Pig Sty Avenue

Credit where it's due, it was M's idea, over breakfast, to have a blitz on the Wiki today. Which we did, the blogs too. This was somewhat political, to let MC see how hard we've been working. And now almost everyone is connected and blogging and writing. A Friday was the best time for this: weekend homework is to blog about what they're up to. Also, creative activity on the Internet is a process which involves revision and evolution, which is ideal activity for a homesick student with not-much-else to do.

It might be a good idea to have a Wiki day, whereby everyone works on the wiki - writing member profiles, writing-up their blogs, getting more links about their own fields of study, and this University...

Yesterday was the first full day of proper teaching, with the book in the morning and the TBL as the day progressed. The task followed on from the book (Language Leader Upper Int unit 2.5) and involved drawing up a survey questionnaire, and going out amongst the University staff and students and conducting it. They picked it up and ran with! Best bit of teaching/learning I've seen in years. This morning there will be feedback from them in the form of short presentations. It looks like it's going to work. Also, they were encouraged to video the surveying, and did. The VLE should look pretty lively if this continues. I've promoted half a dozen students to moderate the Wiki - give them a sense of ownership and give me less work. The thing I haven't done is to collate all of the test results. Which is a result of the biggest problem I have: being course leader and teaching full time is a considerable time-burden. If I was doing this again, I would draw up a timeta...

Started actual teaching from the book this morning, which went well. And then this afternoon setting up links to the Wiki, blogs, etc. We tried to do it with all the students in one room, which was a mistake - it would have been better managed in smaller groups, and taught stage by stage. And there was a problem with their laptops sending cookies or wtf to blogspot and googlemail to say the users were Chinese, and they had to manually adjust the language. It was a bit raggy around the edges, and it took far longer than expected. But it did work. The lesson was, leave nothing to chance, do a carefully staged lesson plan, and factor in the need to change the host sites' language settings.

50-something speaking tests between myself and M. today. A. kept them bus meanwhile. They are both excellent teachers, though M is rather depressing company outside of the classroom. Very keen students - keen, cheerful and friendly despite lingering jet-lag. Unless MC (the new anonymization of the BTM Big Cheese, the M being for Malignant, and you can guess the C if I tell you Paulie used the phrase in The Sopranos), manages to spoil things remotely or on an unscheduled visit. And here's a thing: in a speaking test for Chinese students, the phrase "How are you?" will leave them nonplussed. Tomorrow, we get into the Wiki and the blogging. By Wednesday, it should be running along... The research perspective is great: success or failure is all good data. Objectivity's the thing. Or something.

I got here just after three, watched the first half of Newcastle v Everton in the social club, the second half in CSA, which is the Union. Had a very poor burger there, and poor beer in both places. After a snooze, and very groggy, met up with “Mike” & “Alison” in the bar at the Management Suite, where we are staying for the first week. We made arrangements for tomorrow morning, and I tried to reassure them that everything would be fine once we actually got started: it’s normal to feel anxious in a new teaching situation, but once you’re in the classroom, you’re in a situation you’ve been in a 1000 times before, and you can handle it. The only problem is that they aren’t happy about the rotation of classes, where by each of us will teach each of the three classes during the course of the day. They thought that this would mean they didn’t get to know the students, and that it would be impossible to learn 56 Chinese names; (M said it would be like learning a take-away menu, which...

On the train from Nottingham to Home. The preparations for the course have been completed despite the fact that almost everyone, DoS and “Project Manager” included, has been teaching a lot this week. It culminated in a final meeting when the two other teachers and myself were given lanyards and essentially told not to let the side down by “PM”. At least she’d managed to get the photocopying done. Another last minute hitch was that she’d baulked at copying my nine page grammar test. So we’re to go with BTM’s own test. I didn’t put up too much of a fight on that because I could see the practical objections – one page against nine. And I’ve got my own speaking test, which is approved of if not fully understood. Another battle has been going on all week over the hours. They have contracted for no less than 40 contact hours per week, which is going it some. And, when one of the teachers pointed out that getting from Bedfordshire to the East Midlands on the M1, on a Friday evening ...

The first full afternoon of this course I'm writing is the last piece in the jigsaw - an introduction to get them into the wiki, and into blogging. And I didn't get it done today because the office is too crowded with people, the computers are shit, and the big cheese is a fucking fruitcake. The teachers seem anxious. I won't get the first-full-afternoon stuff done tomorrow because I'm teaching all day. We start next Monday. I wondered this morning if I wasn't being taken for a twat - I've put this course together in-between teaching, and, frankly, it's looking pretty good. Proof of the pudding, and all that, but we'll see. And if it goes well, then, maybe I have allowed myself to be taken for a twat, and I should do this stuff freelance or something.

Another thing to look up when I've got time.

Here's a note to self to look up this camera when I'm less busy...

I remember when I was first online... It was 1995 because Windows 95 was the latest thing. And I found this pic in an image search and printed it out and passed it to people, I thought it was so cool. And everyone else did too. It was when "I got it off the internet" still had the ring of glamour rather than sleaze. I stumbled on it when doing a google search for something unconnected. I seem to remember there were a number of variations on the theme. Wonder who drew it? It's a really well proportioned drawing. And anyway, what's the connexion between cats and drugs, you know, the whole jazz cat thing? Is it because they're so cool, at peace with themselves? Does cann***s put one into an agreeable cat-like state? Was this maybe ever on a tee-shirt?

...It's dinosaurs fucking robots !

Another work spin-off, note to self, wtf... Podbean. Switchpod . I haven't had much chance to check them out, but first impressions are, Podbean has less space (30mb) but is slicker. Switchpod says it's 200mb but is prone to freeze and doesn't say how much per upload.

Thanks to Beebo for putting me on to this... I'm thinking that expensive VLEs are unnecessary with all this technology. Link up a wiki, google site, youtube, a blog, email address, and away-the-fuck you go! You've got a de-facto VLE, which is tailor made. Or something.

I'm now, very now, putting together a Wiki for the pre-sessional I'm designing, and part of the course will be about podcasting. Anyway, for The Avenue's regular TEFL teaching readers, here's a link to some very useful looking podcasts at Splendid Speaking . And it's also a good name for EFL podcasts, don't you think? Back to the grindstone...

A DMU Classic .

I like this idea . lol works as a reply to a funny remark. But it's a bit freaky when somebody's initiating a conversation, and intersperses their discourse with lol s - it suggests an image of some numpty sitting typing, laughing helplessly at their own humour-free remarks, like a nervously deranged drunk.

I wouldn't say I'm unhappy with the Leica, it's just that, after shooting about 8 or 9 rolls, I'm not exactly in love with it. If you see what I mean. Maybe it's because I dropped it whilst loading up the car, and whilst it didn't take any damage beyond a dink to the rewind knob, I realized that it was all a wee bit too precious. Better off with the Sporti which, if it got smashed up in a mugging, or wtf, well, that would be the least of it. Or put it another way, if I'm in the pub on my own I can leave the camera on the table whilst I go out-the-back. And I might just stick with 120. Maybe a Rolleiflex ? On the way to the Hasselblad. That's the beauty of eBay: the Leica won't gather dust, it will go on to fund the next idea. I wouldn't rule out another DSLR, in the far off future.

For your comment on the post which mentioned those bastards who manage Kodak . It's always good to get a real life bit of solidarity. I thought I'd see what the bastards were up to, and got this on google news, which is a marvellous example of the horror of globalized capitalist discourse. Which chimed in with some thinking and reading I'm doing as the Mod5 assignment undergoes some last minute reorientation. In particular, I encountered from Gray (2002) (you can't get the article online, here are articles that cite it). And there I came across the PARSNIP concept, which really I should have read about before. It's the ELT publishers rough and ready guide to what can't go into commercial texts: no Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, -Isms or Pork. What else is there? Gray, J. (2002). The global coursebook in English language teaching. In D. Block & D. Cameron (Eds.), Globalization and language teaching (pp. 151-167). New York: Routledge.

Is what the "Project Manager" said to me. She had the good grace, perhaps from subconscious motives, to pronounce the word "branding" in a slightly ironic way. Because what she meant was, I email her the fruits of my labour and she puts headers onto the documents - nowt original, just a coloured strip across the top.

I don't fully understand.

Living in what used to be called digs. It’s a decent house with good people, but it’s far from home. If I was in Libya, say, it would actually be less lonesome. It’s such a different culture, you just exist in your own way. You’re there for a certain time, and that’s it – you pace yourself, earn your wages, make the best of it, and then get home. Whereas, working away from home in England, you’re actually part of your own culture, and evidence of your missing family is everywhere.

It's a hoot .

I'd forgotten about Voigtlanders. And I was taking an interest back in July . I really loved using that Kodak 66 , and only got rid of it in protest against Kodak's current business practices . Folders are great fun. A lot depends on the exact nature of the enlarger I'm getting from Number 1 daughter. Can it do 6x6 or even 6x9? We shall see...

It's a sad fact of the relationship between people and dogs.

At home for a few days, and managed to find time to sort out the rolls of film I had around the place. Two colour ones, which I put into Boots, and this Fuji N?eopan 1600, which is mostly of the night Santa turned the Christmas lights on in Saltcoats. I particularly like this one of the bairn, not least because it was quite tricky to get right as she whizzed past on the wee swing-round about thingummy. I'm edging towards another change of direction with photography. Have a year with the Ilford Sporti, as I think I already blogged , but also flog the Leica and get a Hasselblad , in due course. I want to take more detailed, sharper photos, and I think that means 120 film and Zeiss lenses . Do my own prints: maybe go the whole hog and frame the buggers myself, too. See, a Leica can give excellent quality for its size, and it's unobtrusive. But I don't know that I want to do unobtrusive any more. Frankly, I find "street candid" increasingly creepy: only street ...

The research situation is 56 Chinese aeronautical and turbine engineers on a three week (in effect) pre-sessional course at a private University which specialises in courses for the aircraft industries. My brief is to get them acculturated, to UK academic mores, as well as the UK generally, and “to get them talking”. The course-design is already well under way. Mornings will be taught around a conventional commercial text, but the afternoons (and the evenings) will be TBL, using a number of projects or “skills assignments”, some of which will involve trips out. There’ll be three classes and three teachers, and we’ll shuffle the classes around so we get to know them all. So, for the research I need comprehensive before and after testing and questionnaires – I can put to good use the limitations I found with my last research in Libya, when I wasn’t involved from the start so there was no comprehensive early data, and my end-questionnaire was a rather “blunt little knife”. All of t...

I was going to stay in the Midlands this weekend and work on the MA, but this morning [Friday] I woke up with an urgent need to get home. I spent the morning in the last session with my one-to-one student, and then got on a bus for the city centre and the railway station. I’m drafting this an hour and a half from Glasgow. I need to get home to process the week’s events at BTM. On Tuesday morning there was an inch or so of snow. I got to work to find the building with the staff room and most of the classrooms was locked “due to bad weather”. One of the teachers – like me, a former lawyer – soon put me straight: the landlord had descended overnight, “despite the falling snow” and changed the locks. The reasons are mysterious, but it seems likely that BTM had leased the building from the tenant in breach of that tenant’s agreement with the head landlord. Or something. None of us really knows. The big cheese of BTM may simply have not being paying the rent. Classes were cancelled ...

I'm told this is very funny, but I can't listen to it because I'm at work. So I've embedded it here for later.

RIP DMU , originally uploaded by °๋§ ợ§ღєηŧ . It's a long story...

This was on the agenda at work yesterday: if one's having students prepare PP presentations, you might want to store them somewhere free, and the obvious place would be, say, Flickr or YouTube. So you need the software, and I've wasted spent a lot of time searching. Anyhoo, this Microsoft thingummy looks like the best bet IF you're running Office 2003, which, on my own laptop, I'm not at the moment. I also need to think about how you'd tie in the audio track, say on a Pecha Kucha presentation, (which, incidentally, I'm going to refer to as PKs from hereon in).

Is a googlewhack.

This might be good if you need to convert files . Haven't tried it myself mind...

This PowerPoint is a fair intro to TBL.

Zen PowerPoint . Endless possibilities. Difficult to make boring, though no doubt some you know could manage it.