Moodle summer course announcement
April 30th is the deadline for application for courses in the European Comenius / Grundtvig catalogue.
I’d like to draw your attention to the course “Moodle at School: Installing & Deploying a Course Management System for Language Teachers“, to be organised in Ghent, Belgium from 06/09/2009 – 13/09/2009.
This one week course will give you everything you need to know in order to not only install but also configure and manage your own Moodle Course Management System. Additionally, you will also learn how to effectively implement all of its features in your daily teaching practice. The full programme of the course can be found on the course website.
People who are interested in joining this course are kindly requested to fill in the preregistration form.
Exam results Accommodation 2
The exam results of the 2nd year Accommodation Management are available for download. The results are very good, too: the average score is 61.97%; remarkably enough, nobody failed in this class either. Check out the distribution of the scores for yourself.
Exam results Travel 2
The exam results of the 2nd year Travel Management are available for download. The results are very good, this time: the average score is 61.53%; what’s more: nobody failed (even though 7 people very narrowly escaped, with 50 or 51%).
Year 2: solutions workbook
For the students in the 2nd year, here are the solutions for units 8-12 of the workbook for Intermediate English.
Year 1: Solutions workbook 8-12
For the students in the 1st year, here are the solutions for units 8-12 of the workbook for Intermediate English.
Voxopop
Vox Populi translates from Latin into Voice of the People, and that’s exactly what the Voxopop site is all about: to let your voice be heard! I was already registered at the old site before they decided to change their name (Chinswing, if you remember it), but I have to admit that registering and looking around was as far as I went.
They’ve added some new features, too:
Any user can now create their very own “talkgroups”. These are discussion communities based around an interest or theme of your choosing. They can be used for blog or podcast communities, interest groups, classrooms, language learning groups, and more. After starting a talkgroup, you can use the new invite feature to spread the word about your new community.
Especially for foreign language teachers/learners this is a very interesting feature of course: teachers can set up classes and have everybody in their class discuss online using spoken language. The fact that these can be used in blogs or podcast communities also means these discussions can be downloaded to MP3 players, etc.
The site also supports RSS feeds per topic, which means that you can make the news come to you, instead of always having to go to the site to see if anything has been added to the topic you’re following. Unfortunately enough, Firefox users will have to add their Live Bookmark manually, since the feed is not automatically recognized by the browser.
You don’t have to start up your own group for this site to be interesting, of course: there’s a group (three, in fact, and I’m sure there are more) where people practice their oral skills for the TOEFL IBT, but learners/teachers of Japanese (Toshiiiiiiiiiiii, where are you?) will also appreciate what they can find here.
Now all I need is some time to experiment with it…
Enemies of the Internet
According to Reporters Without Borders‘ latest report, 12 countries have changed the internet into an intranet, to protect their populations.
“The 12 ‘Enemies of the Internet’ – Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam – have all transformed their Internet into an Intranet in order to prevent their population from accessing ‘undesirable’ online information,” Reporters Without Borders said.
Another 10 countries have been placed under surveillance for adopting “worrying measures”. Interestingly enough, Turkey is not in this list, even though there’s this long list of websites that are censored.
Abramovich updated…
For the students in the 2nd year, here’s an update to the handbook we’re using. According to Forbes’ newest list of the rich and famous, Roman Abramovich has lost about half of his money – he now only has $8.5b left, poor sod. Bill Gates claimed his pole position back ($40.0b), and now leads ahead of investor Warren Buffett ($37.0b) and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu ($35.0b)…
Valencia – Fallas 09
Specialists tell me it was nothing special, and who am I to doubt the word of a local? For me, it was breath-taking, even though in this case “ear-deafening” is probably the better expression. Deafening, that’s all I can say. A racket. Imagine several tens of thousands of people gathering on a square with in the middle fireworks and firecrackers and that would last normal people lifetime. Make sure you have microphones all around, and boost the sound through a set of speakers on steroids. Deafening, I’m telling you. But what a spectacle…
Clearly the point is not to enjoy the wonderful colours of the fireworks – in fact, the colours really don’t matter at all, since this ear-fest started at two in the afternoon. After about 15′ or so, it’s all over. What is left is smoke, the smell of gunpowder, and a feeling of…WOOOWWWWW!
It’s all worked out very carefully, of course – people have been looking forward to this for weeks; it marks the start of a multi-day festival and is just another reason to party like it’s, well, 2009. Ten minutes before the start, a first bomb is inviting you to make your way to the central square. Five minutes later, another one, and then…all hell breaks loose! Slowly, though. Some fireworks, some crackers, more fireworks, and everyone’s staring at the sky and snifsmelling the powder exploding over their heads. When the explosions move from the sky back to the central square, you can feel the pressure building up. Rhythmic bursts of thunder without the lightning mark the grand finale, and an overwhelming salvo makes people jump to the rhythm of the beat. It’s music – it’s poetry – it’s above all a very bad idea to organize it every day.
How not to do your job…
Q: how do you spell “trouble from the beginning to the end”?
A: “Lufthansa ground staff, Istanbul”
Q: how do you spell “utter incompetence”?
A: “Kartal Doğan”
Allow me to explain…
Having worked in Tourism for a couple of years now, as a lecturer of English, you develop a certain affinity for the business. When you go to hotels, travel agencies, etc., you start looking at how these people do their jobs with a different set of eyes. The tourist gaze has made way for the professional counterpart. Knowing how hard my students have to work when they do their in-service trainings, I feel more compassionate somehow for these modern slaves of the service industry.
Now, as it happened, I have / had to be in Valencia for a European project I am a partner in. Colleagues from over a dozen countries all me(e)t there to share the outcomes of the work they have done in the past several months. We all booked our tickets in 2008 (or at least I did), and then the day came when at 5am I had to travel to Istanbul, to fly to Valencia over Munich, with Germany’s Lufthansa. Luft Hansa. The name breathes Deutsche Grundlichkeit.
We go through all the regular, rigorous procedures that accompany the whole check-in and boarding process these days, and finally we can take place in the plane, all well on time. I have the whole row to myself (yeah, I was lucky – plenty of leg room), and I had a seat at the window on top of it all. We taxi to the runway, and my mouth already started watering when I thought of the tapas I’d be eating in the evening. I just told you I had to leave at 5am, and I hadn’t had breakfast yet – I can’t stomach anything that early in the morning. No problem, I’d have something in Munich, where I had to wait a few hours for my connecting flight.
Ladies and Gentlemen…
And then, “ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.” Hmm. “I’m afraid there is a little problem with the flight computer.”
Oh, noooooo…
“We have to get off the runway again. Airport mechanics will come to fix the problem. This should take about 20 minutes.” Oh, well…20 minutes is not too bad – problems with flight computers is not exactly something anyone in their right mind would bear with, especially not keeping in mind that only the day before a Turkish Airlines plane had crashed in Amsterdam. After the initial fixes, they ran some diagnostics, but those failed. The captain updated us very frequently, and informed us that the flight computers would have to be replaced. This would take an additional 30 minutes. We’d already been waiting for an hour by that time, but okay, what’s an hour if it stops you from being dead for all eternity… Flight computers were replaced, and more tests were run.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the problems remain, and I do not accept this plane to fly you all to Munich.” We would be taken back to the terminal where the friendly people of Lufthansa would help us getting into different planes. We had lost just over 2 hours by that time. It was getting a bit annoying, but it was nothing compared with what was yet to come.
The end of the beginning. The beginning of the end.
Munich is one of those transfer hubs in Europe; you fly there, and change over to a different plane to reach your final destination. At least, that’s the plan, heh. Because of this, there was a massive queue at the ticket counter; people had to get new tickets not just for the flight to Munich, but also for their connecting flights, so it took a good deal of troubleshooting to sort it all out.
I’ll give you the short version of the rest of this all first, because it’s a looong story.
- We’ll send you to Spain with Iberia.
- We’ll send you to Spain with Lufthansa & then a connecting flight.
- We’ll send you to Spain with Iberia.
- We’ll send you to Spain with Lufthansa & then a connecting flight. The next day.
And no, it’s not a copy & paste mistake.
I was taken separately together with 2 Spanish people. The lady explained us that we would be put on a Iberia plane instead. “Good,” I thought – I’d be in Spain a bit later, and possibly even earlier than with my original flight.
We had to wait for about half an hour when a new lady came to us, carrying a list in her hands with names on it. My 2 Spanish friends were on it, but I wasn’t. There was a Polish name on it, but not mine. I had been called out half an hour earlier, and the Pole didn’t have any business to do in Spain, but okay… She took their passports (not mine – not on the list means no ticket), and she vanished again. Everything was very hectic, people were trying to get on their flights as soon as possible, some of them had to fly inter-continentally, so I just waited my turn and I asked why they had given Iberia tickets to the other people, and not to me. “Oh, no problem, I’ll give you a ticket now.” Okay… Being patient helps; people stay friendly to you that way. I received a new handwritten ticket and a voucher for a refreshment, good for 10 TL. “Thank you very much, and have a nice day.”
Munich? Valencia? Madrid? Munich? Istanbul?
Off I went. I checked the flight details on the monitor, and noticed that the next flight was scheduled at 16.05. No, scratch that, it had an hour’s delay because of us: it was 17.05 now. That gave me some 20 minutes to get to the terminal, where the boarding process had already started. Sigh. No time for my 10 TL refreshment, in other words, and I went off to gate 203, where I would fly to Valencia over Munich, following my original plans. I started queueing up again, and wondered about my ticket. They had given me only one, instead of two – I didn’t have a ticket for my connecting flight. As I reached the counter again, my name was called out over the speakers again. “Yes, Bonamie, that’s me – what’s the matter?” They were going to take me to a different flight (Iberia). Oh? Okay. Hurrying up to the Iberia gate, we arrived 10 minutes before the gates were going to be closed. My friendly (almost personal) assistant had some discussions with the gate security personnel, and she disappeared again, telling me to wait until she came back. From what I understood, she was going to sort out my ticket with Iberia, and I’d be on the plane in no time. Some time later, she came back again, and informed me that Iberia didn’t accept me as a passenger, so we trotted off again to 203. Munich it was, in other words. Queueing up again, I finally asked what they were going to do about my second ticket.
“Second ticket? You don’t have a second ticket? No problem, just wait here.”
I waited. And waited. Everybody had checked in already, people started boarding the plane, we were over an hour late already, and I was still nowhere. Back at the counter, I was given a new ticket, and they told me that for my flight to Valencia, I’d have to wait until the next day, because there’d be no more flights to Valencia that day.
And then I got a little miffed.
You see, when Ms Kartal Doğan tried to get me the second ticket, she told the people at the other side of the line that I had probably been distracted when they were sorting out the tickets for Iberia. Ms Kartal Doğan didn’t think that I’d understand what she was talking about (in Turkish), so she was putting all the blame on me. How very convenient for her – that way she didn’t have to explain to anyone why she didn’t put me on the Iberia flight in the first place; it was just all my fault! It’s not because she was undoubtedly the oldest person on the staff there that she had to treat anyone else younger than her with the disdain she displayed.
Meanwhile I had reached the limits of my patience, because after all I was traveling to get some work done – not for pleasure or anything. I raised my voice a bit (loud enough for everyone in the corridor to hear me⁾, repeating exactly what had happened, and that I wasn’t going to let it at that. They hadn’t exactly excelled in “crisis management”, and they were blaming their passengers for it, too. Completely unheard of!
But okay…who cares, right? We ended up in the airplane anyway, and with a decent amount of delay we were on our way to Germany. From then on (the moment we were in the plane), everything went fine again. Might this be because Ms Kartal Doğan was not around anymore?
Munich!
After landing in Munich, the people over there helped me really well. What a difference between the Germans and the Turks. I almost couldn’t believe it. They were really friendly and helpful, sent me to a nice hotel (Sheraton – good enough for you?), gave me an emergency bathroom kit, asked me if there was anything else they could do… Bathroom kit? Well, yes, you see: the people at Lufthansa in Istanbul managed to get rid of my luggage somehow and make sure it was not in the plane I was in. No worries, of course…they were going to send it later…Hopefully.
Fire! Fire! Fire!
As someone who is professionally involved in the service industry, I could only advise Lufthansa to get rid of half of the staff in Istanbul, and replace them with more competent people, or at least by people who care about the passengers they’re supposed to help. And start with Ms Kartal Doğan, perhaps. She must be close to retirement anyway and definitely won’t mind not having to deal with those irritating customers anymore.
