Humor4u

Could we evidence our way to a better research ethics system? A bit more formal evaluation has always seemed to me like a very good idea. When I posted the version of this cartoon in 2012, though, I didn't know of any controlled evaluation - despite the critical importance of research ethics and the potential for ethics regulation processes to do harm themselves. I updated the cartoon when I saw a controlled study related to research ethics for the first time. Mary Dixon-Woods and colleagues studied adding an ethics officer. They wanted to know if that could make the process more efficient and improve the quality of outcomes. It didn't go exactly according to plan - 31% of the time there was no contact between the ethics officer and the committee before the meeting. There wasn't an appreciable impact on outcomes - and it didn't speed up the process either. Hats off to all concerned: we're a little less ignorant about research ethics committees than we were before.

This follows on my earlier post Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time? About a month ago I blogged about my mini action research on decontextualised vocabulary learning. The post  generated some discussion with some people arguing that there was nothing decontexualised about it - you can read the original post and the comments here . The main finding was that on the post-test there was no difference between the items which were learnt out of context and the items presented in class in context. So is decontextualised vocabulary teaching a justified strategy? Obvious benefits Even though the decontextualised “Go home and look up” activity produced mixed results and there was a lot of reteaching involved, I still consider it to be successful. Besides enriching their vocabulary it gives learners a sense of autonomy as well as responsibility for their learning, not to mention practice with using dictionaries, an often overlooked skill in ELT. I will definitely keep giving

I made this drawing in Photoshop for fun, and ended up kind of liking it. The original sketchbook version is always better though, at least to me. Anyhow, I thought it would look cute as a little print, so I got four more drawings together and made a postcard set that you can buy on my Etsy shop . Each one is shiny and colorful and about 4" x 6". Here are the other ones...all stuff I've posted before, but tweaked to be more "print worthy." I am making larger prints of some of these that will also be on my Etsy store shortly. I'm also working on some new Skadi prints. You can click this drawing to go to the shop! Thanks! Also, thanks for all the encouragement on my last post. I'll definitely be posting more drawings from my hill folk project soon.

Systematic reviewing: what's not to love?

INTERLUDE Stay tuned...

In this activity, students play an online digital game (in pairs or alone at home) and then focus on the lexis related to money. I've never liked online games, apart from  Airport Madness 3 and  Airline Manager on Facebook - my childhood fascination with airplanes is probably to blame. I would even make snide remarks about people who do like them, such as: "My life is interesting enough I don't need online games" or "I have imagination, thank you. I don't need to escape into the realm of fantasy". However - now this may sound platitudinous - it all changed when I took Graham Stanley 's online course "Language Learning Using Online Digital Games" on SEETA (South East Europe Teachers Association). By the way, if you don't know what SEETA is check out their website - they run great courses and you can take part in some of them even if you're not a member of a teachers' association in any of the 12 member countries. Graham's

From my blog post  for the British Journal of Sports Medicine If you want to be less easily fooled by health claims, reading Know Your Chances or  Smart Health Choices is a good start

So I've had this comic idea that I've wanted to do for a few years now, but I can't seem to get it started. I have the three main characters more or less figured out, but I can't seem to get the story or style nailed down. If this comic actually existed, it'd be about three girls living in the Appalachian Mountains, sometime around the year 1900. I guess it's kind of inspired by all the things that they sing about in old country songs...religion, heartache, murder, mental illness, etc. All my favorite things. There's Cora, a fire and brimstone fanatic who cuts her own hair and sometimes does bad things, like set fires to stuff. She's basically good though. And the most fun to draw. Her "friend" is Shah, who lives alone in the mountains making moonshine and fighting off the inbred cannibals who live nearby. Shah likes animals and shooting people. The third character is a mysterious girl with no memory of her life before being found on a riv

The animation support added in Android 3.0 and enhanced since then is useful, allowing a flexible system of property animation to animate literally anything you want. Like a store going out of business: if it ain't nailed down, it's up for grabs. But that doesn't mean we're done yet; there are many things that we'd like to do to keep improving the animation system and making Android animations easier to write and more powerful. One of those things is curved motion. Right now, if you animate something between a start and end point, it will move in a straight line between those values. For example, a translation animation, where the object moves from one (x, y) location to another, will move in a straight line beween those points. You can (and should) use non-linear timing for these animations, and the animation framework uses ease-in/ease-out timing by default. But the actual spacial movement is linear; there is no way for you to specify a curved path for an object

Activities for recycling lexis from last week's end-of-year quiz  So here we are in 2012... Come to think of it, it's funny that we keep adding "two thousand and..." - it is obvious isn't it? In the previous millennium we said "seventy-nine" and "ninety-five" without (un)necessarily preceding it with "nineteen hundred". It would thus make sense if we said "in the year oh-three" or "in the third year", for example. Sorry about this digression. Language focus I was happy to hear that you liked the news quiz and some of you used it with their students - thank you for the feedback. Below you will find a follow-up activity which is basically language work focusing on the collocations from the quiz. For other ideas on how to revise the lexis your students have come across, read my Cycles of Recycling  post. VOCABULARY REVIEW VOCAB REVIEW - TEACHERS NOTES Easier version (lower-intermediate / young learners) If you used t