The Last Hurrah

Well it’s been encouraging to meet people from something like 40 different countries, who are all interested in the convergence of language learning and technology. If you’d like more info on the conference, see http://www.eurocall2007.com

Today was the last day, and after a series of sessions, we did take a sightseeing trip, and it did my heart glad to see the coast of ireland again, and to see a castle up close and wander about in it.

This particular castle was Dunluce castle, on the northwest coast of ireland.

There happened to be a few knights left from the days of the original castle, who were demonstrating:

The walk down towards the castle as it stands today:

And this is how the castle would have looked. (Compare the two)

This was pretty impressive, the window frames in stone; at first I thought it was original stonework that had survived; while it turns out that these particular window frames were reconstructed to demonstrate what it would have been like, it is still impressive.

And this is a closer look at the model, so see how it would have repeated throughout the frame of the “manor house”.

The next place we went after Dunluce Castle was the Giant’s causeway, an interesting formation of rock, what something like crystal stones, hexagonal shaped, pushing up. It’s a bit of a walk down the hill; interestingly, it turns out that UNESCO, an entity affiliated with the United Nations, had identified this area as one needing protection, presumably from developers, so it is a completely untouched stretch of coastline with absolutely no development whatsoever.

Here is the someday to be Dr. Kelsey sitting atop some orthogonal or hexagonal or somethingonal rock formations.

And here are the rock formations a bit closer.

And we leave you with a view of pre-Dr. Kelsey, (who stayed up too late the night before making the final file sets for the translations of the laptop how-to notes on the wiki page, in spanish, french, portuguese, hindi, thai, arabic and amharic — http://wiki.laptop.org/go/542_Demo_Notes) — and the odd rock formations.

The sessions have been flying by — we got a break last night though, taking a small trip to have dinner at a hotel on the coast.

I wasn’t in a hurry to go inside for dinner, what with the view and colors in the setting sky.

I learned a bit more about white wine from some French colleagues, that it goes well with fish and lighter foods . . .

But of course the highlight of the evening was the coast itself.

And I supposed I should leave you with an unobstructed view:

Eurocall

I am here at University of Ulster – Coleraine campus, surviving off of the last embers of caffiene, with chicago -6 hours and no sleep the prior night.

EuroCALL is the European Computer Assisted Language Learning association, and it’s been nice to meet european colleagues who are interested in the convergence of technology and language learning. Friday I’ll make some sort of presentation about the laptop, and offer a friendly invitation for people to get involved.

It was interesting coming into Northern Ireland by way of Belfast International airport. One of the first things I noticed while waiting for a taxi is how inexpensive it is to fly to spain (ex: below it’s 15 pounds, and even with the exchange rate, that’s only about $30 USD!)

And then I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of real live ship captains, Ian and David, who had just come in from England and were bound to go on a sailing training adventure, with Tall Ships. (www.tallships.org). It made me want to go off and join the Navy!

It was about an hour train ride from Belfast into Ulster; I’m glad I rode the train instead of taking the bus; it was a nice way to see the rolling green countryside

And I don’t have any particularly exciting pictures of the Coleraine campus, except it has an interesting architectural style.

And I suppose my bias towards gardening and green growing things comes through, as this is the last picture of the day, a vine making itself known through the concrete window.

And lest I be completely irresponsible and not mentioning anything useful about language learning, here is a link to the conference itself: http://www.eurocall2007.com