Child Language Acquisition

[Susan Wilde]

browsing through some old emails from the Eng Lang list I found this recommendation from Dan

Next Tuesday's programme of Child of Our Time should be interesting for Child Language Acquisition. Site for the programme is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/childofourtime/

to which my first thought was - ooo - I missed that!

to which my next thougth was :

I was at an ILT day in Solihull yesterday and the ppl from the Britsh University Film and Video Council gave a presentation which included lots of details about how to access archive TV progs since 1998 - it costs money to join - but they have ALL the terrestial TV progs on record there and you can access them *gasp*

worth finding out more about -

http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/

susan

Edited October 5, 2004 by Susan Wilde

[John Simkin]

I was at an ILT day in Solihull yesterday and the ppl from the Britsh University Film and Video Council gave a presentation which included lots of details about how to access archive TV progs since 1998 - it costs money to join - but they have ALL the terrestial TV progs on record there and you can access them *gasp*

Very useful information. Did they give any advice on copyright? Is it still the case that the programmes have to be wiped after being used in the classroom?

[Susan Wilde]

It was just a brief introductory talk, John, and they ran through lots of details and info which I haven't exactly "made my own" yet!

I do not recall anything being said along the lines you have just mentioned. I'm also not sure how accessible it will be for schools, as the talk was for FE practitioners, and they seemed to be grouping HE and FE - so this would be another thing to find out about.

[Guest Andrew Moore]

Between them the BBC and the various recipients of lottery cash are making more and more stuff available in digital format.

The Old Bailey online and Moving Here sites are good examples. I am confident that over the next decade the amount of this stuff will multiply massively (following Moore's law - not mine, I hasten to add).

That's because there is state money (loads of it) committed to the job by the DCMS, the job is becoming far easier to do, the storage is ever cheaper, and high-speed connections mean that it can arrive in schools and colleges, without being slowed down on the public Internet. You won't need to keep it, but just to know where it is, and pick it up when you want to use it.

Schools and colleges have different funding systems generally, but there may be some convergence in network technologies - the regional grids will join to form the National Schools Network, which will become effectively joined to the JANET (joint academic network), and on to various government services.

The purchasing power of the schools' network, by regional aggregation, should soon ensure that it can buy into any good deals that the universities enjoy...

Some kinds of content will be held back by copyright law - but I suspect that that date of 1998 is relevant. My guess is that since then, the broadcasters (the BBC, certainly) will have altered the contracts for performers and production companies, so that they are able to use the broadcasts online without restriction.

But the point of the DCMS lottery funding is to digitize content that already belongs to the nation or local authorities, who want to make it available freely. Also, one consequence of the e-government legislation is that public authorities have to put various kinds of document onto the Web. While copyright law will still apply, individual users can help themselves to this stuff...