colleagues chose Typing, leaving my daughter as the only girl in the Electronics set. I took issue with the headteacher, asking why he had decided to timetable Typing (which would now be Keyboard Skills or something similar) against Electronics. It was clear from our conversation that he had identified Typing as a "girls' subject" and Electronics as a "boys' subject". Anyway, my daughter finished the Electronics course, got a good grade and found it useful as a background to what eventually became her career as a graphic designer and making extensive use of specialist CAD hardware and software.

... and she had certainly retained her Australian accent when I met her. She was dressed in a purple trouser suit - what else?

Yes, worth looking at. I met Dale a few years ago at the University of Victoria, Canada. We were both giving guest lectures there.

I'm inclined to agree John Simkin and with David Richardson: John: David: I do not think standards have improved in my subject area, Modern Foreign Languages. My subjective assessment of tongue-tied kids from the UK whom I have observed while working and holidaying abroad is that the current generation is far less competent than my generation of 40 years ago. As I have often argued, we need to align ourselves more closely with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Attempts are being made, but I think we overestimate the value of our national qualifications. See the Languages Ladder at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/DSP_languagesladder.cfm I very much doubt that a youngster with Higher GCSE would pass a CEF B1 examination.

I have taught modern languages throughout my career. As a male member of staff, I have always been in the minority in modern languages departments. Most teachers of modern languages are female and most students in further and higher education are female - around 70%-80%, I would guess. Teachers of modern languages in the UK are heavy users of ICT, so there must be a large number of potential contributors out there. I have two daughters, both of whom run businesses relating to ICT. One studied art in higher education and runs a graphic design business. The other studied modern foreign languages in higher education and runs an educational software development and retailing business.

Good to hear that! My main contacts at the Uni of Melbourne are in the Language Centre. The Language Centre has played a key role in developing CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) - my area of work. Bob Debski is a leading figure in this field. He took over as as Director of the Language Centre from June Gassin. Monash University also has made a major contribution to CALL. One of the gurus of Web-based CALL, Uschi Felix, is at Monash - along with my former colleague, Sally Staddon, who worked with me at Ealing College London in the 1980s and 1990s. Australia has certainly made its mark in CALL. Some very good work is going on down under!

Some universities are doing a pretty good job. I am external examiner for the MSc in Computer Assisted Language Learning at UMIST: http://mull.ccl.umist.ac.uk/call/ All the students' scripts that I read are word-processed, and I also examine the projects that they have produced on CD-ROM or at the UMIST website. How about the VITAL Environment at the University of Melbourne? The purpose of the VITAL Environment is to provide an easily configurable space where different styles of small group teaching utilising wall length whiteboards, video projection and the use of wireless notebooks can be explored - i.e. a new kind of electronic space for teaching: http://www.artsit.unimelb.edu.au/facilities/vital/index.html I was at the University of Melbourne in 1998, attending the WorldCALL 1998 conference: http://www.worlcall.org Have a look Winged Sandals, a delightful multimedia website on Greek Mythology created by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in association with The University of Melbourne's Centre for Classics and Archaeology. The website is designed for children 6-12 but will certainly have a much wider appeal: http://www.wingedsandals.com

It looks better on screen, and thank goodness that the DfES website - unlike some other government and government agency websites - allows you to download and print a whole unit. As Andrew Moore has argued in another strand in this Forum, teachers need to get an overview of a larger chunk of information than that which can be contained on a single screen. As I have argued in the same strand, reading from the screen is around 25%-30% slower than reading from the printed page - which is borne out by research conducted by Web guru Jakob Nielsen and other independent researchers. It seems that the DfES is beginning to understand what teachers need...

I wrote the following in an earlier email in this strand: The Cox Green case study was updated today, 7 April. Richard Hamilton, Head of MFL at Cox Green, has some controversial ideas on networking computers - i.e. he doesn't have any faith in networks - and on the use of email, the Internet and videoconferencing - i.e. he remains unimpressed by their real benefits. His approach is to use a small number of dedicated MFL authoring packages on basic stand-alone multimedia computers and to integrate ICT activities closely into the MFL programme as a whole, using ICT across the four skills of Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. Richard also makes considerable use of pupils and foreign language assistants to help him produce MFL/ICT materials. The improved GCSE results is one of the few pieces of concrete evidence that I have found supporting the effectiveness of using ICT. Recent OFSTED inspections at Cox Green have resulted in glowing reports, grading a typical MFL/ICT lesson as "Excellent". A message for the eLearning strategy unit perhaps? Low-tech seems to work!

It's probably a copyright issue. See the following Web pages produced by Brad Templeton: A brief intro to copyright: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copyright.html 10 Big Myths about copyright explained: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The author is based in the USA, but he covers general and international copyright issues too. I have written a few guidelines too: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm Have you had a look at the Electronic Text Centre, University of Virginia? http://etext.lib.virginia.edu It does not include works by Harper Lee. She's still alive - hence the copyright restrictions. See also Michael Barlow's Corpus Linguistics site (Rice University, Houston): http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html There is a link here to English-language resources on the Web. Module 2.4 at the ICT4LT website may be useful too: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm Although mainly MFL, some sections of this module were written by an EFL teacher.