Caroline
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Homepage: http://www.constellata.com
Posts by Caroline
Follow the money
Apr 8th
I recently contributed to an article published by Sylvia Guinan’s blog on future trends in digital learning in which I concluded with the quote “follow the money…”. This was interpreted by some readers as meaning that you should focus on doing things that make you money, whereas what I meant was that to understand the behaviour of new businesses active in English Language Teaching (ELT) you often need to look at their financial motivation and how they plan to make money from their efforts.
“Follow the money” was coined in the 1975 film “All the President’s Men” to show how journalists can uncover illegal behaviour by following money trails. But the term is also useful for understanding perfectly legal behaviour, even though some find the idea of big business making big bucks from education distasteful.
So, what are ELT’s money trails, and what do they mean? And why does this matter?
The Janus Moment in (BAL)EAP
May 11th
I attended BALEAP’s biennial conference at Nottingham University 2013, which was a great opportunity to catch up with the world of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). I was there with Epigeum to meet potential clients and authors for its forthcoming English for Academic Studies courses. The conference theme was “The Janus Moment” in honour of the Roman god Janus, who presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and thus war and peace. In this case, the organisers were less interested in war, more interested in the analogy of looking back at the development of EAP over the past 40 years, and also looking to the future with the growth of English as a medium of instruction in Higher Education, EAP is becoming an increasingly important area. The conference was busy, lots of participants and great sessions, which you can see from the conference programme, but I was only able to attend a few, More >
IATEFL Failure Fest
May 2nd
I’m ashamed to see how long it is since I last updated this blog, I’ve been busy on some very exciting e-learning projects, and working as a member of the IATEFL Conference committee. One of my highlights was working with Ken Wilson to organise the Failure Fest evening at the Liverpool conference, and reading the various reviews made me feel very proud. I was inspired to suggest the Failure Fest event after attending a similar event of that name organised by Nesta late in 2012, in which presenters shared their experiences of failure and learning in various educational contexts. You can see the video of our event at IATEFL Online.
Book Machine interview: 5 questions on mobile language learning
Nov 7th
As you can see from the paucity of entries below, I’ve been busy on other things this year, notably working on Word Carrot with my LearnAhead colleagues. You can see here my recent interview with Sophie O’Rourke from emc design on the Book Machine blog. We had a great discussion in the coffee bar of the British Library last week, talking about the development of Word Carrot and the challenges we have faced as a new and unknown publisher against 700,000 other apps in the Apple App Store. Word Carrot is doing well, we’ve had well over 50,000 downloads of the UK and US versions in the past three months, people are using and updating it and buying more levels.
Word Carrot
Feb 14th
Word Carrot is LearnAhead’s first iPhone app published on the app store on 5 January 2012. It’s a free app with 90 words and will soon be updated to enable learners to buy more words through in-app purchase. We will then release a US English version, and an iPad version, though the current version also works on iPad. In the longer term we hope to publish for Android and in other languages. The accompanying website has articles and free worksheets that teachers can use for teaching the word sets featured in the apps.