Web censorship

Have you visted ChillingEffects.org, a website that acts as an archive of legal notices sent to websites,ISP's and Google? These notices typically demand the removal of material they disapprove of, on supposed copyright grounds, under threat of legal action. Chilling Effect's analysis of many of these legal notices is that they would not have been upheld by a court. Nonetheless, in many cases, the threat was sufficient and the websites deleted material as requested.
According to Annalee Newitz's article Post and be Damned, New Scientist , 14/01/06. "One study, by law researchers at New York University's Brennen Centre for Justice, found that 47% of takedown notices sent to ISPs concerned material that had " had a strong or reasonably fair use or First Amendment defense", that is, the material was likely exempt from copyright laws. And yet they found that half of this content had been removed from the Internet.

My feeling is that it is vital to stand up against such legal bullying if we wish to preserve the extraordinary freedom the Internet currently affords many people round the world.
I wonder if any HLT readers have been served this sort of legal notice and I also wonder how they reacted. Correspondence on this would be interesting.

What's in this Issue?

I am acutely aware that HLT has carried relatively little material aimed at the primary sector over its first seven years and so am delighted to invite you to read Major Article 4 Foreign Languages in Steiner-Waldorf Education by Christoph Jaffke. You will also find links from this article to other very practical aspects of Steinerian thought in the work of Henk van Oort, a faithful contributor to HLT over the years whose practical exercises for primary school work are among the most widley read parts of the magazine, the statistics package tells me.

In Major Article 3 British EFL and the "main stream", Rod Bolitho offers a history of the influence on UK EFL on state secondary education in countries round the world and attacks current British Council policy. Reprinted from IATEFL Conference selections 2005, this is a major document that I was very keen to have cached in the HLT archive, as I believe that we reach many readers beyond the IATEFL orbit and will do so more and more as HLT grows.

In Major Article 1 Arguments against English as an International Language, Julian Kenny vigorously opposes the Jennifer Jenkins and Henry Widdowson's case for English as a lingua franca. You can read a major article of Jenkins' in an earlier issue of HLT.

Some issues back I appealed for people to write about the downside aspects of our profession and I think I hit a nerve. In Short Article 1 Being down so long seems like up to me: depression, one of my main trainers, Lou Spaventa, writes from within a current "black dog" period of his life. He is so aware of the power of his mood to drain others that at the end of this moving piece he apologises to any reader who has been negatively affected. His poignant 2000 words fiercely remind me of William Stryon's book Heart of Darkness, also written from within an abysmal trough of depression.

This issue carries a spirited defence from Croatia of intelligent use of PowerPoint, Short Article 4, while in Short Article 6 Miranda Hamilton tells you in detail how she come to terms with and then fell in love with her interactive white board.

I had great fun writing the Ideas from the Corpora column, having failed to cajole a proper corpus linguist to contribute this time. I wondered what stoppedgraveyard and cemetery being synonyms. Using Google as my corpus for this search was amazing and I hope you enjoy my hesitant, inexpert findings. When a word like graveyard moves over mostly into the metaphor zone does it lose the power of its original primings, to use Michael Hoey's term? Can a word be "metaphorised" out of grounded existence?

HLT statistics tell me that not that many people choose of visit Readers'Letters, but you should this time:
Paul Davis writes a powerful text on how the basis of real teaching is love for your students; if you know Paul you will realise that "love" here has nothing to
do with sentimentality, mother-hennery or romanticising.
Khoram Balaee, from Tehran, has penned the second letter, questioning the value of second hand experience passed on by colleagues.

In Lesson Outlines you will find vintage activities offered by Chaz Pugliese and Simon Marshall, while in Teachers'Resourcebook Preview you have a meaty piece by Christine Frank on how to get a creative writing atmosphere going in your class. She ends this piece with some excellent exercises.

To edit a growing magazine over a period of seven years is quite an undertaking and we, at Pilgrims, very much hope that a new fresh face will soon be appointed to take over from me as editor.
I am aware, if only vaguely, that I have given this magazine some sort of shape at the expense of many distortions and deletions and it is time you are exposed to the genius, vision, narrowness and blind spots of a new mind with a different perspective on the humanistic movement in language teaching and from a different country and a different mother tongue.
This new hand on the tiller will soon have HLT scudding across the water with every inch of sail aloft and with the spinnaker bellying taut in the following force four wind..

Mario