A world of language

My four year-old-nephew asked me, "What's the world called today?" and I realised in the context of our conversation that he was asking me what the date was. I told him, and marvelled at children's verbal dexterity and their ability to find ways of making themselves understood. I look forward to more explorations of children's language in a fantastic new project I am involved in. Led by Andrew Burn at the Institute of Education, it is a project that involves tracing children's playground games and rhymes in a new media age and will lead to the development of games for the Nintendo Wii. You can read more about it here and I will update you on the project as it progresses. We will soon be advertising for a .5 post-doctoral research assistant for 2 years from April 2009 to conduct playground ethnography in a primary school in Sheffield as part of the project, so if anyone reading this might be interested, let me know and I can send you details!

A Wii rest

I have taught on two weekend study schools and examined three PhDs in the last 10 days, in addition to the usual round of writing, marking, admin, reviews, meetings (and more meetings), responding to students' emails and making research visits to schools etc., so am feeling in need of a bit of rest & relaxation. I am thinking of buying a Nintentendo Wii to play with this forthcoming weekend...along with half of Britain, it seems. Now I have to get in the queue behind physiotherapists, who are using them with recovering patients. I was already way behind care home residents in the Wii stakes. Anyone for tennis?