Dreams to weave

The next task is to start planning an educational website. So, what to do? A site for language teaching? English? Polish?? Or maybe IT? Perhaps a combination of the two, an IT site for language learners or a site where learning English and IT go hand in hand? The key will be the delivery. It can't be loads of information with some behaviourist drill and practice exercises. It needs to encompass the concept of 'Invenio' - discovery, and be essentially constructivist with the learner in control as much as possible, with perhaps the site acting as scaffolding. It will also need to have a certain degree of interactivity. Not just point and click but real activity. However, that is easier said than done. True interactivity involves some form of communication between the user and the site and I'm not sure if my programming skills are up to that. A discussion forum would add interactivity but that requires a community and you can't manufacture a community for a site without driving traffic to it. PHP and MySQL? I think that's probably beyond the scope of this project. So, I'm planning to build an interactive site which enables users to discover English and IT in an environment which they have control. Hmmmm.... that shouldn't take long then.

Grammar a model for language?

For one of my courses I was asked to look at the uses of modelling in my area of teaching. As I've spent the last few years attempting to teach English as a foreign language, I thought I'd look at grammar. On the face of it grammar should be the perfect model for language learning. Learn the model for sentence structure, pop in a few words and hey presto - language!

Here's a sentence structure for an English sentence.

Subject (S) + Verb (V) + Object (O) + Adverbial (A)

So.....

“The girl sang the song beautifully.”

..fits perfectly into our model. But what about...

“My cat teaches sausages on Wednesdays.”

It fits the model - but it means nothing. Unless you have a strange cat and a packet of highly intelligent sausages!

Then again, what about...

“Strong is Vader. Mind what you have learned. Save you it can"

This doesn't fit our model, but we can understand it and, more importantly, so could Luke Skywalker and he was thus able to save the universe.

Is language too complex to be modelled accurately by computers? Will chatterbots ever really be able hold convincing conversations? Should we bother? Should we not just talk to each other?

New Year ( well Chinese New Year anyway) New Blog.

I doubt if anyone will be moved to read this blog as I Intend to use it as a means of compiling my thoughts during my MEd ICT course at a large university in North West England. Best not say where in case any 'pointy hairs' or Waterstone's management find out. However, if you are reading - Hello! The info here will be about the use of IT in education - I think ICT is such a crap term. A symbol of how education prides itself on being out of step with the rest of the world. Most of the stuff will be about the Internet, databases, modelling and language teaching. I'll probably also moan about how hard life is as a student, having to be at lectures by 10am - three times a week. "Oh the hardship" I hear you cry.