There is a new craze happening on Twitter. It’s called ‘Tweeting what you’re Eating’. Everyone is at it. A couple of nights ago, for example, Scott Thornbury shared this with us:

@thornburyscott Home again, and homely food: butifarra amb moniatos:

A few days before that, Gavin Dudeney was kind enough to offer us his airport lunch:

@dudeneyge Airport… Served with side order of scowl…

Anyway, as you can imagine, cookery seems to be establishing itself as a metaphor for language teaching. A few nights ago, for example, the question of Dogme cuisine came up when Scott tweeted that:

@thornburyscott You can’t get more dogme than a sausage!

We then had some fun comparing sandwich toasters with interactive whiteboards (have a look at this silly link). After this Scott asked:

@thornburyscott Seriously though, isn’t technology to teaching what fast food is to dining?

To this, Graham Stanley replied:

@grahamstanley no, technology is to teaching what technology is to cooking.

Technology affects every human endeavor in some way or another. Perhaps then, instead of looking for an analogy to describe the relationship between technology and the classroom, we should be looking at parallels. Here is one that I would like to share - the technology is good / bad debate in medicine.

First of all, the ‘technology is bad’ corner. This is represented here by the ‘machine that goes ping’ and ‘the most expensive machine in the hospital’:

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And now, in the ‘technology is good‘ corner, here are some photographs of Barcelona pediatricians Marta and Roser at work. A few years ago these ex-students of mine set off to Sierra Leone to get involved is a Médecins Sans Frontières project.

Marta with some friends

Roser playing Pick-Up Sticks with Alhaji

Roser feeding baby Kargbo

This last photograph shows Marta performing ‘telemedicina’ - a long-distance diagnosis which was made possible by a live video link to specialists in Barcelona. She told me:

“We explored the babies with ultrasound (echocardiografy or abdominal ultrasound), connected to Barcelona specialists, who gave us the right diagnoses in dificult cases.“