You know the end of the school year is near when

- You haven't blogged for three weeks (because your blog is about teaching and you are so tired of teaching that you have nothing to say).

- You are thinking about starting a travel blog instead.

- You sigh loudly in front of your students at the beginning of the class. Realising what you have done, you say the heat is killing you.

- You have started counting the hours you have to spend teaching until the holiday begins (105).

- You are thinking about the beginning of the next school year with horror.

- All your lesson plans somehow revolve around the topic of summer holidays.

- You are thinking about starting a fashion blog.

- You finally write a very, very short post, just to get it over with. Then you hope your readers will add more ideas to your very, very short post.

So, how do you know the end of the school year is near?

Technorati Tags: TEFL, holidays

So Long, Vincent

I already shared this slideshow on this blog once before. Unfortunately, I never bothered to write a proper blog post to follow it. Alas, I was young and foolish. And lazy.

Anyway, had I written a proper blog post with the slideshow, this is how it would have sounded:

"Van Gogh's museum in Second Life is a magical place. Imagine living inside one of Vincent's paintings - sitting in that cafe of his pretending to be a regular, posing in front of the fountain or under the starry sky. Imagine looking at the paintings that no longer exist. Van Gogh's Museum in Second Life is so beautiful that you will never want to leave."

Something like that. Except that Van Gogh's Museum in Second Life no longer exists. Alongside with a lot of other cool places elsewhere on the Web (for example, where is English Droid?!).

Nothing lasts for ever on the Internet. Take Twitter, for example. Sometimes I read a tweet that is really funny or really wise (or both at the same time). Unless I remember who has written it, I will never be able to find it again. And it is a pity.

Imagine what Shakespeare's tweets would have been like. And imagine losing them forever on the Internet. 

Then, there are digital photos. They are all over the place - digital frames, Web albums, mobiles, emails... None of these things last for ever. And very few people still bother with hard copies. 

I wonder how our culture will look to the next generation. Will there be enough of our culture for the next generation to study? And how do we preserve what we have? 

Technorati Tags: 31DBBB, Day21, SecondLife, Twitter