1. Techfugees mission is “empowering displaced people with technology” https://techfugees.com/ They’ve just issued their first ever annual report, which you can read here https://techfugees.app.box.com/s/v3j96k8bhs6sm0vuhle6gtkcl4jrnaru I’ve also attached a PDF below but please be warned it’s a bit of a monster file – perhaps surprising, given the people with whom Techfugees does such good work – and you might not want to use up most of your data allowance downloading it.
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2. Duolingo, the language learning site, https://www.duolingo.com/ have also just published their first annual Language Report on global language learning trends https://blog.duolingo.com/global-language-report-2020/ Lots of interesting observations, including: the ten most popular languages, where #1 might not surprise you but the lowly position of #10 might; the second most popular language learnt through Duolingo in each country worldwide; the fastest growing languages being learnt; the country that works hardest at learning languages. One small proviso is that the data derives from Duolingo’s customer database, which is clearly not quite a random sample of population in each country.
3. You’ll need to book quickly for the Oxford English Language Teachers’ Online Conference (ELTOC), as some sessions are already full: https://elt.oup.com/events/global/eltoc-2021?cc=gb&selLanguage=en It runs from 25th to 27th February, and here’s the programme: https://view.pagetiger.com/ELTOC-2021-global-schedule
4. And, finally, the first episode of the first book, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, in a series of BBC Radio dramatisations over the next few months of Thomas Hardy’s novels told from the heroine’s point of view: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078zcrr Listened to it last night and thought one of my favourite novels survived well!
Here’s the episode of ‘In Our Time’ that discussed Tess: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078zcrr
Curiously – or lazily? – both dramatisation and discussion use the same image of Tess – see if you can find it here! http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/tess/tess.html
Roy Cross's Blog 