Really good day in Pamplona at la Escuela Oficial de Idiomas conference. Thank you to all the teachers, the organisation, and Silvia and Duncan at OUP. As promised, here is the handout:

EOI handout

Hope to see you again

Jamie :)

BBELT handout

PS Did anyone else feel like they were going to come out on a football pitch when we walked through the tunnel to lunch?

Larry Lessig (second last video on the page) asserts that outdated copyright laws have turned our children into criminals. Kirby Ferguson would seem to echo that in his recently-completed Everything is a Remix series.

Finally, two TED talks worth watching – the first is an early one from 2007 by campaigner Larry Lessig:

The second is from earlier this year. Teacher-writer Clay Shirky talks about SOPA and PIPA:

Jack was wandering at his favourite place in the mountain range of Sierra Nevada, California. He was heading towards the bridge – that huge, oddly smelling thing. There was something fascinating about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger (paws) on. It was such an amazing masterpiece of architecture that made even him admit that those noisy fur-stealers, as he always called humans, were actually good at something.

When he got to the bridge he took a deep breath, letting the odd scent of the place get to his lungs, his head and every part of his body. That scent! Oh, he loved it! The smell of the woods, the river and the bridge itself mixed in the air calmed him down even on his worst days and he felt like he couldn’t get enough of it.

He wandered on with his eyes half closed, sometimes taking a quick look at the alley under the bridge and he couldn’t help but smile and thought: ‘Yes, I love life.’

As he got to the middle of the bridge with this tiny but strong thought in his head he heard something. Something was buzzing but he didn’t care enough to open his eyes. A few minutes passed and the buzzing started to get stronger and stronger – it was so disturbing after a while that he couldn’t enjoy his Sunday afternoon walk.

He opened his eyes.

Something was coming towards him. It was quite fast and it didn’t seem to slow down. He had never seen anything like that before but as an eternal optimist he thought he could just wait for it to slow down and then they might get to know each other.

That never happened. Whatever it was it didn’t stop and it almost crashed into him but luckily Jack was able jump out of its way and he landed on the ledge of the bridge. He was so shocked by whatever it was that he lost his balance and fell off the ledge.

For a second he thought he would die but suddenly an inner, instinctive self of him took over his muscles and made him catch the ledge with his paws. After a few minutes of hanging there he finally managed pull himself up so he was safe.

For now, he added in his thoughts.

Jack watched as the Sun went down and once again let the scent of the bridge embrace him. It made his shock pass and he fell asleep with a smile on his face (chops).

What Jack couldn’t know was that his next day would be very busy.

A bunch of noisy fur-stealers came as soon as they heard what had happened to Jack. They seemed to be quite concerned about him so they decided to help him. However, they knew that Jack was afraid of a single ‘whatever it was’ so they didn’t want him to see all those machines that they brought in order to get him off the bridge.

So on the very next day when Jack was just about to open his eyes and get up (and figure his way down) something really strange happened. He was just stretching when he felt something itchy in his back. He wanted to turn and see what it was but suddenly he felt tired again and fell asleep.

The noisy fur-stealers waited exactly for that. They put a huge net under the bridge and tried to push Jack into it with a pole. It took them some time but in the end he landed in the net completely safe and sound.

The next thing he knew was that about ten noisy fur-stealers were standing around him, all watching him carefully and glancing at each other with suspicious smiles on their faces. They probably thought he wouldn’t notice it but no one can fool a bear!

He stretched again and as he stood up and was about to leave the noisy fur-stealers leaned back while one of them gently showed him the way back to the woods. And as Jack was a very polite bear he gave the noisy fur-stealer a smile and nodded in a friendly manner.

A week later he went down to the bridge to have his usual Sunday walk and tried to remember the happenings of last Sunday. He smiled as he took a deep breath of the cool, oddly smelling air. Maybe those noisy fur-stealers aren’t so bad after all, he thought to himself. They gave him the bridge and they managed to take him down as well. He murmured something and nodded – that case was officially closed.

He then wandered on, humming his favourite song.

Nyan Cat is a happy little guy. He has the the body of a cherry Pop-Tart and leaves an unbroken stream of rainbow fart wherever he goes. Originally, he cruised through the cosmos in silence. The catchy music that you hear was added by saraj00n just three days after launch date (note that as well as getting involved in pointless practices, young people these days don’t have normal names). This was not a planned collaboration. PRguitarman and saraj00n had never met before.

Nyan Cat proved to be very popular with the kids and the YouTube video went viral. But young people these days aren’t passive consumers. Since the happy digital feline was created, hundreds of remakes, remixes, parodies and mashups have been uploaded onto YouTube. Here are some of my favourites:

The Nyan Cat is an example of an Internet meme. Internet memes have a habit of coming together in diverse and unpredictable ways. Watch the following two videos and you will see what I mean:

Despite the fact that Nyan Cat was born only 4 months ago, it is most likely that his time is up. He now joins the Internet meme hall of fame where he can mingle with other stars such as dramatic chipmunk, badger badger badger and the sneezing panda.

In the clip, James Thomas, my friend and colleague who is also working with the group, makes a cameo appearance.

After hearing about the clip, I replayed this recording of myself. That way my students were able to see their teacher’s spoken text a second time. Their task was then to make a note of all of the new vocabulary that was introduced to them via the videotelling stage.

I played this clip at the Linguascope conference in Brighton this weekend. I’ll upload the entire presentation when I have a chance to edit it.

• Traps that teachers may fall into when making use of ‘authentic’ materials (practical).
• The trap of assuming that a piece of material is necessarily good because it is labelled authentic (theoretical).

I attempted to get around this problem by focusing on the first idea (the practical) and stopping 6 minutes and 40 seconds from the end to deal with the second idea in a Pecha Kucha form. You can see the Pecha Kucha below. For the full presentation, click here.

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fan called Jerry Levitan sneaked into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, the recording was  edited down to 5 minutes and illustrated.

Here is an interview with Salavdor Dalí. I’ve no idea what it’s all about but it’s strangely captivating.

Only 271 no-hitters have been recorded in Major League Baseball. In this radio interview with Doc Ellis, pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, the player talks about the famous 1970 no-hitter that he threw against the San Diego Padres while under the influence of LSD.