Graham Davies

I am inclined to agree. Most of what I have seen in my subject area, produced by companies such as Boardworks and the big publishers of modern foreign languages coursebooks, is all presentation and no interaction. It's a return to the teacher as a presenter/animator - creating more work for the teacher rather than less work. I always thought computers were designed to help reduce our work load. When I first got interested in computing in 1976 the emphasis was predominantly on interaction. The interactive programs that were developed subsequently in the 1980s placed a lot of emphasis on feedback, branching and help routines and, finally (which teachers of modern foreign languages were looking forward to for years), we got sound and video when the first multimedia computers appeared - although there was a period in the 1980s when Heath-Robinson interactive videodisc setups enabled us to enjoy interactive programs incorporating sound and video. Nowadays, feedback appears to be a lost art. What has happened to all the research that was done on the pros and cons of intrinsic vis-à-vis extrinsic feedback? All we appear to have now is flashy presentations (v. the new BBC Jam materials) and multiple-choice point-and-click-let's-move-on quick stuff - which does very little to help embed the learning materials in the student's mind.

Roy asks I don't actually teach these days. I retired in 1993, my last job being a director of a university language centre. Since then I have been involved in training language teachers to use ICT and in various types of consultancy work. But nowadays I spend more time gardening, walking my dog, playing golf, swimming and travelling to nice places abroad. I keep in touch with what's going on in Computer Assisted Language Learning by surfing the Web, via email with numerous contacts worldwide and through membership of the professional associations EUROCALL (Europe) and CALICO (USA). A lot of work is being done is the area of podcasting in modern languages. Joe Dale, Ewan McIntosh (Scottish CILT) and Mark Pentleton (Partners in Excellence) are working in this area. See Joe Dale's blog at the TES site: "ICT & Modern Foreign Languages: Using podcasts in the classroom" http://www.tes.co.uk/blogs/blog.aspx?path=/ICT/&post=2237887 which reports on his own efforts at getting the children to create podcasts See also Joe's own site at: http://www.joedale.typepad.com Mark Pentleton is leader of Partners in Excellence (PiE), a Scottish initiative for the promotion of language learning and teaching using ICT. PiE are creating their own series of PodCasts for languages learners, which they refer to as PiECasts: http://www.pie.org.uk See the Modern Foreign Languages Environment Blog, a weblog based at the Learning and Teaching Scotland website, maintained by Ewan McIntosh, providing the latest news on Modern Foreign Languages and a facility for readers to add their own comments: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/cs/blogs/mfle/

Roy writes: No, I am not familiar with this software, but there are several packages around of this type, e.g. TaskMagic, which includes a "Millionaire" type game. You can author it easily. My first priority re IWBs for Modern Foreign Languages is to ensure that a decent pair of loudspeakers is available so that multimedia packages can be used - vital for presenting the children with authentic native voices. You don't need special software for IWBs either. Many standard packages such as the text-reconstruction package Fun with Texts and mystery games in foreign languages such as Oscar Lake (which can go on for weeks) lend themselves naturally to group work. Form more advanced learners off-the-shelf DVDs such as Amelie are a great source of inspiration. As Chris Jones said in the title of his seminal article in System in 1986: "It's not so much the program; more what you do with it". See The Ashcombe School Language College site for some bright ideas and loads of resources: http://www.ashcombe.surrey.sch.uk/Curriculum/modlang/

Andy writes: 1970s? The 1960s was my period. My college, Queen Mary College, London, had a fantastic theatre/ballroom. I was at gigs held there in the 1960s where these bands played live: The Who, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Them (Van Morrison lead singer). My wife-to-be worked at an architect's office in Soho Square in the 1960s, next door to the British Board of Film Censors. One day when was on my way to meet her for lunch I was accosted by an Asian woman protesting outside the Board about a film of hers that had been banned. Stills from the film showed just pictures of people's bottoms. "Do you find this offensive?" she asked. "No," I replied "boring maybe but not offensive." "Thank you", she said and pinned a daffodil on my lapel. When I met my wife she asked why I was wearing a daffodil. "Some Asian woman gave it to me", I said. The Asian woman turned out to be Yoko Ono - little known at the time. The 1960s were a period of upheaval, protests, change and liberation. Authority was questioned left, right and centre. It was great compared to the sedate and somewhat oppressive 1950s! But I guess it made being a teacher a lot tougher. I was trained as a teacher in 1964-65 at Goldsmiths' College. My practice teaching took place in a South East London comprehensive - a baptism of fire for an ex-grammar-school boy who knew no other type of secondary school environment. My first teaching post in a grammar school in Devon was, by contrast, an easy ride. I used my first language lab there and I have been cautious about technology ever since. I enjoy gadgets but I am the first to point out that they are not the panacea. In my subject area, modern foreign languages, many children in the world learn to speak three or four different languages in classes of 50 children and one text book between three - I've seen it for myself in KwaZulu, South Africa, in the 1980s. In the UK, with all the gadgets at our disposal, we remain the language dunces of Europe.

John writes: I am one old “silver surfer” (just turned 64) who is still a big kid regarding electronic gimmicks, in spite of the fact that my old eyes find it increasingly difficult to read and write mobile phone text messages – but I do try! What worries me about young teachers is that they often fail to look back at the lessons of the past, e.g. relating to my subject area, modern foreign languages, the rise and fall of the language lab. There are various reasons for its demise, but the main ones were lack of training and the inability of teachers to exploit fully the new approaches to teaching and learning that it offered. See my article: Davies. G. (1997) "Lessons from the past, lessons for the future: 20 years of CALL". In Korsvold A-K. & Rüschoff B. (eds.) New technologies in language learning and teaching, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France. The full text (regularly updated) is also on the Web at: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/coegdd1.htm I cite Oppenheimer (1997) in this article, who expresses more cynical views about technology: "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) I don't entirely agree with Oppenheimer, but his views should sound warning signals - and which I think have already been addressed in the exchange of views in this debate.

Roy, you are absolutely right about CPD being the key. I was called in as a trouble-shooter by one of the NOF training agencies towards the end of the NOF funding period. Many teachers who had been enrolled as NOF trainees by their schools had failed to complete their tasks (some of which were completely pointless) and I spent several months visiting around 20 different schools in order to get teachers over the final few hurdles so that they got their NOF training certificates. NOF was a mess and identified as such by Ofsted. This is a digest of the thoughts I formulated post-NOF, based on feedback from trainees and what I observed: - Schools were faced with a bewildering array of approved training providers – 57 in England – which made the task of choosing a suitable provider very difficult. Only three providers were subject specialists: Languages, Science and History. A smaller number of subject-specific training providers would have made more sense. The subject-specific providers generally received better feedback from trainees than those that tried to cover the whole school curriculum. - NOF trainers were not supposed to teach basic ICT skills, such as finding one’s way around Windows and using a word-processor. It was assumed that such general training should have been provided by schools, local education authorities or other training providers, but in many cases it is clear that this simply did not happen, and NOF trainers found themselves having to deliver training in basic ICT skills. It would have been better to provide a two-tier training system: NOF1 for basic skills and NOF2 for applied subject-specific skills. - Some schools were attracted by the idea of one training provider covering all subjects in the curriculum but this proved beyond the competence of many training providers, who failed to take note of the specific needs of teachers of Modern Foreign Languages. Training has often been delivered by ICT specialists rather than subject specialists, leading to complaints that the training offered was too generic, too technical, and often incomprehensible. The lesson to be learned is that ICT training – including basic skills – has to be in the hands of subject specialists rather than general ICT specialists. - Particularly where the percentage of training online in a course was high, the support of the school was essential. Some teachers could not ensure access to ICT facilities, their progress was not monitored by management, and no technical support or time allocation was offered. - Schools should have had the necessary hardware and software in place and in good working order before teachers could effectively embark on full-scale training. Sufficient access should have been available to teachers of all subjects, not just the traditionally ICT-based subjects such as Maths and Science. - Online training featured in the courses of several NOF providers but sometimes this consisted of little more than the provision of a folder of materials and a discussion forum. The lesson to be learned is that considerable and regular intervention by tutors is essential in online training. Tutors could not handle more than 30 online trainees at one time. - An effective system for assessing teachers’ basic and applied subject-specific skills before they embarked upon a NOF course – i.e. some form of externally managed placement testing – should have been used. - A standardised system of assessing teachers’ competence at the end of a NOF course should have been used. - The pace of work for teachers following a NOF course during term time often proved stressful. Ideally, teachers should have been allowed time off to follow training courses. An alternative approach was adopted by some local education authorities, whereby trainees were supplied with laptops preloaded with subject-specific software and tasks, to be carried out in trainees’ own time and at their own pace with support from a local professional development centre. The following page at my website is an update of some of the things I was teaching NOF trainees: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/lspinset.htm The ICT for Language Teachers site is a 16-module set of training materials for teachers of modern foreign languages: http://www.ict4lt.org ALL FREE! Maybe your colleagues in Modern Foreign Languages might be interested in the above. See my 2002 publication: "ICT and Modern Foreign Languages: learning opportunities and training needs", published in International Journal of English Studies 2, 1: Monograph Issue, New Trends in Computer Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, edited by Pascual Pérez Paredes & Pascual Cantos Gómez, Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Murcia, Spain: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/needs.htm See also my chapter in Felix (2003): "Perspectives on online training initiatives". In Felix U. (ed.) Language learning online: towards best practice, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. Not available online.

As I indicated before, I first got interested in ICT in 1976. It was not easy to get into at that time. All my college had was a Prime 300 minicomputer. With the advent of the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the BBC Micro it got easier in the late 1970s / early 1980s. Then things got difficult again. Networks arrived and the PC arrived. The Mac made things easier again, but then Windows arrived (Win 95 = Mac 87) and has continued to make things more difficult again. Now the pace of change is so fast that many teachers have just given up. Last year I was offered a free mobile phone upgrade by O2. I turned it down on the grounds that I had only just got used to last year's free upgrade. I am not surprised that teachers feel less comfortable with ICT. In Modern Languages we have been ahead of the game for a long time. Our international professional association, EUROCALL, was founded in 1986 and is still going strong 20 years later: http://www.eurocall-languages.co.uk However, I think we are beginning to get stuck in a rut. Too much emphasis is placed these days on increasingly complex VLEs. The buzz has gone out of ICT for me. Maybe I'm just getting old - 64 earlier this month. I'm beginning to enjoy walking my dog and tending my garden much more than browsing the Web.

Modern language teachers are often not experts, especially if they are non-native speakers. I consider myself fluent in German, but I am definitely not an expert. I frequently seek the advice of native speakers, dictionaries and - using a KWIC concordancer - authentic texts in electronic format in order to verify something I am not sure about. This is why we try to introduce as many authentic materials as possible in the classroom, e.g. recordings of native speakers from different regions of the country/world where the language is spoken, authentic texts, off-air recordings from satellite TV, etc. In this respect an IWB is very useful for the presentation element of teaching/learning, but it is the practice/performance element that embeds the language in the learner's mind. I only really got to grips with German while spending a four-month period in Hamburg as part of my university studies, i.e. listening to, reading, writing and speaking German for several hours every day. To some extent the practice/performance element can be simulated in interactive computer programs and, of course, the Internet has opened up many channels of authentic communication. IWBs only have a small role to play in second language acquisition.

I also tend to support the view that the IWB tends to be "interactive for the teacher and less so for the students" - unless the teacher is particulary active in the classroom firing questions at the class and getting them to do things. Modern language teachers tend to be very active, regardless of the technology that they use. This is because we are teaching a subject that is performance-related (as is music too) rather than knowledge-related. Getting the learners to "perfom" is what we try to do in the classroom. I got into computer assisted language learning (CALL) in 1976. What made it different from other technologies available at the time (e.g. the language lab) was the interaction that it offered in the form of feedback, branching, help routines etc. When computers were introduced into schools in the early 1980s, many teachers embraced whole-class teaching with a computer, because they could only afford a single computer and a big TV set rather than a computer lab. Some interesting approaches to teaching languages emerged in this way, e.g. getting the class to reconstruct blanked out texts as a group exercise, as a stimulus for oral work (essential in modern languages), etc. Now the wheel seems to have turned full circle. Whatever happened to feedback? Whatever happened to listen / respond / playback activities (essential in modern languages, so that the learner can hear what he/she sounds like)? See: Davies G. (1988) "Using the computer to stimulate conversation". In Kühlwein W. & Spillner B. (eds.) Sprache und Individuum, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Piper A. (1986) "Conversation and the computer: a study of the conversational spin-off generated among learners of English as a Foreign Language working in groups", System 14, 2: 187-198. Bangs P. (2003) "Engaging the learner - how to author for best feedback". In Felix U. (2003) (ed.) Language learning online: towards best practice, Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. See Section 4 ("Whole-class teaching and interactive whiteboards") of Module 1.4 at the ICT4LT site - and see the following Section 5 ("Teaching in the computer network room"), which offers an alternative approach: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod1-4.htm BTW, you don't need an expensive IWB setup these days. There is also a cheaper cable-less device, known as CM2, produced by ONfinity - around £450-£500. It has been developed for on-the-road presentations and for multi-room presentations and is used in combination with a standard projector and projection screen. All that you need to do to set up the system is plug in the CM2 device via a USB connection to a PC. There is no cable between the PC and the whiteboard or projection screen. The actual CM2 device is palm-size and you use an extendable electronic pen to click on and draw on the projection screen. It can also be used in conjunction with a large plasma screen, which has to be connected by cable to the PC. There is a video showing the set-up procedure and the CM2 device in operation at: http://www.onfinity.info/. CM2 is available from http://www.compubits.com

Dealing with plagiarism, as David points out, can be problematic. In my experience there are quite a few grey areas where, for example, the student is guilty only of sloppy bibliographical referencing, in which case a quiet word and a request to add the reference will suffice. I have only come across one case where a whole piece of coursework was largely a cut-and-paste job. I spotted several examples in the piece of work in question and then the JISC detector found lots more. We just gave the coursework a fail grade and reprimanded the student. He didn't learn the lesson, however, and carried on doing the same thing - but on a smaller scale. Needless to say, he failed the whole course. Lecturers too are guilty of plagiarism. See: Decoo, W. (2002) Crisis on campus: confronting academic misconduct, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. An interesting read! I have only come across one case of a lecturer plagiarising on a grand scale. As a series editor, I could see that a chapter she submitted for a book was largely lifted from other sources and often lacking bibliographical references. It was not easy to explain to her why her work was rejected. A local education authority in the UK "reversioned" a program for language learners that I wrote in the mid-1980s for a new type of computer. It was obviously a rip-off as they had even copied one of my coding fudges that would not have been necessary on the new type of computer. The handbook also contained many sentences that were lifted direct from my original text. I thought about taking legal action against them, but was advised that it could be expensive. My solictor's advice was to make sure, subtly and privately, that the key players in the world of computer assisted language learning knew what they had done. I took his advice. It did the trick. They were ostracised from conferences and seminars and the unit that had ripped off my program was eventually closed down.

I read the report about students using students or graduates in India or Eastern Europe to produce assignments for them - in The Guardian, wasn't it? There was a report on a lecturer who signed on with one of these agencies in order to check how they worked. One of his own students contracted the agency to write an assignment, and the lecturer completed it for him and sent it back (anonymously, of course). The student then submitted the lecturer's own work back to him. Caught red-handed! I have worked as an external examiner for several different universities, going back to the early 1990s. Since the appearance of the Web in 1993 plagiarism has become a major problem. Coursework is becoming far less useful as a means of assessing students. You can find ready-made essays on a wide range of topic all over the Web. This is why the JISC plagiarism service is now being used extensively by universities. The nature of courework will have to change. Rather than setting an essay with a very general title such as "What were the main reasons for the outbreak of World War I?" students could, for example, demonstrate that they can carry out research via the Web. This means more work for the teachers in setting relevant and varied coursework, but it would be more valuable for the students. Students should also be taught how to evaluate different sources and, above all, how to reference them properly. Time and time again I read students' work where they have clearly quoted a source (I often detect a sudden shift in style) without referencing it. I used to teach the German language. Students are now using translators such as Babel Fish. They don't work, however, and make serious mistakes that are easy to spot. Such translators are only useful for giving the gist of what a text is all about and then you can decide if you want it translated properly by a professional translator. Amuse yourself with this page from the online version of The Sun newspaper. It consists of football chants and songs translated into German in anticipation of the World Cup. I like the rendering of "God save our Gracious Queen" as "Gott Speichern Unsere Liebenswürdige Königin". For the non-Germanists amongst you, "speichern" means "to save" in the sense of saving a file or program on hard disk, CD-ROM, etc. http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006180295,00.html Babel Fish triumphs again!

The grammar school that I attended in the 1950s-1960s used to have a morning assembly similar to the one that Andy describes. It was unashamedly CoE, so Roman Catholics were only present at the non-religious announcements at the end. I can't recall members of any other religious groups attending my school in those days - the school was situated in middle class Kent. The assembly was a very boring start to the morning. The assembly in the grammar school at which I taught in the 1960s and 1970s became less and less religious in its orientation. Puplis were encouraged to give 5-10 minute presentations on a variety of issues of their own choice. I recall one group of pupils paying a tribute to the rock singer/guitarist Jimmy Hendrix. I don't think the rather conservative headmaster really approved, but that's what the kids wanted! I quite enjoyed assemblies at that school. They brought us all together at the start of the day and created a sense of community.

There's a role for both approaches, but it also depends on the subject area. In my subject, namely foreign languages, there is a strong case for lab work, which gives learners the opportunities for intensive individualised listening and speaking practice, especially listen / respond / playback activities which are strongly favoured by teachers of foreign languages. When computers were introduced into schools in the early 1980s, whole-class teaching using one computer and a big TV screen was in favour – mainly for reasons of economy. Then labs and networks came into being. Now we are seeing a return to whole-class teaching, using a computer/projector setup, with or without an interactive whiteboard. We weigh up the pros and cons of both approaches for teaching and learning foreign languages in this document: Davies G., Bangs P., Frisby R. & Walton E. (2005) Setting up effective digital language laboratories and multimedia ICT suites for Modern Foreign Languages, London: CILT: http://www.languages-ict.org.uk/managing/d...nguage_labs.pdf The ICT4LT site also contains advice relating to this topic, especially in Module 1.4 (see Section 4 on whole-class teaching and Section 5 on using a networked lab) and Module 3.1, where five different case studies are presented: http://www.ict4lt.org

Some further thoughts on this: I can't remember where I read the information, but it was more or less in line with what John has said: Most high-tech companies have overestimated the money to be made from providing educational materials on the Web. UkEU crashed spectacularly two years ago. Students just didn't apply for their courses. As an 18-20 year-old the last thing I would want to do is follow an online course. At that age I wanted to get away from home, go to parties, get drunk, travel the world and fall in love - as well as getting an education, of course. The e-learning companies would do better if they targeted housebound people, i.e. a similar audience to that of the Open University. I think there is growing evidence that people aged 40-plus (or even 60-plus like myself) are more likely to look for online learning materials - and we just want no-frills, high-quality stuff. As for my subject area, modern foreign languages, it tends to be media rich and some kinds of learning materials just work better in more traditional formats, such as an audio CD that I can listen to in the car or TV broadcasts that show lots of real-life situations and local culture, e.g as in the BBC's TV series for learners of Greek, Chinese and Portuguese - and which I can watch sitting in a comfortable armchair. But the BBC has now closed down the unit that used to produce these excellent TV series (they don't come cheap) and is now offering us poorer quality Web-based materials as a substitute.

I already offer a lot of free stuff at my website: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/freestuff.htm We make our living mainly from one software package, that we have developed: Fun with Texts. I doubt that we could offer it for free and rely on adverts. In any case, we have complex royalty agreements relating to the package, and it would not be easy to change them. I think we could consider revenue from advertising, but I am a bit wary of adverts putting teachers off. All our other revenue derives from retail sales. I have my doubts about high-tech sites. BBC Jam has gone down this route and is attracting a lot of criticism - because the fancy animations and multimedia bits just don't work properly at peak times of day and with heavy usage by schools. I think there will be place for a small-scale business like mine for a long time to come.

I have been an external examiner for four different Masters courses since the mid-1990s. Plagiarism has become rife in recent years. The silliest example I found was a student who had lifted a whole chunk from a a website of mine and pasted it into his coursework without acknowledging me - not a good idea to upset the external examiner in this way! Needless to say, he failed. JISC has now introduced a plagiarism detection service (TurnitinUK), and students in many universities are told that any work they submit may be checked via this service: http://www.submit.ac.uk/ Regarding plagiarism on the Web in general, there is a new profession emerging, namely that of the "copyright bounty hunter". It's already well established in the USA. Such people trawl the Web looking for breaches of copyright and then report the culprits to the copyright owners (usually big companies) for a substantial fee in exchange for the information. However, you may be more at threat from pupils, their parents or your colleagues. My local school was reported to the Federation Against Software Theft by a parent (name unknown) for ripping off a piece of software I had written, namely supplying copies of it to pupils to work on at home. The parent was stupid, however, and had failed to check that the school had a licence to do this - purchased direct from my business. I found one reference on the Web regarding a teacher in the US who had been overlooked for promotion and had consequently reported her head of department to a software company whose products she had copied illegally. This is a neat way of getting rid of senior management!

Point taken, Andy. Most educational materials, whatever their format, are mediocre. This just underlines the point that content rather than form is more important - a basic premiss that seems to be overlooked in these days of technical gee-whizardry. I find it rather alarming to see the emergence of a new generation of educators whose axiom appears to be "If it ain't on the Web it ain't no good". Personally, I still prefer to read text from a book rather than from the Web, but (in line with Nielsen's recent findings as reported in the Technology Guardian interview) I use the Web mainly to search for information and resources. OK, I'm being cynical and playing my usual role of Devil's Advocate. Having been involved in computer technology since 1976, I have seem a lot of "new" approaches to the delivery of educational materials come and go and I have been involved in numerous development projects, including the following, where I played the role of evaluator. Most "new" approaches are nine-day wonders in my experience. It sounds like MALTED may be what you want. MALTED is the outcome of a project funded under the Educational Multimedia Taskforce initiative of the European Commission. It's free! MALTED stands for Multimedia Authoring for Language Tutors and Educational Development and consists of a set of authoring tools for developing multimedia courseware for language learners. The coordinating institution of the project is University College London, which maintains the main MALTED website: http://www.malted.com Although MALTED was developed for the creation of language learning materials, it can be used in any subject area - and has been already. It offers quite advanced multimedia authoring tools. Our DfES has shown little interest in the project even though the MALTED package has been offered to British educational institutions free of charge. (The DfES prefers us to pay for outrageously expensive VLEs and authoring systems recommended by BECTA.) The Spanish Ministry of Education, however, which is part of the partnership, has embraced the project with enthusiasm and the MALTED software can be downloaded free of charge from this site: http://malted.cnice.mecd.es The Spanish version of the package is the most advanced version. It has been widely trialled in Spanish schools. It will work in any language, but the instructions for authoring are mainly in Spanish - which shouldn't be a problem in this country, which is renowed for its expertise in a wide variety of foreign languages. Technical support is available from University College London if you get stuck. One of the key developers of MALTED, Paul Bangs, is based in this country and spends a lot of his time demonstrating MALTED and training people to use it. Here is his website: http://members.aol.com/bangspaul/ His EUROCALL 2001 paper is worthwhile reading on the pros and cons of using the Web as a delivery medium. It's entitled "Will the Web catch enough flies? Where Web-based learning cannot yet reach" and can be accessed at: http://members.aol.com/bangspaul/EurocallPB.htm

OK, Andy - understood. But who needs this kind of stuff anyway, regardless of whether you pay an arm and a leg for it or get it for free? Having read John Simkin's message regarding the Technology Guardian interview with Web guru Jakob Nielsen, of whom I have been a great fan for years, I think it is high time (to borrow a phrase used by the interviewer) to "turn the music down". The final paragraph of the interview was revealing, where Nielsen says: "There was a study done at the Open University found that in elementary schools, for every £100 spent on books, students grades improved by 1.5% - and for every £100 spent on computers, grades improved by 0.7%. So books are twice as good as computers for this... So it's not necessarily that I should study history by clicking on some Web pages, but that we should teach about these electronic media forms and how to use them. The value of that education would be immense."

John wrote: Our business database of 5000-plus secondary schools in the UK shows that fewer than 5% are using Macs as their main machine, so there's not a lot of point in talking about Mac software in this context. My business has phased out developing and selling Mac software for schools - no money in it! Macs are wonderful machines, the sine qua non in the print and design business. My daughter is a professional graphic designer and runs a small all-Mac business. It's a niche market in the UK. Are we talking about open source equivalents of Web authoring packages such as Dreamweaver (which I use), Front Page, etc?

No, Andy has got it totally wrong. My private business - a small partnership - was doing OK until Curriculum Online (COL) came on the scene. Since then our turnover has dropped by 50%. We are not the only small business - or even medium-sized business - to have suffered in this way. I am in no doubt that Curriculum Online shares a large proportion of the blame for this. Schools are not free or trusted to spend their eLC allocation on anything but COL-registered (= state-registered) products. So much for the freedom of choice. As for quality control of COL-registered products, it's negligible. BECTA have asked for just two samples of our products out of a large list. The feedback we received from them indicated, firstly, that they did not understand the pedagogy of one of the products and, secondly, that they were mainly interested in technical compliance rather than pedagogy anyway. Furthermore, Curriculum Online generates a lot of extra work each month when we have to report to BECTA (formerly the DfES) on the schools that have bought eLC-funded products from us and how much they spent. It's Big Brother stuff! (Orwell's Big Brother, of course, not the TV series.) I pointed out to the Curriculum Online administration that the orders submitted by schools did not always indicate which budget they were using and asked if I should contact the schools to find out. The reply was that this was not necessary and that we should only report on those schools that clearly indicated that they were using eLC funding. Obviously, this didn't work out, resulting in a huge mismatch between what the DfES had doled out and what schools appeared to be spending. Now, if any state school buys a COL-registered product we have been told to assume that the eLC budget is being used, even if it isn't! We just report on every school that buys a COL-registered product. So the budget is probably even more out of balance now.

John writes: Bear in mind, however, that there are many free sites registered at the Curriculum Online site too, including BBC Jam, which was financed out of your licence fees as part of the Curriculum Online (Digital Curriculum) initiative. My personal (negative) opinion of BBC Jam is expressed here: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/BBC_Jam.htm John is probably right. Most e-learning companies will go out of business - and good riddance! Without the funding to buy a subscription I doubt that schools will continue to subscribe. I am not impressed by the offerings of e-learning companies. Most VLEs that e-learning companies in my subject area (foreign languages) use to wrap up their materials are repeating the same mistakes as the producers of language labs in the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. falling over backwards to bore the pants off students. As for blogs and podcasts, I enjoy some of the rants you find in blogs, but most are just boring newsletters. Podcasts are not a lot different from radio broadcasts. Apart from the technological wizardry involved in setting up, downloading and maintaining blogs and podcasts, I can't see enormous advantages. All educational materials depend on quality of content and the imagination of the teachers that use them - and quality of content is currently lacking in most of the blogs and podcasts I have read/heard. As for "feeds", no way! I am overwhelmed with rubbish pouring into my email boxes already and have had to set up aggressive filters to keep it out. My telephone and fax machine were other sources of annoyance until I subscribed to BT's "Privacy at Home" and “Caller Display” services. It's now a lot quieter at home in the evenings. My business, Camsoft, was forced to register with Curriculum Online, otherwise we would not have been able to take advantage of the eLC money that schools can spend on digital resources. Digital resources include offline resources such as CD-ROMs and DVDs, which is what my business sells. We don't offer any online services - but I do offer free materials at my business website and at the ICT4LT website. I hate the whole concept of Curriculum Online. It's involved us in unnecessary bureaucracy and actually caused a 50% drop in sales because schools are no longer at liberty to spend the money on resources that are not registered with Curriculum Online. There are many quality products that are unregistered and never will be because (being products for learning foreign languages) they are produced abroad by companies who have not the slightest interest in or understanding of Curriculum Online. Here's what I say on my "Favourite Websites" page: Curriculum Online (COL): See http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk. A UK government initiative, launched in January 2003, which has the noble aim of providing ring-fenced funding, known as e-Learning Credits (eLCs), to schools in England to enable them to buy software and online services to support their teaching. Unfortunately, the initiative has been surrounded with an atmosphere of controversy from the outset, resulting in court action against the BBC, accusations of high-level bungling and a very expensive website. 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 and E-valuate, but for an exorbitant fee that a small business cannot afford - and you won't find many Modern Foreign Languages products that have been evaluated. http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm It's a corrupt initiative. I'll be delighted to see the back of it.

Terry Wogan is the main reason that I bother to watch the Eurovision Song Contest. Over the years he has had me chuckling non-stop through each contest. This year he was less funny than he usually is. He repeated himself a lot and made a meal of the female (Greek-American) presenter's overuse of the word "amazing". He did a reasonable job, however. What made the evening for me was the winning act, Lordi from Finland. In spite of the skewed Balkan and Baltic voting, the Finns won by a long chalk, having been the victims of "nul points" from so many countries so many times in the past. Great news for an ageing rock fan like myself! Is this the first blast of the wind of change that marks the beginning of the end of the boom-bang-a-bang, la-la-la era and those dreadful lugubrious ballads? I've travelled a lot in the Balkans, having visited all the Balkan countries at some time, going right back to the early 1960s when Tito was in charge and long before the more recent bloody conflicts. It's a strange place, characterised by a love-hate relationship that is similar to our own love-hate relationship with France and Ireland - and we've fought some bloody battles in these two countries too. It was nice to see the Balkans voting for one another. And thanks, Ireland, for your vote for Daz! BTW, Brian Kennedy, the singer of the Irish entry is from Belfast, which (still) happens to be British. As a Kennedy, I am sure Brian considers himself Irish rather than British. The Northern Irish are often a bit schizophrenic in this respect. My wife, who is also from Belfast, is never quite sure whether she shoulld describe herself as Irish or British - usually the former, however, except in the Shankill Road! My wife and I saw Brian Kennedy perform at the Millennium concert 1999/2000 and we met him in person in Belfast in 2003. Nice guy and a great perfomer! Pity about the song this year...

French is taught as the first FL in the UK (and in Ireland) mainly because: 1. France is our nearest neighbour. 2. We have always taught French as the first FL. 3. There are more materials (textbooks, audio materials, videos, computer programs) around for teaching French. As a fluent speaker of German I have always found German much more useful than French when travelling around Europe, especially as one heads towards the East. You find German widely spoken in tourism areas such as the Italian Adriatic, the Dalmatian coast and many resorts in Spain. The Eurobarometer survey points out that most Europeans (65%) learn a FL ONLY at school. After that they are unlikely to learn a FL in any other way. In other words, get it right at school and you get it right for ever. If you have studied a FL at school, e.g. French or German, and then later in life you find that you need a completely different FL for business purposes, for tourism or whatever, you will find that it will come easier to you as you will have learned a lot from the language learning experience. This is why bilingual children brought up in community languages, say in Urdu or Panjabi alongside English, often excel in French or German at school. I used to teach in a college where there were substantial local Panjabi and Polish speaking communities. They provided us with a large number of students wishing to study European languages such as French, German or Spanish. I don't think the aim of teaching a FL at school should be solely to prepare the next generation for business. However, most Europeans surveyed (73%) stated that better job opportunities were the main reason for learning a FL. This is because most European businesses insist on new recruits having skills in a FL for certain types of job, whereas our employers couldn't care less - apart from firms such as Amazon who are now shifting their European customer services unit from Slough, Berkshire, to Cork, Ireland, because they cannot recruit sufficient numbers of people with the appropriate language skills. Ireland is doing rather better than the UK in this respect as well as offering great financial incentives for establishing new businesses.

Which foreign languages should we be teaching? According to the most recent Eurobarometer survey (2005, published February 2006) English is spoken by 51% of European citizens as their Mother Tongue (MT) or first Foreign Language (FL). The Eurobarometer survey covered the EU countries plus Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Turkey. The figures for the main languages are: English: 51% (MT 13%, FL 38%) German: 32% (MT 18%, FL 14%) French: 25% (MT 12%, FL 13%) Italian: 16% (MT 13%, FL 3%) Spanish: 15% (MT 9%, FL 6%) So German speakers are the dominant MT group, followed by English and Italian speakers. Geographical spread is, of course, a key issue. Italian as a MT or FL is confined to a much narrower space than German. English is spoken almost everywhere to a lesser or greater degree in the countries surveyed. When asked which two FLs UK children should learn at school, UK citizens answered: French: 77% German: 34% Spanish 39% German came higher in most other European countries and French and Spanish came lower. Apart from the UK, only Ireland (64%) and Luxembourg (83%) considered French to be the first FL that children should learn. Overall, 77% of European citizens considered that children should learn English as their first FL. Source: http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/a..._243_sum_en.pdf Looking at the global picture, however, we should probably be teaching Chinese and Japanese. Blogs written in Japanese on the Web now outnumber those written in English, and Chinese is catching up fast. Source: Sifry's Alerts State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html Or should we be teaching Arabic?

Andy asks: It depends on what you mean by e-learning. To most people e-learning is associated with online and/or distance learning, but our Department for Education and Skills (DfES) says something quite different. I have recently been employed as a consultant by the Standards Unit of the DfES to assist with the production of a so-called "E-learning Toolkit" for language teachers in adult education. It consists of a CD-ROM and an accompanying book. The DfES's definition of e-learning that we have to work with is a catch-all defintion, ranging from using a word-processor for producing printed handouts to a full-blown VLE. A large part of the E-learning Toolkit focuses on the imaginative use of a word-processor and producing PowerPoint presentations for use on an interactive whiteboard. We hardly mention VLEs - which are rarely accessible to teachers in adult education, many of whom teach just a couple of evening classes each week in church halls and school classrooms in the twilight hours. There is just a short definition of a VLE in the Glossary. We do, however, say quite a bit about Web resources in general. The E-Learning Toolkit Glossary contains the following definition of e-learning, as approved by the DfES: "E-learning is learning facilitated and supported through the use of information and communications technology. It may involve the use of, for example, computers, interactive whiteboards, digital cameras, the internet, the college intranet, virtual learning environments and electronic communication tools such as email, discussion boards, chat facilities and video conferencing. The DfES consultative document ‘Towards a unified e-learning strategy’, says the following: ‘E-learning exploits interactive technologies and communication systems to improve the learning experience. It has the potential to transform the way we teach and learn across the board… It cannot replace teachers and lecturers, but alongside existing methods it can enhance the quality and reach of their teaching.’ " DfES, 2003