1. I could imagine that many of us have mixed feelings – at least! – about the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. This year’s has just ended, and here’s McKinsey’s ‘five key takeaways’ from it https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/themes/5-takeaways-from-the-world-economic-forums-2023-meeting There’s a link to a piece on each of the key takeaways, with an audio version of each read (rather well) by ChatGPT’s younger sister.

Here’s the print piece on the space economy takeaway https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/our-insights/how-will-the-space-economy-change-the-world and here’s the audio version https://soundcloud.com/mckinsey/listen-to-the-article-how-will-the-space-economy-change-the-world

2. The latest free download in Heath Rose and Jim McKinley’s Cambridge Elements in Language Teaching series is Teaching Young Multilingual Learners by Luciana C. de Oliveira and Loren Jones https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/teaching-young-multilingual-learners/FCF4AF1045B8A204184865731C42918B

Available to download till 3^rd February; PDF below just in case you don’t get round to it in time.

Information on the rest of the series here: https://tinyurl.com/mry5v4ef

3. Your friends at school, languages and the pandemic legacy is the title of the latest weekly TeacherTapp blog post, which, as usual, addresses three questions.

This week’s three are:

a) who needs friends at school? (not head teachers, apparently);

b) which languages are being taught in the UK nowadays? (and possibly also learnt?);

c) what did we learn from the pandemic? (and which innovations did we retain post-pandemic?)

https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/your-friends-at-school-languages-and-the-pandemic-legacy/

4. Just Twenty-Five Pages a Day is a nice idea, possibly explained at greater length than necessary here https://fs.blog/twenty-five-pages-a-day/

5. And, finally and I hope acceptably self-indulgently, Flanders and Swann were a favourite musical duo of my father’s, and we ended his celebration-cremation service yesterday with their Hippopotamus Song https://youtu.be/4zpDF3Py7r8

He would be very pleased, I’m sure, if you sang along with the chorus!