June 2006 Archives

A hierarchy of languages

In a BBC online article about the need to promote non-European languages in British schools, Dr Anderson of Goldsmiths College is quoted as follows:

It's a question of status - the message has been that these languages are less important. We need to get to a point where we don't think in terms of foreign languages and community languages, where there isn't this sense of a hierarchy of languages, where all forms of language learning are valued.

Low Threshold Applications

A Low Treshold Application (LTA) is defined as a teaching/learning application of information technology that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and (incrementally) inexpensive. There is a lot in it that I like; I like the idea of incorporating existing technologies that are already well-established and avaialble, which might already be used by both teachers and learners.

Cracking up

I have just cleaned out our links database, which I do once a year. About 10% of the links were broken, similar to last year. Unless ESL is particularly bad for this, it doesn't bode well for the web. So much of the web is dependent on links, yet such a high breakage rate means that after a few years much of it will be unreadable, and particularly in areas like blogs where people tend to respond to things they have seen on the web and post their thoughts and the link.