Week 5

My apologies to everyone. I had some real trouble with my Gmail account and hence have not been able to login to the blog. But thanks to Darryl for getting me back online.
As with most of us the lecture yesterday was extremely interesting and beneficial to myself (thanks to Mike also for his input) and to the rest of us.
After the lecture, I started to wonder as I have a very good friend who is a priest who had change from the Catholic Church the Lutheran church. No mention was given to the religious reforms that were carried out (not sure about the time frame) where Luther broke away from the Catholic Church. Surely, this may have had something to do with movements of the way people thought and acted. Luther was the first priest to make a move and break away from the Catholic Church, forming his own church with his own followers. Possibly, the way language was used around that time may have been influenced by their act of anti-disestablishment.

During my readings (listening) out all the readers we have had recently, namely Pennycook and Benesch who I have quoted were quite understandable in their approaches. Although, I found Pennycook and the way he wrote to be quite angry as if for he had had a very bad experience at some time during his years teaching. Maybe it is because Benesch and he are locked into a battle over research. I guess I will never know.
Let me add to the timeline to Darryl wrote on the board for us and let me add my two cents.
Of course, I cannot prove this, but I believe that there used to be life on Mars (I can hear your laughter). But no,NASA have sent a probe to Mars and found nothing. Yes of course, think about it, how long can you hold your breath in space? About 30 seconds. And think about why astronauts wear suits with heavily shaded visors?! It's only because of the power of the sun. Of course it can destroy anything. Getting back to language teaching, there is a strong movement away from the classroom and into the home of the student. The two universities that I know of (one of my work collea and gues graduated from one) are the University of Southern Queensland USQ and Phoenix University situated in Arizona (is that right Mike?) And is something that I had been working on at the University I was tenured at. We had set out the classrooms so that every room hand a camera that could be connected to the Internet. So, as this was a woman's University there were times when they were not able to attend lectures. They could however, with an Internet connection connect to the classroom via the Internet and take the class. This was all done using Skype.