Paper vs Digital ELT materials

There is currently a debate going on in the IATEFL Young Learner SIG Yahoo Group about the the pros and cons of publishing digital ELT materials/resources as compared to paper-based ones (i.e. books).

I have been reading the posts on this thread with a great deal of interest, and can't help thinking that those defending the paper model echo what many in the music industry were saying about digital downloading when the first effective model (Napster) came on the scene. There was a time some years ago when the music industry had a real chance to utilise the emerging technology to provide a new business model for the industry. Instead, they chose to ignore the change implied by the new technology. As we all know now, this has led to widespread adoption of illegal file-sharing and huge losses by record companies all over the globe. Despite efforts to stop this (DRM, court cases, legal file-sharing through iTunes, etc), most people feel the battle has been lost and musicians are starting to realise that the money has to come from elsewhere.

What has this to do with ELT? It's tempting to think that books are different, that we will always want to hold the physical objects in our hands, to own and collect them as objects? This is true of our generation maybe, but what of the next? The current generation is fast becoming used to a different model, where access to information (video via Youtube, digital music streamed through programmes such as www.spotify.com, etc.)

Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference wortks have been the first books to suffer (like it or not, Wikipedia is fast overtaking the Encyclopedia Britanica as a source of information - the pros of Wikipedia far outstrip the cons: in the 21st Century, our sources of information need to be up-to-the-minute and dynamic).

What about the other arguments for paper-based material? Reading on a screen is not sustainable? You can't take it with you on the train? Devices such as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPod Touch and the iPhone have changed that. I no longer buy a daily newspaper - I download the news from the BBC and El Pais to my iPod in the morning and read that on the metro.

What about the parts of the world where the Internet does not reach? The signs are that this will change in many of these areas. The Internet probably won't come via PCs, but will instead be available via mobile phones (did you know that most mobiles are in the developing world?), which are becoming ubiquitous in most parts of the world.

As we have seen (most recently in a heated exchange on Twitter between a wide variety of ELT professionals), there is a demand for digital copies of resource books and textbooks. The ELT publishers have yet to cater to this demand. The danger is that unless something is done, then what awaits them is what happened to the music industry re. digital downloading.

In fact, it's already happening. There has recently been a proliferation of websites and blogs offering illegal copies of most ELT textbooks and resource books. These are generally scanned copies of the books advertised by the sites as 'free ESL books to download.' The website authors claim they are providing a service to people, "freeing information", etc. but look carefully and you'll see the sites are generally full of advertising, so their aim is to make money by illegally copying and distributing the books. I am not providing any examples of sites as I really don't want to encourage this sort of activity. Of course, the publishers act against these websites when they are found (it is common for authors to report them to the publisher), but I fear they are fighting a losing battle if legal downloading of digital copies of ELT books is not going to be offered.

How things will turn out is difficult to say, but you can look at trends and predict. We are currently experiencing the death of the newspaper (http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ - talk to any newspaper journalist and you'll hear the same thing). As mentioned before, the emergence of new reader-friendly devices and increase in Internet mean that the demand for digital downloads will increase whether you like it or not.

Although I am a book-lover and know I will continue to buy and read books for the rest of my life (I am also writing one!), I do think that the shift from paper to digital materials in ELT is inevitable.

To Blog or not to Blog?

Why blog? Getting started - my experience

Recently, I've been thinking about blogging and why people do it. I've been encouraged by the nomination for an award I mentioned in my last post, and by Karenne Sylvester's call for entries to the blog carnival she has organised to help newbie EFL bloggers.

So, what makes someone sit down and write something and publish it on the Internet for all to see? In particular what makes an EFL teacher do this. The main reasons I suppose are self-expression, to communicate with other teachers, to share ideas, reflect on practice. Of course there's also the teacher who wants to try it out because you want your learners to blog and you don't think you should ask them to do something that you wouldn't do or haven't tried . That's why I started.

Let me start with some statistics - I've been blogging at http://blog-efl.blogspot.com for six years (since July 9th 2003), have written 553 posts so far and over 60,000 words.

My first post was directed at a group of teenage learners I was teaching in a summer school in Barcelona. I wanted to try out a new global community my school had set up for learners and had managed to get a daily computer room slot. Then, at the last minute, I was told that my students wouldn't be getting accounts in time, so I needed a backup plan. I remembered that a friend of mine had invited me to set up something called a blog six months previously - I'd joined and written one post and then not returned. But, I had seen that it was a quick and easy way of publishing on the Web and wondered if I could do this with my learners.

I jumped in and all of the learners in the two classes I was teaching se up blogs and started writing about themselves and reading what the learners in the other class had written - their curiosity was provoked, and although few of them wrote much, they were motivated enough to want to write and to read what the others had written, sharing their interests, and asking questions by leaving comments on the other learners' blogs.

I also started using the blog I'd set up to reflect upon the experience rather than write to the learners, as illustrated by the second post I wrote. By the end of the course, I was convinced that this was something that I should look into more, even though the learners had become a little bored with blogging during the course and I decided to do something else (you can read about this here if you like).

Getting Interested in blogging

I spent time after the course finding more out about blogging. At the time, there was little written about blogging and only a handful of EFL teachers were using blogs. One of them was Teresa Almeida D'Eca's Let's Blog. Teresa is a teacher based in Portugal - I'd been introduced to her through my colleague, Nik Peachey (who funnily enough has only recently started blogging himself) and was very impressed with her blog. So much so, I wrote a review of it on my blog.

I started learning a lot from the other educational bloggers out there about how best to use them. Aaron Campbell's article on Weblogging in ESL was very influential and there were tips from other bloggers about how best to encourage participation, and whether or not to correct.

You can tell from the amount I was writing to the blog (48 posts in August 2003!) just how enthusiastic I was getting. In fact this figure only shows a small part of it - I'd also been put in contact with a teacher in Brazil - Barbara Dieu (or Bee), who had been blogging with her students for some time. I wrote a review of her blog, Bee Online and also started responding to some of her ideas she had.

Sustaining Interest in Blogging

One of the many ideas that Bee had for promoting and sustaining learner interest in blogging was the idea of having a mystery guest on her blog. I was one of the two mystery guests in August 2003, and the results were convincing - the students responded well and wrote loads during this period. Bee said that they were all motivated and asking questions, trying to work out who the mystery guests were between classes, trying to get her to give them clues, etc. And afterwards, the conversations continued as we got to know each other. For me, this was the moment when I realised the power and potetnial of blogging with students. You can read the actual posts here - as a sidenote, I think it's wonderful that all of this still exists - it's been great to revisit this now, so many years afterwards.

I went on to run my own blogging experiments with classes that year and several years afterwards. Some of them were successful, others not so much. I kept in touch with both Teresa and Bee. They introduced me to the wonderful Community of Practice, the Webheads in Action, and to lots of other educators around the world. I co-moderated a series of online workshops about blogging with Bee and Aaron Campbell through the TESOL Electronic Village Online. Eventually, though, I found my interests turning more towards podcasting and then to social networking and games and virtual worlds. However, I still believe blogging is a great tool to use with students, and although my own blogging output has diminished recently, I can see how valuable it is for teachers' reflective practice and for sharing ideas and building community. Especially now, that it has started to be used by mainstream EFL teachers rather than just those who are interested in technology. This for me, is the key, and the main reason why I am interested in blogging regularly again.

Blogger's Block

So, what about the so-called blogger's block? Looking back at my blog entries, I can see that I have a lot of unpublished drafts. Posts that I started and didn't finish. And then I remember times when I wanted to write something and didn't. I think the most important thing is to be involved in the blogosphere. If you read other blogs (and nowadays take part in the conversations that are constantly happening in Twitter and Facebook, as well as on mailing lists, etc.), then you'll never be short of ideas for blog posts. Of course, the other thing to remember is that blogging is all about contributing - and no matter what you think, everyone has a unique voice and a relevant point-of-view - you can always add something interesting to the conversation. Just, as Karenne recently encouraged me to to on Facebook, jump in and do it - don't think too much about it.

I think it's also important not to feel overwhelmed - there is so much out there, you'll never be able to keep up with everything that's going on, vever be able to read all the blogs, etc, that you'd like to. Choose a few people to read regularly that you find interesting and then from time to time, let yourself be led by links from their blogs (or by serendipity) to other people. Be sure to contribute to other people's blogs by writing comments - it's very important for bloggers to feel that there's somebody out there reading what we are writing (otherwise, why write it, right?) - tools like clustrmaps are very important to a blogger to see that they have an audience (I prefer this visual demonstration of audience more than looking at a counter or at stats - I have also noticed that it impresses students more too)

Setting goals can be important to keep up interest too. apart from the goals you may set up with students (a good one is to always relate what you are doing in class to the blog and vice-versa), if you blog for other teachers or for yourself, then you might want to use the blog:-

• for reflective practice (write what you think about how a particular class went)
• as a repository for a future teaching e-portfolio
• to sound out ideas that you may want to follow up in an article or a conference presentation / INSETT session
• simply keep a record of your time as a teacher

Finally...

Most of all, treat blogging as something you do for fun that can also help your professional development and you should be able to continue, happy in the knowledge that what you are doing is of value.

BLOG-EFL nominated as one of the 100 Best Blogs (Language Technology)

Are awards important for bloggers? The reason I ask is because I recently found out I've been nominated for one (from Anna, whose excellent blog about her experiences in Second Life has also been nominated).

The Top 100 Language Blogs 2009 Awards have been organised by LexioPhiles and there are four categories: Language Learning, Language Teaching, Language Technology and Language Professionals.

I was surprised to hear that I'd been nominated, because I haven't been blogging here much recently (much of what I used to use my blog for has been taken over by Twitter or Facebook or Delicous).

Surprised and also chuffed. And then I wondered why. Thinking about it, I realised I'd been wanting to get back into blogging, but needed a good reason for doing so. Browsing the other nominated blogs (for me - this is the most important reason for such awards - you can find out about bloggers you weren't previously aware of, or people you haven't looked at in a while), I started to realise just how much wonderful stuff was being written by so many. I know now should start making blogging a priority again, and wonder why I'd stopped doing so for so long.

Hello again, Blogosphere! I'm back! And Thank you, Lexiophiles for giving me a reason to start blogging again.

 I wrote the following article on Extensive Reading for the British Council's TeachingEnglish website:

Extensive reading

In general, students learning to read in English do not like reading and they rarely read. This is partly due to the way reading is approached in the language class.

The reading skill is most often taught by close study of short passages followed by analysis of language. 

• Extensive reading: An alternative approach

• Aims of extensive reading

• The characteristics of an extensive reading approach

• Motivation

• The teacher's role

• Conclusion

 

The value of this intensive reading procedure, with its focus on the teaching of discrete reading skills has been questioned by some, who claim that teaching students reading strategies does not necessarily make them better readers. It is widely believed that people become good readers through reading, and that learning how to read should mean a focus of attention on the meaning rather than the language of the text.

Extensive reading: An alternative approach
Another model for teaching reading exists. This is an 'extensive reading approach' and involves students reading long texts or large quantities for general understanding, with the intention of enjoying the texts.

Students are allowed to choose the books they read depending on their interests, and there is not always a follow-up discussion or work in class. In this way students are encouraged to read for pleasure and should become better readers.

Aims of extensive reading
The principal objective of undertaking an extensive reading approach is to get students reading in English and liking it. An increase in reading fluency should be another objective. Because of this, reading should be a pleasurable activity for the student, promoted as much as possible by the teacher.

The characteristics of an extensive reading approach

• Reading material
  Reading for pleasure requires a large selection of books be available for students to choose from at their level. Here, teachers can make good use of graded readers (books which have been written specifically for EFL/ESL students or which have been adapted from authentic texts).
  
  Setting up a class library is a good way to provide material for students, and because the books are kept in the actual classroom, there is a greater chance that they will be borrowed, and teachers also have more opportunities to refer to them during class.

• Student choice
  Students choose what they want to read based on their interests. If a student finds a book is too difficult or they don't enjoy it, they can change it for another one.

• Reading for pleasure and information
  Often students are put off reading when it is tied to class assignments. In an extensive reading programme, the students are reading principally for the content of the texts. Teachers can ask students about the books they are reading informally, and encourage occasional mini-presentations of the books or book reviews, but these should not seem like obligations to the students.

• Extensive reading out of class
  Teachers can do a lot to help students pursue extensive reading outside of the classroom. Having a classroom library and regularly encouraging students to borrow books to take home are some things which can help. If books are shelved in the classroom, students can also be given class time to browse and select books.

• Silent reading in class
  Extensive reading should not be incompatible with classroom practice and methodology. There are teachers who set aside a regular fifteen-minute period of silent reading in class. This silent reading has been said to help structural awareness develop, build vocabulary, and to promote confidence in the language.

• Language level
  The vocabulary and grammar of the books that students read should not pose a difficulty. The objective of an extensive reading programme is to encourage reading fluency, so students should not be stopping frequently because they do not understand a passage. However, the books should not be too easy as this may well demotivate students, who feel they are getting nothing out of the books.

• Use of dictionaries
  Reading becomes a chore if students think they have to stop and look up every word they do not understand in a dictionary. For this reason, dictionaries should be avoided. Instead of interrupting their flow, students should be encouraged to jot down the words they come across in a vocabulary notebook, and they can look them up after they have finished reading.

• Record keeping
  If the teacher takes an interest in and keeps record of what students are reading, then this can in itself encourage students. If a note is also made of which books the students like, then the teacher can also recommend other books to the students. The teacher should also be careful to explain the reasons behind the programme, and to highlight the benefits of extensive reading to them so that they know why they are doing it.

• The teacher as role model
  If the teacher is also seen to be a reader by the students, then they will be encouraged to read. The teacher can talk in class about books that she or he has been reading, and if they are knowledgeable about the books in the class library, having read them, then they can make genuine recommendations to students about what to read. The teacher can also read aloud to students, as a way of introducing students to different genres or individual books.

 

Motivation
One of the key factors to the success (or not) of an extensive reading programme is motivation. Capturing student interest is the key. If the materials available are interesting to the students, then they will be far more likely to want to read them. These books should also be at a level appropriate to their reading ability. As mentioned earlier, the texts should not be too difficult so students experience the frustration of not being able to understand the books.

Getting the extensive reading programme off to a good start is also vital. The aim is for an initial successful experience so that students discover they can read in English and that they enjoy it. This positive experience should stimulate them to read more, increasing motivation, enjoyment and a desire to read.

The teacher's role
The teacher encourages and assists the students with their reading, which the students undertake during and /or after class. Occasional summaries (oral or written) can help with this as they show both that the students are reading and also that they understand what their books are about. The activities can also help students improve their writing or speaking ability. Another activity teachers can become involved in is individual counselling - this gives the teacher an opportunity to ask students about their reading experiences and can be done by the teacher while the rest of the class are silent reading. Above all, however, extensive reading should be a student-centred and a student-managed activity.

Conclusion
Day & Bamford (1998) highlight the benefits that have been gained by the undertaking of extensive reading programmes. These include gains in reading and writing proficiency, oral skills and vocabulary, an increase in motivation and positive affect.

Setting up an extensive reading programme should not only lead your students to improve their reading proficiency and other language skills, but will hopefully enable them to take pleasure in reading for its own sake.

Further reading
Susser B & TN Robb (1990) 'EFL Extensive Reading Instruction: Research and Procedure' JALT Journal Vol No.2 http://www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/~trobb/sussrobb.html
Day RR & J Bamford (1998) 'Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom' Cambridge:CUP
Barnett, M.A. (1988). Reading through context: How real and perceived strategy use affects L2 comprehension. The Modern language Journal, 72, 150-162.

The BBC and British Council are not responsible for the content of external web sites.

Graham Stanley, British Council, Barcelona 

SLanguages 2009

This year's SLanguages conference promises to be the best ever - it starts later today at 20.00 Central European time and continues for the next 24 hours.

I'm excited to be speaking several times, first as part of the AVALON project, a European Union funded initiative, with 26 partners in 8 European countries. AVALON stands for Access to Virtual Learning live ONline, and our goal is to explore the potential for scenario-based language learning. This (tonight and then again tomorrow morning - see schedule for details) will be the first time we've spoken about it in public together - looking forward to it.

I'm also speaking as part of the panel discussion plenary on language teacher training in Second Life, with Nergiz Kern, Nick Noakes and Dennis Newson, although I think Dennis can't make it after all. We'll be talking about our experience organising the TESOL Electronic Village Online session on Virtual Worlds & Language Learning. The social network, http://evovwll.ning.com, that was set up for the EVO session has now just under 3000 members, and the discussions and meetings have been continuing, even though the actual EVO session finished back in February.

Finally, on Saturday I'll be talking about the Virtual Tourism CLIL course I organised earlier this year in Second Life. I'll mention how it went, include references to what the students thought about it (collected here), and finish off by taking people on a short tour of some of the places the students had to visit.

If you're interested in innovative ways of language learning and teaching , be sure to check out the SLanguages conference - hope to see you there!

IATEFL double whammy: Milan & Cardiff

I count myself among the lucky few who are going to attend in-person both of the upcoming events hosted by http://www.iatefl.org/ and the http://www.britishcouncil.org.

IATEFL 43rd Annual Conference - Cardiff

Starting on 31st March and running until 4th April, the 43rd annual IATEFL conference promises to be the best yet. The range and quality of the speakers at the IATEFL conference always poses a challenge when you're flipping through the programme deciding who to go to hear speak, although little does it matter, as rarely, in my experience are you disappointed.

The great news for those who can't be there in person is you'll be able to get more than a flavour of the conference by registering at IATEFL Cardiff Online: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/

Last year, there were 1600 participants at the conference and 5000 participating online. This year promises to be even better, with far more activity going on online to bring those not at the conference closer to the action.

Apart from the live broadcasts of the plenaries and video and audio recordings of some of the other sessions, wifi access at the conference means some participants in sessions will be live blogging or twittering (using http://www.twitter.com) to keep people in the loop. Should be a very special event indeed.

IATEFL YL SIG & LT SIG Conference - Milan 

But, the week before this, there's another very special event in the form of a joint Young Learner SIG (Special Interest Group) and Learning Technologies SIG conference in Milan (March 23rd-25th) examining 'Innovations in Teaching Children and Teenagers'. If you can make it and are interested in attending, there is still time to register here:  http://www.britishcouncil.org/italy-english-milan-teacher-training-aggiornamento-insegnanti-inglese-milano.htm

This event promises to be a real treat for anyone who teaches young learners, and there are three strands to the conference, which are CLIL (Content & Language Integrated Learning), Learning Technologies and  Testing & Assessment. 

Although there won't be as much online activity at this event, there will be some, and I have agreed to try my best to keep people informed by blogging here. I'll also be twittering at http://www.twitter.com/grahamstanley - hope that some of you at least can join us for the educational journey!

Seven Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

Happy New Year everyone.

I'm not even going to say that one of my New Year's resolutions is to start blogging regularly again, as I think I said that last year (and it didn't work out - probably because I was so busy elsewhere). This year, however...well, this year it'll be a different story...

So, wondering how to start the year off, I was going to post more resolutions, but Lindsay Clandfield asked me if I'd write six New Year Web 2 Resolutions for his blog, so I needed something else.

Then I found I'd been tagged by Gavin Dudeney for the ‘Seven Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me’ , which will make a perfect start to the year.

Here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog
• Share 7 facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird
• Tag seven people at the end of your post
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

Well, here goes nothing...

1. Before becoming a teacher, I worked in London for a number of architectural and design companies, starting off in document control/data management and moving onto administration / office management. This is where I started using computers, and I remember well the green on black screens of the first IBM PCs (I'm still sure it's the reason why everyone working there started wearing glasses) while working at SOM back in 1986. When I first started there, there were five employees. Three years later, when I left, the London practice had grown to well over 350 during the construction boom that saw the practice being mainly involved in the building of Broadgate and Canary Wharf.

It was here that I worked with Mark Dytham, who then won an architectural competition and moved to Japan, setting up his now prestigious company. Years later, I came across his name again as co-creator of the pecha kucha presentation format, which subsequently I've used both with students, at the 2007 ETP Live conference and at the second pecha kucha night in Barcelona. Pecha Kucha is becoming a popular ELT conference event, thanks to Lindsay Clandfield, who has started a special pecha kucha ELT site to help promote this fun experience. I'm happy to say I'll be part of the pecha kucha event to be held at the IATEFL conference in Cardiff in April 2009.

2. The most embarrassing moment of my childhood was when I played Aladdin in the school play (I must have been aged 7 or so) - I was dressed in a splendid oriental costume, complete with make-up and a fabulous Chinese hat with attached ponytail. At the end of the rehearsal performance in front of the entire school, I took a bow and my hat fell off. Everyone in the audience burst into laughter. I think that is the reason I never considered a career on the stage.

In later years, my most embarrassing moment was probably when, as a new player of a company softball team, a gorgeous girl suggested we go for lunch together. I turned up the next day with the whole softball team in tow, thinking that was what she'd suggested. At the end of lunch, she came up to me and said "Hey! That was nice, but maybe the next time we could have lunch just you and me."

3. My most famous private student was Spain's 2002 Eurovision candidate, Rosa Lopez (Rosa de España) , who I was introduced to by a friend of a friend. She had been catapulted to fame as the people's favourite in the first edition of Operación Triunfo (OT), the music reality show.

I met her after the show and after Eurovision. It seemed then that she was the most famous person in Spain - there wasn't a magazine or a newspaper that didn't feature her on the front cover. Everytime you turned on the TV she was there, and the paparazzi staked out her flat waiting on her every move. Her management's idea was to rework what they saw as an uncut diamond into a dazzling gem, and among other things, this included extensive dental work, daily gym workouts (she was the only OT candidate who was over-weight), elocution lessons and English classes!

Before I could start, her brothers and bodyguards had to give me the once over (presumably to make sure I wasn't a journalist in disguise) then I went up to her flat in Barcelona to start. The first couple of days went well. She was almost a total beginner, which is difficult to find in Barcelona these days. And this, despite the fact that she had sung in English during the TV programme. Later I was to find out that she had learned the words phonetically. This was one thing in her favour - she had an excellent ear for music and sounds.

A very kind and sociable person, each class, before we started, she insisted on making us breakfast (usually a turkey salad sandwich and coffee). Once we started, I found that she was easily distracted and getting her to turn off the TV during class was a trial. I tried to reach her with music, and brought in Delaney & Bonnie's 'Superstar' to listen to in class. She loved it, and asked to borrow the CD. At one point, the word 'something' came up, and she started to sing the George Harrisson song (which she had learned phonetically) , belting it out as we sat at the table. I was blown away, both by how well she could sing, and also the fact that she remembered all of the lyrics without being able to speak much English. Shortly after we started, Rosa mentioned she now had an English teacher called Graham when she was interviewed on TV and in the magazine Que Me Dices - the first and probably the last time I'll be featured in a gossip magazine.

Unfortunately, things weren't working out for Rosa in Barcelona, and the pressure soon got too much for her - she had some kind of breakdown and returned to Granada in the South of Spain. We'd made little progress - cancelled classes, others that were spent with her in tears, unable to speak any English. Once, she told me that the moment she decided that she wanted to learn English was when she was at a party in New York. Introduced to her idol, Whitney Houston, she realised she couldn't say a thing to her, not even "I love your songs" - a missed opportunity that she didn't want to let happen again. However, there was just too much going on in her life. The last time I saw her, I turned up for class and she was in the middle of a photo-shoot in her apartment. She was sorry, but she would have to cancel. A week later, she was back at home suffering a crisis.

Fortunately, she's back on track now, and seems to be doing well, despite the fact that many people in Spain thought she'd end up giving it all up and going back to her family. Good on her. I sometimes wonder if she's managed to learn any more English.

4. I've been an extra in a Woody Allen film (Vicki Christina Barcelona) - read more about the experience here. It's now out and I'm on screen for about half a second towards the end, buying flowers for my film-wife behind Rebecca Hall as she's on the phone to Javier Bardem.

Since then, the agency has called a few times asking if I could do more extra work. At first it didn't work out, but I finally got to do more extra work last November - this time it was for Suspicious Minds, a Spanish psychological thriller. I played the manager of a garage and spent three hours signing receipts on film in the middle of the night in an industrial estate in Barcelona. Hmmm, the cinema world isn't as glamorous as people make it out to be. With a bit of luck, though, I'll be on-screen for a second - if things continue at this rate (doubling my on-screen appearances every year), I reckon I could be a star by 2016.

5. Hundreds of hours of my teenage years were spent rolling dice over my parents' dining room table with a group of three friends. We mainly played AD&D and Traveller, and met to do so most Wednesdays (13.00-23.00), Fridays (19.00-23.00) and Saturdays (13.00-23.00) for at least a couple of years. At 24 hours a week, around 50 weeks of the year (allowing for holidays, etc), that makes around 240 hours. Phew! My parents worried that I wasn't going to school discos and classmates spread rumours that we were meeting to perform 'strange experiments'. Strangely enough, that time spent playing role-playing games has paid off creatively, especially as I was usually dungeon-master, mainly involved in creating the story for others to follow, writing and imagining scenarios for the others to follow.

6. While in my twenties, and living in the UK, I was called to do jury service. I spent the best part of a week in the waiting room, then was called to sit on a case. At the first session the judge told us that because of the nature of the crime (armed bank robbery, policeman shot) and the fact that a gang was involved, each juror would be assigned 2 armed bodyguards 24-hours-a-day. So, I went home on the bus with 2 policemen following me and that was the case for the rest of the week-end and week afterwards. At first it was a novelty, and I delighted in turning up at a friend's house and telling them to look out the window. But after a few days of this, it became a real pain - I became self-conscious and everything I did I had to keep in mind that there'd be two coppers following me. I went to a pub to play pool and there they'd be, at a safe distance (I had been told not to approach them) keeping an eye on me. After a week of being followed I was really cheesed off.

On the Friday, some of the jurors asked for permission to go out for lunch. We'd been cooped up all week (so that the bodyguards wouldn't have to be called), and really needed to get out. We were told to go as far away from the Old Bailey as possible, to make it less likely that family members / friends of the accused would bump into us. Four of us (and our 8 bodyguards) went to have lunch in a pub. On return, one of the jurors I was with said that he thought he'd spotted someone from the visitor's gallery in the pub. The judge heard about this and decided to suspend the case. The four of us who'd been to the pub were told that we'd almost been charged with contempt of court (even though we'd had permission) and the front page headlines in the national newspapers turned the court case into a 'gang tries to reach jury' story - I still can't believe the rubbish they wrote about the case...

7. My great unfulfilled ambition is (like so many other people) to write a novel. I wasted a good part of my twenties standing around in pubs boring the pants off the people who were kind (or stupid) enough to listen to my ideas for plots. In my thirties, I stopped talking and actually started writing this rubbish down on paper. Then, I discovered NaNoWriMo, and, as I'd become a blogger, actually started blogging a novel, trying to put down a minimum 60,000 in 30 days. Soon, I discovered I'd actually built up a readership (of four!), which inspired me to continue. After 20,000 words I gave up, unable to persuade my dull and earnest main character to leave his flat. I suppose Sandy's right - I should've injected made it a comedy. Maybe the next time...

Now, in my forties, I find the sum result of these long hours: the last section of a blog post about 'Seven Things You Probably Don't Know About Me'. Still, I have recently been given a new glimmer of hope, after seeing the success a colleague, Adam Dalton, has had with his novel, Necromancer's Gambit. If you like metaphysical fantasy, I can highly recommend it.

And now I'm tagging, Lindsay Clandfield, Bee (Barbara Dieu), Sean (EFLGeek), Nick Noakes, Dennis Newson, Isa F Munn, Language Lab (Grammar Girl)