Voice of America

Here is a link to a page on Voice of America http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2010-01-30-voa2.cfm it has a streaming MP3 function so you can listen to the reading.
The reading is a bit slow in my opinion. However, I do believe it has potential. Text could be deleted to make a cloze test. Lara mentioned in her blog http://huiren1983.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-proposal-for-action-plan.html
that she felt the BBC spoken English was too fast. Maybe the answer is to switch to VoA. Maybe students could read and listen to the text from the VoA article above and then record their version.

Reading children's stories

To back up my suggestion for reading poetry, well why not children's stories.
There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats. That was a quote by Rat.
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GraWind.html
Maybe story telling at CityU would be good for us, any comments ?

Re conference call

I would like to start a poetry reading group on the campus in the gardens. There are small shelters there, near a babbling stream (OK so it is artificial, but you can't win them all). Maybe those interested could meet with some tea or coffee and read and listen. However as Robbie pointed out we are all busy. SKYPE has a conference call system. Maybe interested parties should try this as well. I have used SKYPE for years but never used that function. Can anybody throw light on it ?

Hail !

All hail Streaker Foomeister !

Re old computers

So some folk have many computers, and some have none. I have an old computer sitting in my drawer that needs fixing. I wonder how many geeks or non geeks have old dead or not so dead computers lying around. I used to work for Acer in Taiwan and they used to do part exchange deals. The engineers would build bitza computers. I wonder if smart guys could teach their students how to get dead computers working and then donate them to needy children. I noticed a web site that recycles old printers, it sells cheap ink as well. INK-HK.COM

An ex workmate lived in a very affluent area in Hong Kong. People would dump their unwanted computers. She would take a screwdriver and take the hard disk, the price was right as well !

Poetry reading

If anybody was disappointed by Wednesday's poetry reading what about doing one outside on the campus, when we have time ? I guess we are all a bit too busy these days.

Second Life

This was a new one on me. It did cross my mind that a history lesson might just become far more interesting if the students could actually visit any sites of study. March with the Roman army maybe ? A biology lesson where the student goes into the pond to study the life cycle of a frog? This has a lot of potential. A geography lesson where the student could go into an active volcano? What ever next ? Years ago I had a Land Rover, I worked on it but did not really understand how the engine worked until I stripped out an engine and took it apart. Now, if I had the opportunity of wandering around inside a working engine, I would have understood it a lot better. It took me a long time to figure out how a differential worked, it would have been quicker if had been able to clamber inside a virtual differential. In the end I would rebuild differentials that the Land Rover specialists would not touch.