Polyglot Plurality (2)
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Ted Neward (7)
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Interoperability Happens (5)
1 day, 14 hours
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The Pragmatic Programmer says, "Learn a new language every year". This is great advice, not just because it puts new tools into your mental toolbox that you can pull out on various occasions to get a job done, but also because it opens your mind to new ideas and new concepts that will filter their way into your code even without explicit language support. For example, suppose you've looked at (J/Iron)Ruby or Groovy, and come ...
Two thoughts on Euro 2008 and Web globalization (1)
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John Yunker (4)
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Global by Design (4)
5 days, 2 hours
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Congratulations to Spain for emerging on top of Euro 2008. I can’t say that I was pulling for any one team, but I would have loved to have seen Germany score a last-second goal to keep the tournament alive. Being the globalization geek that I am, I couldn’t help but check out the home page of Yahoo! Spain, which features a localized header, shown here: And then I noticed that the home page of Yahoo! ...
More Language in our school (1)
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RossA (0)
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Primary Teacher UK (0)
5 days, 12 hours
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There has been a big leap in the number of primary schools teaching children foreign languages. Minister for Schools and Learners Jim Knight welcomed news that 84% of primary schools now teach children another language, up from 70% on the previous year and nearly double the 44% in 2002. Research from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) published today shows that traditional languages dominate, with French being most popular (89% of schools which teach ...
BBC Languages (4)
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Martin (87)
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gHacks technology news (74)
1 week, 1 day
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BBC Languages is a website by the BBC that is providing language courses for several popular languages such as German, French, Spanish and Chinese. A language portal was constructed for each language that is used as the main hub for that language. From there students can get a quick fix of the selected language which is a great way to learn some phrases in the language. Especially useful if your trip starts the other day ...
Using Voki and a blog in a sequence of three lessons (2)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
1 week, 2 days
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I have recently been looking into motivating pupils, boys in particular, to speak in the target language and I have been studying the use of Voki and my subject blog as the means to achieve this objective. Having laid out the rationale for the use of Web 2.0 for this purpose in a previous post, I would like to explain exactly what I did in these three lessons and how I planned them. I was ...
Lingual Dexterity - Objective Caml Overview (1)
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Jim Fiorato (0)
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WriteBetterBits.com - Jim Fiorato's Blog (0)
1 week, 2 days
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Yep, that's right. Objective Caml. Objective Caml is an implementation of the Caml language, that adds some object oriented concepts to make it a multi-paradigm language. I chose Objective Caml because it's currently the language of choice of the course I'm currently taking (Prolog to follow. tee hee). In addition, it's a pretty good language for an introduction to functional programming, despite it's object oriented features.If you're looking for a good tutorial on the language, ...
EUfeeds: what are European journalists writing about? (1)
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Ernst-Jan Pfauth (25)
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The Next Web (34)
1 week, 4 days
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When you favorite blog or news site has a slow day, you might wanna turn to different news sources. A good alternative is Eufeeds, this site is fed by 500 hundred feeds from European newspapers. People from 28 different countries can check what their nations’ journalists are writing about. When you see a headline that arouses some curiosity, the article opens in a fancy Ajax layer - you know the type: inner screen pop-up that ...
JVM-Based Languages Grow In Popularity (10)
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Reuven Lerner (1)
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OStatic blogs (15)
1 week, 5 days
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When Sun Microsystems first unveiled Java in 1995, it was hard to define. That's because Java has several parts: It is, of course, an object-oriented programming language. Java is also a standard (or multiple standards, including mobile, standard, and enterprise versions) that defines the language, as well as the libraries that a programmer can expect to have available with each version. Finally, Java is a "virtual machine" (the "JVM"), a software environment on which Java ...
Conditionally displaying sIFR text for different languages using content negotiation with Django at Aral Balkan (3)
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aral (0)
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Aral Balkan (0)
2 weeks
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I'm using sIFR on the new Singularity teaser site (not least because Mark Wubben is speaking at the conference, mind you) and ran into an issue today with extended characters (such as extended Western characters, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) not displaying properly as they weren't embedded into the Flash text field. Getting extended Western characters working is not too difficult as you can embed most of them in the sIFR SWF without increasing the size of ...
Wordle: using word clouds in a lesson (3)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
2 weeks, 1 day
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There has been a flurry of posts in the edublogosphere this week about Wordle, a very useful tool that allows you to create word clouds from text (or del.icio.us tags). It’s very simple to use: you just copy text in any language, paste it into Wordle and it will sift through it and create clouds with the most commonly occurring words in the text. You can then edit the shape, the colours and the font ...
JavaScript 2.0, aka ECMAScript 4 (3)
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Jens Alfke (3)
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Thought Palace (3)
2 weeks, 2 days
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I just discovered that there is an ECMAScript 4—better known as JavaScript 2.0—in development. As a shameless language slut, I immediately dove into the language overview, and it’s pretty neat. This turns JavaScript into a much more useable language, that I could see doing serious development in. I’m well aware that today’s JS isn’t a “toy”, that it’s got an interesting prototype-based object model under the hood; but I’ve found the language so loose as ...
Why has Spanish become so popular? (2)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
2 weeks, 4 days
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I was watching Spain play Sweden in the Euro 2008 championship last night (Spain won 2-1) when I saw this Nike advert about Fernando Torres, a Liverpool FC player. It brought to my mind the fact that Spanish is increasingly becoming more popular in primary and secondary schools across the country. It also made me think about the reasons why Spanish is becoming so popular. Unfortunately it also reminded me of the hostility some teachers ...
INTERLINGUA. the european language (1)
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BlogMasterPg (0)
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UNITED STATES OF EUROPE (0)
2 weeks, 6 days
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English, French, Spanish, Esperanto or Interlingua? Interlingua uses words drawn from the following languages: Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, French, English, German, and Russian; is the result of an extensive cooperation of European and American linguists. They methodically extracted an international vocabulary common to the major languages of Europe, every characteristic is based on at least three languages of European origin and there aren't invented terms; millions understand Interlingua "at first sight". Speakers of Romance languages especially understand ...
How to auto-follow on Twitter (5)
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Christopher S. Penn (12)
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Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero (12)
3 weeks
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Image via Wikipedia Ever since announcing that I’d basically follow anyone who’s followed me, I had to come up with a way to make this happen in a timely, efficient process. So here’s how I do it, if you want to use this bizarre workflow yourself. Aggregate all the “now following you” emails from Twitter in Mozilla Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, filter all these to a separate folder. On disk, open the Twitter folder in BBEdit. ...
Mi vida loca - Learning Spanish with the BBC (1)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
3 weeks, 1 day
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The BBC offers online courses, called Steps, in Spanish, French, German and Italian. But now they have added Mi vida loca to their bank of resources for Spanish. Mi vida loca is an interactive course with video and sound in which you are tasked with a mission, as if you are the main character in a spy thriller: it starts with you on a plane on your way to Madrid and you are reading a ...
Televisión Española en Internet (1)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
3 weeks, 2 days
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32% of homes in Europe are online. In Spain, the percentage is 32.6%, which is only slightly above average, but 75% of these enjoy a broadband connection, putting Spain among the best connected countries in Europe. Broadband connection has made it possible for video to be streamed to computers over the internet faster than ever before. Commercial TV stations in Spain have realised that there is a gap in the market and are competing with ...
How I got started in programming. (1)
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Maggie++ (0)
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Maggie++ (0)
3 weeks, 4 days
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Michael Eaton has requested developers to share stories of how they got started in programming. I started programming in the dark ages which many of you will not be able to relate to, so bear with me. First of all, when I was a child no one had computers in their homes. The only computers I knew about were at the universities and the government. When I was in junior high, my school decided that ...
Lingual Dexterity - Getting Over the Hump (1)
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Jim Fiorato (0)
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WriteBetterBits.com - Jim Fiorato's Blog (0)
1 month
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Whenever I set out to start on learning a new programming language (I've started often, can't say I've ever finished), I always feel like the biggest hump to get over is the practice aspect of the new technology, and not necessarily the language itself. I can sit down and go through the tutorials, but what I always want to see, right from the get go, is the development environment, what the package structure is like, ...
How Dumb Is That? (1)
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joshua (10)
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Logomacy (0)
1 month
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Prompted by a query by one of my friends as to whether we tended to say “dumb as a bag of hammers”, “dumb as a box of hair”, or “dumb as a box of hammers” I did the following Googling on “Dumb as a X”: Dumb as a * : 502,000 Bag of hammers: 30,700 Box of hair: [...]
Using Web 2.0 to motivate boys to speak in the target language (1)
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José Picardo (0)
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Box of Tricks » ICT in Education (0)
1 month
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I was recently the subject of a great culture shock: a year ago, I transferred from a girls’ school to an all boys school. Myths materialised and hearsay became reality as I had to completely re-think my approach to teaching Spanish so as to make it more fitting and more relevant to my new all [...]
