Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for July, 2010

Additions on reading schemes

Posted in Uncategorized on 08/07/2010| Leave a Comment »

This month I’ve been taking a long hard look at the Storylines grading scheme with a view to rewriting it. Some of the ideas that have come out of this have been added to the existing article Preparing Reading Schemes which is now three paragraphs longer.

Read Full Post »

Downloads

Posted in Uncategorized on 06/07/2010| 6 Comments »

“The Author” repeats some stats on the brave new world of digital music, in the context of the excitement among writers about the alleged but hypothetical fortunes to be made from e-books.

An American site (www.informationisbeautiful.net) calculated how many downloads etc a musician had to sell to earn the “US minimum monthly wage”. This is how it runs:

Self-pressed CDs … 143

iTunes album downloads … 1,229

iTunes track downloads … 12,339

Then it points out that now music is often streamed rather than downloaded. To earn the minimum monthly wage from last.fm a track would need to be played 1,546,667 times in a month.

On Spotify, a track would have to be played 4,549,020 times.

As Bob Dylan sang with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival, “Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?”

Not digital media, that’s for sure!

Read Full Post »

Listening

Posted in Uncategorized on 05/07/2010| Leave a Comment »

New article on Listening and mobiles added to ELT articles.

Read Full Post »

Video availability

Posted in ELT on 05/07/2010| 1 Comment »

A discussion is starting to take place in the comments under “Bibliography” on video availability. Please join in if you have anything to add. We were shocked when OUP deleted most of our videos in 2009, after years of leading the market in purpose-made ELT video. We were told that “teachers only want the news now” which shows little awareness of the lower levels, or the efficacy of video as a teaching tool. IATEFL a few years ago abandoned the video SIG (Special Interest Group), and placed members in the Literature SIG which showed no awareness of what classroom video is either. I had no interest in the “Literature” group though graded readers are a great area of interest.

Read Full Post »