Above is a link of short conversations that I've created around useful expressions. How you teach them is up to you, but here is how I've used them: They are purposely made short as they are meant to be memorized by students because they are chalk full of useful expressions.
What!? More memorization! Well, a little. I am not a fan of memorization as a teaching technique, so I am only advocating it for a limited purpose here. These conversations are not a mere list of vocabulary items, but instead they are composed of chunks that students will find themselves needing time and time again. They are the same kind of chunks that I learned when I studied Korean. They helped give me survival skills for everyday situations.
Language is a motor skill as well as a cognitive skill and it helps to have a repertoire of these chunks to draw upon so that the conversation does not proceed at a snail's pace. As well, through repetition and memorization, the students will hone their intonation and pronunciation. By the time they are finished, they should be able to go through each conversation error free and in a speedy fashion.
But on the other hand, students will not advance their communicative competency very much on these alone. They will not be able to talk about complex issues in depth, or express opinions and arguments. These conversations are about survival, or functioning in an English world. In other words, they are about ordering a hamburger and not about criticizing government policy. And as such, these conversations are meant for beginners or false beginners. They are a stepping-stone to greater things at a later date.
Having said that, I'll briefly summarize how I use them. Before handing out the conversations, I begin with a short monologue on the topic or some kind of teacher talk that is related to the topic. I try to get some conversation going, but being beginners with limited English language skills, the students often give me strained conversation with me asking questions and them giving one-word answers.
Next, I hand the conversations out and have the students repeat after me until they are used to the pronunciation and intonation. The first time we go through the conversation, I go over any target phrases and check the student's understanding. After they have practiced with me, I get them to close their books and I make each group member recite the conversation in turn. If they make a slight error, they have to try it again from the top until they get it right. If I have only a small group, I listen and stop them when they make a mistake. But for a larger class, I break them up into groups of two or three.
If I break them up into groups of two, then one person will recite the conversation, while the other person looks at the sheet and stops them when they make a mistake. If they make a mistake, they have to start from the beginning. In groups of three, one group member will check the conversation while the other two practice it. This technique is known as the human tape recorder.
After they have memorized the short conversation to my satisfaction (i.e. flawlessly), we do the activity or questions under the conversation on the handout. This whole process takes about 10-20 minutes. Then, we continue on with the real meat of the day's class, which hopefully is connected to the conversation in some way (though not always). At the end of class and at the beginning of the next class, the students will have to recite it again. And everyday, there is a new conversation waiting for them.
A word of warning however, for older students --especially adults with drinking problems-- memorizing a conversation can be frustrating, even when it's short. I let them off the hook if they can't handle it, but almost no one else gets off.
The students do get used to the discipline of doing this everyday and they like it because they can see their improvement daily (since they have a new useful chunk under their belt). I think the memorization aspect helps because I actually see them using these chunks in class when they can. In the past, I have laboured at putting useful expressions organized into daily themes on the board, but have been disappointed with the results in that students rarely used the expressions in spontaneous situations. With these chunks digested as wholes, however, I find the students do use them in class and that is the reason why I am advocating these conversations now: they produce results.
Rabu, 16 Desember 2009
Why do my students question me?
Almost all teachers come across a student, student personality type or even whole nationality or age group that meet their grammatical explanations, suggestions for self-study or ideas on how much error correction they need with a sceptical look or even a "That's not right". With other types of people the fact that they do just as they are told or agree with everything you say could just as easily be hiding the same attitude. By looking at some of the reasons why these feelings of doubt can exist and/ or be expressed, I hope also to show how teachers can cope with this issue through changing their approach, showing the students what they want to see, or simply getting a sense of perspective. In terms of getting a sense of perspective, I should also point out that teachers usually get the benefit of the doubt rather than doubt every time they step to the front of the class, and this article is strictly about dealing with the few problem students or few problem situations that can come up. Another general point worth making is that the teacher does not have to be the source of all the solutions to these problems, and with things like showing students how much experience you have got the school can easily play their part in sending your CV to the HR department of in company classes or advertising the general minimum standards of all their teachers.
Reasons why students might doubt their English teacher
1. They've caught you out before
2. They trust their previous teacher, who taught them something wrong
3. They think you are too young
4. They only trust qualifications/ they don't think you are well enough qualified
5. They only trust experience/ they don't think you've been teaching long enough
6. They only trust native speakers
7. They have a bad impression of native speaker teachers
8. They have problems with your gender
9. They only trust books or other media
10. They can't accept alternatives
11. They can't accept "It depends"
12. They can't accept that there is no explanation/ that it is just coincidence
13. Their own language is more prescripti
13. Their own language is more prescriptive
14. They've taken your self-depreciating jokes seriously
15. It's due to a different tension
16. They are used to being deferred to/ listened to
17. They just like arguing
18. It's a wind up
19. They want to catch you out because you are never wrong
20. It's revenge21. They really do know more than you
Reasons why students might doubt their English teacher
1. They've caught you out before
2. They trust their previous teacher, who taught them something wrong
3. They think you are too young
4. They only trust qualifications/ they don't think you are well enough qualified
5. They only trust experience/ they don't think you've been teaching long enough
6. They only trust native speakers
7. They have a bad impression of native speaker teachers
8. They have problems with your gender
9. They only trust books or other media
10. They can't accept alternatives
11. They can't accept "It depends"
12. They can't accept that there is no explanation/ that it is just coincidence
13. Their own language is more prescripti
13. Their own language is more prescriptive
14. They've taken your self-depreciating jokes seriously
15. It's due to a different tension
16. They are used to being deferred to/ listened to
17. They just like arguing
18. It's a wind up
19. They want to catch you out because you are never wrong
20. It's revenge21. They really do know more than you
Speech versus writing
Linguistics examines all forms of language, but the written word is considered at best an incomplete representation of a linguistic system. Linguists generally consider that more fundamental insights can be gleaned into the nature of language by analysing natural, spontaneous speech, rather than assuming the primacy of writing.
Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.
Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.
Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.
Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.
Why students might not do their homework and what you can do about it:
1. It's boring
Unless you were a very square kid indeed, I'm sure you understand this feeling! You might also remember the things that made homework something you would happily spend extra time on: getting other parts of your brain working (artistic activities, logic puzzles, using your imagination); project work; competition; working as a team; finding out something new about the world; or an excuse to interact with people (e.g. interviewing a family member). All of these can fairly easily be brought into EFL homework.
2. They don't understand the instructions/ what to do
A common excuse this one, even when it is just an excuse... Tactics to take away that excuse include writing the instructions on the board, doing one example of each exercise in class, pre-teaching the language that is used in the workbook instructions and doing a similar exercise right at the end of the class.
3. It's too difficult
Another one that is very often said and quite often true! Reactions include giving them hints on where they can go for help (e.g. the grammar reference at the back of the students' book), giving mixed up answers, giving an easier task for the lower level students to do, doing exactly the same exercise in class without letting them take away a copy and letting them do it half from memory for homework, or advising them that they should work together in study groups.
4. It's too easy
Less common to hear this one, but even if it is okay for most people that means it must be too easy for at least one person! Easy ways to make homework more challenging include taking away the multiple choice answers to turn it into a gap fill, giving the homework for the same language point from a different workbook, telling them to do it within a certain time limit or asking them to do the exercise orally before they write their answers down.
5. They could understand the language, but couldn't think of any ideas (e.g. arguments for and against or a storyline)
You could try brainstorming ideas at the end of the class, teaching them brainstorming and other creative techniques, or giving optional ideas they can use (but somewhere that takes a bit of effort to get to so everyone tries to be creative first)
6. It's not their priority, e.g. because it doesn't involve speaking
They may just be right on this one! You can ask them their priorities and design the homework around that, get them to write down what they did instead in a study diary or share it with the class, or give tasks that can be adapted for different students ("Write a phone conversation or an email in which..."
7. They just forgot/ forgot exactly what they had to do
Such is human nature, especially when your subconscious is telling you it is something you don't want to do. Aside from using the tips here to make it so interesting that it is at the front of their mind all the time, ways to avoid this include having a totally fixed routine and schedule for homework, giving them a written schedule for all the homework at the beginning of each month or term, having the homework written up somewhere they can easily check it like the school notice board or blog, and checking that each person has marked the right exercise with the date it must be finished by
8. They don't find time/ have bad time management
Occasions where it seems you have no option but to fix someone's personality come up surprisingly often in language teaching, but that doesn't make it any easier to do. Options for this problem include doing a lesson on how they use their time and time management, finding out when they do have time and designing the homework to fit in with it (e.g. a recording they can do in their car or a compact self-study book such as a graded reader they can do standing up on the train), telling them how long each exercise should take, or even asking them to write the time and date when they are going to do it rather than the date it must be done by in their workbooks.
9. It's a minor rebellion
This could be a symptom of problems with you or teachers more generally that will demand a very flexible response to that particular student or group of students- for example; some students could actually be rebelling because they think you aren't strict enough! In these cases, someone outside the situation like someone observing your class is probably the best person to ask.
10. They don't see the point/ don't think it will improve their English
Again, there is always a chance that they are right about whatever the publishers have thrown in at the last minute to fill up that page of the workbook. Ways to make sure this is not the case include giving them options on what they do, doing a needs analysis and designing it to fit in with the skills they think they need, doing a classroom activity a second time after they have done the homework and show how them it is easier because of what they have learnt, and telling them how likely the language will be to come up on the test or in their lives,
Unless you were a very square kid indeed, I'm sure you understand this feeling! You might also remember the things that made homework something you would happily spend extra time on: getting other parts of your brain working (artistic activities, logic puzzles, using your imagination); project work; competition; working as a team; finding out something new about the world; or an excuse to interact with people (e.g. interviewing a family member). All of these can fairly easily be brought into EFL homework.
2. They don't understand the instructions/ what to do
A common excuse this one, even when it is just an excuse... Tactics to take away that excuse include writing the instructions on the board, doing one example of each exercise in class, pre-teaching the language that is used in the workbook instructions and doing a similar exercise right at the end of the class.
3. It's too difficult
Another one that is very often said and quite often true! Reactions include giving them hints on where they can go for help (e.g. the grammar reference at the back of the students' book), giving mixed up answers, giving an easier task for the lower level students to do, doing exactly the same exercise in class without letting them take away a copy and letting them do it half from memory for homework, or advising them that they should work together in study groups.
4. It's too easy
Less common to hear this one, but even if it is okay for most people that means it must be too easy for at least one person! Easy ways to make homework more challenging include taking away the multiple choice answers to turn it into a gap fill, giving the homework for the same language point from a different workbook, telling them to do it within a certain time limit or asking them to do the exercise orally before they write their answers down.
5. They could understand the language, but couldn't think of any ideas (e.g. arguments for and against or a storyline)
You could try brainstorming ideas at the end of the class, teaching them brainstorming and other creative techniques, or giving optional ideas they can use (but somewhere that takes a bit of effort to get to so everyone tries to be creative first)
6. It's not their priority, e.g. because it doesn't involve speaking
They may just be right on this one! You can ask them their priorities and design the homework around that, get them to write down what they did instead in a study diary or share it with the class, or give tasks that can be adapted for different students ("Write a phone conversation or an email in which..."
7. They just forgot/ forgot exactly what they had to do
Such is human nature, especially when your subconscious is telling you it is something you don't want to do. Aside from using the tips here to make it so interesting that it is at the front of their mind all the time, ways to avoid this include having a totally fixed routine and schedule for homework, giving them a written schedule for all the homework at the beginning of each month or term, having the homework written up somewhere they can easily check it like the school notice board or blog, and checking that each person has marked the right exercise with the date it must be finished by
8. They don't find time/ have bad time management
Occasions where it seems you have no option but to fix someone's personality come up surprisingly often in language teaching, but that doesn't make it any easier to do. Options for this problem include doing a lesson on how they use their time and time management, finding out when they do have time and designing the homework to fit in with it (e.g. a recording they can do in their car or a compact self-study book such as a graded reader they can do standing up on the train), telling them how long each exercise should take, or even asking them to write the time and date when they are going to do it rather than the date it must be done by in their workbooks.
9. It's a minor rebellion
This could be a symptom of problems with you or teachers more generally that will demand a very flexible response to that particular student or group of students- for example; some students could actually be rebelling because they think you aren't strict enough! In these cases, someone outside the situation like someone observing your class is probably the best person to ask.
10. They don't see the point/ don't think it will improve their English
Again, there is always a chance that they are right about whatever the publishers have thrown in at the last minute to fill up that page of the workbook. Ways to make sure this is not the case include giving them options on what they do, doing a needs analysis and designing it to fit in with the skills they think they need, doing a classroom activity a second time after they have done the homework and show how them it is easier because of what they have learnt, and telling them how likely the language will be to come up on the test or in their lives,
Tips on using the Internet as a tool in TESOL
A sound Internet lesson should:
• have aims that are perspicuously reflected in lesson materials. Not stating lesson aims might be confusing for students.
• make a coherent connection with course examinations/tests. Students need to see a connection with non-traditional and traditional learning.
• use technology to reinforce existing practice i.e. should have non-ICT elements in the lesson; students may want/expect to be taught more traditionally without being given so much autonomy. Lessons that have the highest potential for learning are where teachers have a planned amalgam of non-ICT and ICT roles, and students have timed chunks of autonomous ICT study.
• contain suitable sites level-wise (i.e. grammar/vocabulary) and topic-wise. This may be a difficult undertaking.
• not rely on one site and/or not use too many sites.
• have pre-screened sites i.e. so the teacher can explain to students what should be done.
• provide succinct site tasks for students on a lesson handout that can be taken away after the lesson
Long lists of ESOL resources do not seem to help teachers much. This suggests that teachers require more than just categorised hand-picked Internet lists or lists of well-known ESOL homepages; teachers need pedagogical guidance on how to use the Internet materials.
• have aims that are perspicuously reflected in lesson materials. Not stating lesson aims might be confusing for students.
• make a coherent connection with course examinations/tests. Students need to see a connection with non-traditional and traditional learning.
• use technology to reinforce existing practice i.e. should have non-ICT elements in the lesson; students may want/expect to be taught more traditionally without being given so much autonomy. Lessons that have the highest potential for learning are where teachers have a planned amalgam of non-ICT and ICT roles, and students have timed chunks of autonomous ICT study.
• contain suitable sites level-wise (i.e. grammar/vocabulary) and topic-wise. This may be a difficult undertaking.
• not rely on one site and/or not use too many sites.
• have pre-screened sites i.e. so the teacher can explain to students what should be done.
• provide succinct site tasks for students on a lesson handout that can be taken away after the lesson
Long lists of ESOL resources do not seem to help teachers much. This suggests that teachers require more than just categorised hand-picked Internet lists or lists of well-known ESOL homepages; teachers need pedagogical guidance on how to use the Internet materials.
Motivation Where does it come from? Where does it go
In recent years, I have had the privilege to visit many classes around the world, to talk to teachers and sit in on their lessons. I remember very clearly one experience in particular which started me thinking about the whole question of motivation.
I was visiting a secondary school, and my first visit was to a first year class of 11-12 year olds, early in their school year. As soon as you opened the door, you could feel and see the motivation to learn in these students. Big, bright eyes, and smiles, eager to show the visitor what they had learned. They had been looking forward to the visit by ‘the Englishman’ and now the moment had arrived. The bubbling energy of these students was overwhelming, and so too was their desire to learn English.
Next lesson, I went a little further along the corridor to visit a second year class, a year older. Here, the tone was very different – more purposeful but more subdued with none of the spark that I had seen just before. Their eyes no longer had a twinkle and the smiles were now replaced by a somewhat expressionless look on some students. We had a pleasant encounter, and they read short pieces of their work to me but the overall tone was rather polite.
Next, I visited a third year class, and here I found a quite different atmosphere. At front of the class, there were a few students who were clearly interested in the visit by ‘the Englishman’. We talked about the things they liked and disliked in learning English and their interests. It was, however, always the same students who talked and most of the students remained silent throughout. More significantly, there were two students who clearly couldn’t care less – or so it appeared. One of them, sitting at the back of the class, had his feet on the edge of his desk, not a book, a pen or a piece of paper near him. He was removing what looked like motor oil from his nails. Every so often he would shout something out to another student, and receive a glare from the teacher. The other student, also at the back, was evidentially asleep, with his head flopped over his desk, and no sign of any school equipment near him.
Many teachers, I am sure, will recognise the scenarios here. They are, in fact, situations that I have since seen time and time again in my visits to schools. Many teachers, too, will also recognise the sketch of the ‘couldn’t care less – don’t want to learn’ students. The most striking thing for me, however, was the transition from the 1st year students –all seemingly eager and energetic- to the wide differences amongst the 3rd year class, with some students now apparently completely negative about their learning. Assuming that the 3rd year class had once been like the 1st year class, what had happened in the intervening three years? Where did the students’ initial motivation come from? And where did it go?
Sources of motivation
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single factor which would account for the apparent changing levels of motivation and involvement that I had witnessed. As all teachers know, and as Marion Williams in an earlier article (ETP, Issue 13) has explained, there are many, many factors which affect students’ commitment to study. Many things – perhaps most – are beyond our control as language teachers, and fall outside the confines of the few lessons that we have with them in a week. Home background, physical tiredness, events in their personal life, health, previous educational experience, personality and the onset of adolescence, are just some of the factors that can affect how individual students appear to us in our classes. Nevertheless, I believe that in many cases, the explanation of why the smile disappears from the faces of some students – whatever their age - may indeed lie in their experience of their English classes – in short, in how their classes are organised.
by:
I was visiting a secondary school, and my first visit was to a first year class of 11-12 year olds, early in their school year. As soon as you opened the door, you could feel and see the motivation to learn in these students. Big, bright eyes, and smiles, eager to show the visitor what they had learned. They had been looking forward to the visit by ‘the Englishman’ and now the moment had arrived. The bubbling energy of these students was overwhelming, and so too was their desire to learn English.
Next lesson, I went a little further along the corridor to visit a second year class, a year older. Here, the tone was very different – more purposeful but more subdued with none of the spark that I had seen just before. Their eyes no longer had a twinkle and the smiles were now replaced by a somewhat expressionless look on some students. We had a pleasant encounter, and they read short pieces of their work to me but the overall tone was rather polite.
Next, I visited a third year class, and here I found a quite different atmosphere. At front of the class, there were a few students who were clearly interested in the visit by ‘the Englishman’. We talked about the things they liked and disliked in learning English and their interests. It was, however, always the same students who talked and most of the students remained silent throughout. More significantly, there were two students who clearly couldn’t care less – or so it appeared. One of them, sitting at the back of the class, had his feet on the edge of his desk, not a book, a pen or a piece of paper near him. He was removing what looked like motor oil from his nails. Every so often he would shout something out to another student, and receive a glare from the teacher. The other student, also at the back, was evidentially asleep, with his head flopped over his desk, and no sign of any school equipment near him.
Many teachers, I am sure, will recognise the scenarios here. They are, in fact, situations that I have since seen time and time again in my visits to schools. Many teachers, too, will also recognise the sketch of the ‘couldn’t care less – don’t want to learn’ students. The most striking thing for me, however, was the transition from the 1st year students –all seemingly eager and energetic- to the wide differences amongst the 3rd year class, with some students now apparently completely negative about their learning. Assuming that the 3rd year class had once been like the 1st year class, what had happened in the intervening three years? Where did the students’ initial motivation come from? And where did it go?
Sources of motivation
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to point to a single factor which would account for the apparent changing levels of motivation and involvement that I had witnessed. As all teachers know, and as Marion Williams in an earlier article (ETP, Issue 13) has explained, there are many, many factors which affect students’ commitment to study. Many things – perhaps most – are beyond our control as language teachers, and fall outside the confines of the few lessons that we have with them in a week. Home background, physical tiredness, events in their personal life, health, previous educational experience, personality and the onset of adolescence, are just some of the factors that can affect how individual students appear to us in our classes. Nevertheless, I believe that in many cases, the explanation of why the smile disappears from the faces of some students – whatever their age - may indeed lie in their experience of their English classes – in short, in how their classes are organised.
by:
Microsoft has has begun a months-long process of migrating users to a major upgrade of its Hotmail Web mail service.
Microsoft Corp. has closed the public testing period for Windows Live Hotmail and has begun a months-long process of migrating users to this major upgrade of its Hotmail Web mail service, the company will announce Monday. (To read a hands-on review of the new Microsoft Hotmail, check out our Today@PCWorld Blog: Microsoft Launches New Hotmail.)
Windows Live Hotmail, dubbed as the biggest Hotmail upgrade since the Web mail service's debut in 1996, has been tested by about 20 million users since Microsoft first allowed people outside the company to try it out in mid-2005, said Brooke Richardson, Microsoft group product manager for the popular e-mail site.
"It is safer, faster and has more features than Hotmail. It's definitely an advance for our current customers," she said. Windows Live Hotmail has a brand new code foundation which will let Microsoft add improvements quickly, something that had become a challenge with Hotmail's decade-old code base, she said. "It's a much more stable foundation for us to innovate," she said.
A major challenge for Microsoft will be to convince long-time Hotmail users that the upgraded version is worth switching to, said Van Baker, a Gartner Inc. analyst. "Consumers get accustomed to things they use on a daily basis, like their e-mail service," he said. "When you make changes, sometimes it's a challenging transition for consumers."
Microsoft will not autocratically move users to the new version. For now, Microsoft will give Hotmail users the option to continue using the old version if they don't want to switch to the upgraded version. However, at some point, everyone will be unilaterally migrated over to Windows Live Hotmail, she said.
New users will be automatically signed up for Windows Live Hotmail but, like any user of the new service, they will get to choose from two user interfaces: a "classic" layout that closely resembles the old Hotmail; or the new interface, which was designed to look like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail and calendaring desktop application, she said.
Later this month, Microsoft will release a free software for linking Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook, a capability the company previously charged for. With Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for MSN, users of the Web mail service will be able to access their account from Outlook, along with e-mail, contacts and folder synchronization for free. In the future, Microsoft will release a desktop client for Windows Live Hotmail called Windows Live Mail. Windows Live Mail will be the successor to Outlook Express and Windows Mail on Windows Vista.
But all these different names, brands and components leave Microsoft with a fragmented story in the Web mail market that could lead to consumer confusion, Gartner's Baker said. "Another big challenge is to manage this message," he said.
In terms of security improvements, each e-mail message carries a "safety bar" which indicates whether the message came from a known, unknown or potentially fraudulent sender. Spam protection has also been enhanced. Windows Live Hotmail also has a mobile version so that its estimated 280 million users can access the service from cell phones and handheld devices with a Web browser.
by: Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Windows Live Hotmail, dubbed as the biggest Hotmail upgrade since the Web mail service's debut in 1996, has been tested by about 20 million users since Microsoft first allowed people outside the company to try it out in mid-2005, said Brooke Richardson, Microsoft group product manager for the popular e-mail site.
"It is safer, faster and has more features than Hotmail. It's definitely an advance for our current customers," she said. Windows Live Hotmail has a brand new code foundation which will let Microsoft add improvements quickly, something that had become a challenge with Hotmail's decade-old code base, she said. "It's a much more stable foundation for us to innovate," she said.
A major challenge for Microsoft will be to convince long-time Hotmail users that the upgraded version is worth switching to, said Van Baker, a Gartner Inc. analyst. "Consumers get accustomed to things they use on a daily basis, like their e-mail service," he said. "When you make changes, sometimes it's a challenging transition for consumers."
Microsoft will not autocratically move users to the new version. For now, Microsoft will give Hotmail users the option to continue using the old version if they don't want to switch to the upgraded version. However, at some point, everyone will be unilaterally migrated over to Windows Live Hotmail, she said.
New users will be automatically signed up for Windows Live Hotmail but, like any user of the new service, they will get to choose from two user interfaces: a "classic" layout that closely resembles the old Hotmail; or the new interface, which was designed to look like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail and calendaring desktop application, she said.
Later this month, Microsoft will release a free software for linking Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook, a capability the company previously charged for. With Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for MSN, users of the Web mail service will be able to access their account from Outlook, along with e-mail, contacts and folder synchronization for free. In the future, Microsoft will release a desktop client for Windows Live Hotmail called Windows Live Mail. Windows Live Mail will be the successor to Outlook Express and Windows Mail on Windows Vista.
But all these different names, brands and components leave Microsoft with a fragmented story in the Web mail market that could lead to consumer confusion, Gartner's Baker said. "Another big challenge is to manage this message," he said.
In terms of security improvements, each e-mail message carries a "safety bar" which indicates whether the message came from a known, unknown or potentially fraudulent sender. Spam protection has also been enhanced. Windows Live Hotmail also has a mobile version so that its estimated 280 million users can access the service from cell phones and handheld devices with a Web browser.
by: Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
example of article BRAD STONE
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7 — Photobucket, a four-year-old, rapidly growing Web company, is in advanced talks to be acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of the News Corporation, a person briefed on the negotiations said Monday.
Photobucket allows its users to store photos and videos and then easily drop them into their pages on prominent sites like Facebook, eBay and particularly MySpace, which is also owned by the News Corporation.
The deal is not yet complete, but the parties have ironed out major issues and are focusing on finer points, according to this person, who said the price could be as high as $300 million. The person asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.
Representatives of MySpace, Fox Interactive Media and Photobucket all declined to comment.
News of the discussions was first reported earlier Monday on a Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag. Photobucket said last month that it had hired Lehman Brothers to explore a possible sale of the company.
Photobucket, which has offices in Denver and San Francisco, has catapulted over older sites to become the largest and fastest-growing photo-sharing service on the Web. Unlike rival photo sites such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, Photobucket positioned itself as a tool for people using sites like MySpace, rather than a place to get prints made or to interact with other photographers.
The company has had the kind of booming growth that make larger media companies envious. A year ago, it said it had 14 million members. On its Web site on Monday, Photobucket cited 41 million users.
The site is free for basic use, but charges $25 a year for a premium subscription that includes extra storage space and the ability to store videos more than five minutes long. It also displays advertisements to users when they manage their accounts.
The company already has a symbiotic, if sensitive, relationship with MySpace. According to the research firm Hitwise, for the week ended Saturday, 60 percent of Photobucket traffic came from MySpace users who had placed their photos and videos on Photobucket. It was also the third-largest destination for people leaving MySpace, after Google and Yahoo.
“There’s clearly a synergy between these two sites,” says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.
That close relationship has made MySpace uncomfortable in the past.
Last month, MySpace blocked slide shows and videos stored on Photobucket, saying the company was violating its terms of service by embedding its own advertisements in the media files. After a week of discussions, the two companies resolved their differences and MySpace removed the block.
Photobucket allows its users to store photos and videos and then easily drop them into their pages on prominent sites like Facebook, eBay and particularly MySpace, which is also owned by the News Corporation.
The deal is not yet complete, but the parties have ironed out major issues and are focusing on finer points, according to this person, who said the price could be as high as $300 million. The person asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.
Representatives of MySpace, Fox Interactive Media and Photobucket all declined to comment.
News of the discussions was first reported earlier Monday on a Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag. Photobucket said last month that it had hired Lehman Brothers to explore a possible sale of the company.
Photobucket, which has offices in Denver and San Francisco, has catapulted over older sites to become the largest and fastest-growing photo-sharing service on the Web. Unlike rival photo sites such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly and Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, Photobucket positioned itself as a tool for people using sites like MySpace, rather than a place to get prints made or to interact with other photographers.
The company has had the kind of booming growth that make larger media companies envious. A year ago, it said it had 14 million members. On its Web site on Monday, Photobucket cited 41 million users.
The site is free for basic use, but charges $25 a year for a premium subscription that includes extra storage space and the ability to store videos more than five minutes long. It also displays advertisements to users when they manage their accounts.
The company already has a symbiotic, if sensitive, relationship with MySpace. According to the research firm Hitwise, for the week ended Saturday, 60 percent of Photobucket traffic came from MySpace users who had placed their photos and videos on Photobucket. It was also the third-largest destination for people leaving MySpace, after Google and Yahoo.
“There’s clearly a synergy between these two sites,” says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.
That close relationship has made MySpace uncomfortable in the past.
Last month, MySpace blocked slide shows and videos stored on Photobucket, saying the company was violating its terms of service by embedding its own advertisements in the media files. After a week of discussions, the two companies resolved their differences and MySpace removed the block.
Literature by Neal Asher Latchingdon, Essex, United Kingdom
According to my dictionary ‘literature’ is a term defining everything from leaflets giving information on haemorrhoids to War and Peace. Even a Blair speech is literature, though a form of it somewhat overburdened by ellipses and bathos. But the first dictionary meaning admits the word commonly refers to ‘poetry, novels, essays etc’, so are all these always literature? No, apparently, because there is another usage of the word that seems to define it by what it is not.
The wider literati intelligentsia – a diverse collection of self-promoting critics and would-be academics – feel it their business to decide what to include under this title and what to exclude. Why they feel they have this right is debateable. But then people of a similar stripe denigrated Charles Dickens for his penny dreadfuls, and William Shakespeare for catering to plebs who just wanted plays containing plenty of royalty, murder, sex and ghosts. So we have this thing I will italicize as literature, and what a strange beast it is.
Genre fiction is not such a beast until sufficiently aged (perhaps buried in peat and dug up again). Those books that are popular and show no sign of going away, are only reluctantly accepted, because to the literati intelligentsia ‘popular’ equals ‘not-literature’. Books moving into the literature category, popular or otherwise, undergo a transformation. In long turgid dissertations they become satirical, noir, surreal, allegory (insert favourite pretension), and the clunky robots, magic swords or smart-talking detectives blowing away bad guys are, with some embarrassment, shuffled off stage. Thus, The Lord of the Rings is a political allegory of World War II and Sauron is quite obviously Hitler; The Sirens of Titan is a superb satire favoured by neophyte academics, but the less said about the Tralfamadorian on Titan the better; and Raymond Chandler ‘leads writers of the twentieth century’ with his ‘brutal noir’ and ‘inimitably literary style’. It would be nice if those writing such dissertations occasionally came out with an honest statement like, “Actually, I really liked that book, but I’m a pretentious git so I’ve got to dress it up in what I consider to be more presentable clothing and work very hard on its diction.”
This is a situation to which those writing fiction in the SFF world are quite accustomed (hence Pratchett’s tongue in cheek statement about being ‘accused of literature’), but it is unfortunate that our genre is not immune, internally, to the same snobbery directed against it, for it is merely a microcosm of the entire writing world and contains its own self-styled judges. In the not-literature category they lump anything by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs (not sufficiently peat-aged yet), Robert Heinlein (wrong politics) and anything unashamed of being definitely science fiction or fantasy, and in which the writer aims to entertain an audience rather than demonstrate personal brilliance. In the literature category they give us the boredom of the New Wave (in reality just a bigger and noisier version of similar waves spreading their flotsam over the shores of SFF now), various other versions of, “Well, not a lot happened, but I managed to write a novel about it,” and the products of those writers so enamoured of the literature label they produce stunning prose and mind-numbingly deep insights into the human condition, while usually forgetting essential story. The literature/not-literature classifications are all very very subjective and in need of seasoning with large pinches of salt.
But how should you identify excellence? How then do you know what is good? Well, pick it up and read some of it, then if you want to carry on, make your own decision when you finally close it. How, after that, do you identify great literature? Simple really: you bury it in peat for a couple of centuries then see if it is still recognised when dug up. In other words you don’t, posterity does. I suspect today’s literati intelligentsia would be horrified at the rich strata of J K Rowling, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett that will be revealed. But by then, ensuing generations of critics and academics will have produced reams of turgid prose about the work of those writers, without too much mention of gnomes, wizards or vampires.
The wider literati intelligentsia – a diverse collection of self-promoting critics and would-be academics – feel it their business to decide what to include under this title and what to exclude. Why they feel they have this right is debateable. But then people of a similar stripe denigrated Charles Dickens for his penny dreadfuls, and William Shakespeare for catering to plebs who just wanted plays containing plenty of royalty, murder, sex and ghosts. So we have this thing I will italicize as literature, and what a strange beast it is.
Genre fiction is not such a beast until sufficiently aged (perhaps buried in peat and dug up again). Those books that are popular and show no sign of going away, are only reluctantly accepted, because to the literati intelligentsia ‘popular’ equals ‘not-literature’. Books moving into the literature category, popular or otherwise, undergo a transformation. In long turgid dissertations they become satirical, noir, surreal, allegory (insert favourite pretension), and the clunky robots, magic swords or smart-talking detectives blowing away bad guys are, with some embarrassment, shuffled off stage. Thus, The Lord of the Rings is a political allegory of World War II and Sauron is quite obviously Hitler; The Sirens of Titan is a superb satire favoured by neophyte academics, but the less said about the Tralfamadorian on Titan the better; and Raymond Chandler ‘leads writers of the twentieth century’ with his ‘brutal noir’ and ‘inimitably literary style’. It would be nice if those writing such dissertations occasionally came out with an honest statement like, “Actually, I really liked that book, but I’m a pretentious git so I’ve got to dress it up in what I consider to be more presentable clothing and work very hard on its diction.”
This is a situation to which those writing fiction in the SFF world are quite accustomed (hence Pratchett’s tongue in cheek statement about being ‘accused of literature’), but it is unfortunate that our genre is not immune, internally, to the same snobbery directed against it, for it is merely a microcosm of the entire writing world and contains its own self-styled judges. In the not-literature category they lump anything by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs (not sufficiently peat-aged yet), Robert Heinlein (wrong politics) and anything unashamed of being definitely science fiction or fantasy, and in which the writer aims to entertain an audience rather than demonstrate personal brilliance. In the literature category they give us the boredom of the New Wave (in reality just a bigger and noisier version of similar waves spreading their flotsam over the shores of SFF now), various other versions of, “Well, not a lot happened, but I managed to write a novel about it,” and the products of those writers so enamoured of the literature label they produce stunning prose and mind-numbingly deep insights into the human condition, while usually forgetting essential story. The literature/not-literature classifications are all very very subjective and in need of seasoning with large pinches of salt.
But how should you identify excellence? How then do you know what is good? Well, pick it up and read some of it, then if you want to carry on, make your own decision when you finally close it. How, after that, do you identify great literature? Simple really: you bury it in peat for a couple of centuries then see if it is still recognised when dug up. In other words you don’t, posterity does. I suspect today’s literati intelligentsia would be horrified at the rich strata of J K Rowling, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett that will be revealed. But by then, ensuing generations of critics and academics will have produced reams of turgid prose about the work of those writers, without too much mention of gnomes, wizards or vampires.
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