Free phone calls with Skype

I've just taken delivery of my new Skype phone. This combines a standard mobile with Skype's use of the Internet to make free calls. Even the phone itself comes free with a monthly contract. It’s got all you’d expect from the best mobiles - like a 2 megapixel camera, big high-res display and music player. You can also surf the web and watch TV. Take your pick from over 500,000 music tracks. And of course, chat or talk to your mates on Skype for free. All at the touch of a button. The Skype to Skype calls suffer a bit from the sort of voice-lags that you get in long-distance calls - and the quality is iffy. But what the heck - it's free.

The Skype phone sounds pretty cool, but there are other devices that can surf the web and watch TV and that's a computer! In fact, you're able to plug Hi-Res digital security cameras into your PC and remotely view them via the internet. In essence, you've changed a PC into a DVR! Now that's pretty cool technology!

Sonny Rollins

This picture of Sonny says everything about him: funny, incredibly hip, and still going strong at seventy-eight. He's one of the few jazz musicians to regularly inject humour into his improvisations - which he does by executing unexpected key changes and making quotations from one tune whilst playing another. He also has a genius for extracting lyrical glories from the most unlikely material. Who else would think of playing Burton Lane's How Are Things in Glocca Morra or Noel Coward's Some Day I'll Find You. But he does, and like other great jazz artists, he takes them seriously, he knows the lyrics, and he plays them as if he means it. You can hear all this on what is still a standout albumn from his middle period - A Night at the Village Vanguard, or you can listen to him next week on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 23 November 2007 22:30-23:30.

Moodle Teaching Techniques

William H. Rice is something of a Moodle specialist. This is a follow up to his recent Moodle: E-Learning Course Development in which he seeks to explain the finer points of Moodle's dizzying array of features and how they can be used to construct ever more sophisticated models of online teaching and learning. This guide looks at the current and the future versions of Moodle. For instance, many tutors want to control the sequence of the student's progress through a course, so that they need to understand one topic before they pass on to the next. This is called 'activity locking', which is not available in the currently popular Moodle 1.8 version, but will be by the time version 2.0 appears. This is a good way of future-proofing ... Read more >>

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The Myth of Mars and Venus

A notion has sprung up in the last decade or so that men and women use language differently - even that they are psychologically and genetically hard-wired for language in different ways. This notion has solidified around the expression 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus', which was the title of a book which became a best-seller in 1992. This current book is Deborah Cameron's exploration of that idea from the perspective of an academic specialist in the field. Not to hold back on her conclusions unnecessarily, she points out that the notion is complete rubbish. There isn't any proof or justification for it in any of the published research. There are only vague 'surveys' and pop-journalism which make claims which evaporate under the scrutiny of rigorous examination. So the question immediately arises - why is this myth so widespread and enthusiastically accepted as a universal truth? ... Read more >>

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David Mamet

Some years ago (longer than I care to remember) I picked up a couple of VHS tapes which had been remaindered in a media bucket shop in York (where I was teaching on an Open University summer school). They were The House of Games and Something Changed by David Mamet, whose work at that time I didn't know. They made an immediate impact on me: tremendous dialogue, tightly plotted, clever,spare, and obviously the latest manifestation of the American naturalist tradition. Since then I have sought out his work wherever possible. He's really good at creating menace, suspense, and mystery. But last night I watched The Spanish Prisoner for about the fourth time - and I began to wonder. His plots centre heavily on conspiracy against the underdog - and you are expected to believe that an awful lot of people are in on the act of creating alternative worlds which baffle the hero or heroine. Restaurants which disappear; squads of CIA agents who are all phoney; hoards of hoods dressed in rented cop's uniforms.

In this particular film there's another plot weakness. The hero is working on a secret formula ('the process') in a big business - yet we're expected to believe that there's only one copy of the formula in handwritten form in an A4 notebook. Come on David - get real!

But that's after four viewings. He's still good entertainment.

The Bedside Virginia Woolf

This is a really curious book, both in appearance and content. The text is presented in double columns like a Victorian newspaper, and its subject is just about everything you could think of regarding Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury - but offered in quick snatches and potted summaries. It's not a continuous narrative but a series of overlapping sketches and thematic surveys. The chapters switch from biography to social history, then on to Woolf's major fictional writing, and back again to the geography of Bloomsbury, the houses they all lived in, and their relationships with feminism, the two world wars, and even animals. This renders the treatment rather superficial, but I imagine it will make the book more interesting to the people it is aimed at - because new characters, incidents, and themes are coming up on almost every page... Read more >>

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