Martin Dougiamas, father of Moodle

Great interview with Martin Dougiamas, father of Moodle, at Moodlemoot in Bamberg: “Moodle is really a system of control. The web 2.0 is very much about complete freedom and openness and lack of privacy. And Moodle is obviously oriented to what institutions care about, which is about walls and protected spaces, and this just allows […]

Why do you take pictures?

The Wind Blows It All Away from bob sprankle on Vimeo. I’ve stopped taking pictures, let alone putting them in an album the way I used to. Are blogs and photostreams etc. the new photoalbums? But isn’t having pictures on the computer very different? How do you keep and look at your pictures? Source: twitter […]

Lost on games or just sold on Zapdramatic?

All you need to feel like an old fart is to spend a few hours spread over a few days trying to imagine what learners of English could get out of playing online games. This is really quite hard for me,  just learning to move around and react to virtual surroundings makes me feel like […]

British Rail and buzz

Going to IATEFL next week, and buzzed about it, too. Yesterday I gave up trying to book a train on British Rail and decided to go by bus from Heathrow to Cardiff after all. Why? The interface kept asking me to make decisions for the system about which options were best for me. Hey, that’s […]

He loves Brazil

I saw a dear friend today who travelled to Brazil with her 10-year old son late last summer. One of the stories she told has added a bounce to my step all day: When they landed and wanted to go through customs, there wasn’t a guard in sight anywhere. So they settled down for a […]

Hot rod

Thanks, Rod, for this video about a new kind of hot rod (hehe, sorry, couldn’t resist), the fastest street-legal electric car. “The beamer (=BMW) lost against the zombie.” I just wonder: this racing uses up a lot of electricity, so it’s not the “greener” car at this speed, is it? PS: This is a great […]

Two Englishmen are standing on a corner…

… when a woman drives up. She asks, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” “No, sorry, I don’t.” “¿Habla español?” “I’m afraid not, sorry.” “Parlez-vous français?” “Unfortunately, no, not a word.” Frustrated, she drives off. So one guy says to the other, “Hey, maybe we should learn a foreign language.” “What a waste of time,” says the other. […]