Despite the clamour, a tinny ringing of the phone can just be made out. The initial instinct is to ignore it, not least because it is ignorable. There were many other things to ignore: the fractious twins on computer 4 who were refusing to let mouse and keyboard work in unison; the excited user on computer 1 who had just announced she was listening to the Spice Girls, causing a stampede to share in this unique event; computer 6 wanted to know why Altavista wouldn't provide a satisfactory answer to "Do vampires exist?" Not to mention the fourteen other users who needed support every two minutes. Suddenly getting the phone seemed like the only thing I could do - at least it would give the impression of control, responding to needs as they arose. I picked it up: "Hello, multimedia madness."

The scene is the Multimedia Centre in the British Council Lisbon, July 1997. Centre Co-ordinator at the time, David (Devo) Forbes had been commissioned to come up with a 'Multimedia course for young learners'. The format he decided on was! two week - twenty hour summer intensive course for learners between the ages of 10 and 15. Classes were divided into two age groupings - 10 to 12 and 13 to 15 and were mixed in level. Course time was divided evenly between the multimedia Centre (MMC) and t! he classroom, with classes alternating on a daily basis.

The programme was to have classes work on two projects, mostly in the Multimedia Centre, and follow a grammar syllabus based on individual needs when in the classroom. The multimedia projects were as follows:

1. Each student was to create their own homepage containing a photo and short paragraph about themselves, making sure to mention a couple of their interests. They were to learn to search the web for information and use this to identify a site or web page within their area of interest. They then came up with a comprehension question about this page or site and placed it on their home page. Visitors to the page would be invited to surf off to the information source, find the answer, return to page and input the answer. The answer itself was made available in a drop down box written into the HTML. (There was no server linkup in the page design).
2. Students used the Oxford Interactive Encyclopaedia (OIE) to create a multimedia slide show presentation using the Mediastudio presentation program which comes with the OIE. In their groups, students identified a topic and! worked to assemble material from the encyclopaedia and the WWW, adding their own texts and scanned pictures related to the topic. Generally speaking, the final presentation was series of photos and short video clips chosen from the encyclopaedia, interspersed with linking texts written by the learners. Most availed themselves of the option for a musical backing track, however inappropriate their choice: anything remotely related to science or technology (and what wasn't?) used an X-files theme tune "wav" fil! e which we found on the net, while a gloomy Bach Toccata and Fugue was somehow supposed to define the atmosphere for a breezy look at future inventions.

The personalised language development plan was to be based around the appropriate book in the Cambridge "..Grammar in Use" series.

What initially struck the three people working on the courses - Devo, Clea and myself - was how motivating all of this was for the young learners. The presentation / publication goal of both projects made them determined to polish their work until perfect. Of course, what was for them 'polishing' was for the teachers a linked series of process writing activities, a difficult thing to achieve with lower-level young learners.

Secondly, for several reasons, there was a greater washback into the classroom of the work being done in the Multimedia Centre. The high level of motivation made learners reluctant to let go of a piece of work until it was 'mounted' in it! s final form.

Quite a lot of classroom priming was necessary to set up the MMC sessions. Much of the material found on the encyclopaedia or on the net could only properly be exploited if printed off and analysed in the classroom. This expansion of the role of MMC reduced the need for a separate language syllabus, as it became apparent that the project tasks themselves could generate opportunities for exploitable language practice. Murphy's was no longer law.

"It all sounds as if it was a roaring success", the reader may be thinking. "What about the stressful classroom management mentioned at the beginning?" Quite simply, the course had too much to get through and we hadn't anticipated a range! of issues from the theoretical to the practical.

The fact of trying to packing too much into the syllabus meant more than simply moving through the material a little quicker than the ideal. Most students were new to the media we were asking them to work with. Many had a computer at home; but their experience of it was limited to playing Quake and the odd bit of homework. There was little experience of using CD-ROM encyclopaedias properly, and less still of Internet use. Given the short duration of the course, tight scheduling was n! ecessary to achieve its goals, which often meant students didn't have enough time to explore, for example, the medium of the Internet before being pushed to produce a result in it - a web page. Even with more time, it is questionable whether the high-minded! ideal of personal research is feasible for an age group with often undefined interests and a low level of English. As may be imagined this led to lots of ongoing questioning (read confusion) while in the MMC sessions.

Secondly, we overestimated the level of IT skills the learners had. Confidence and competence go together in learning anything, of course, but they have a particular relationship with regard to use of IT. Inexperienced adult users are often wary and will defer to anyone who seems confident. Confident equals competent in their view. Conversely, young learners are usually unfazed by IT (seemingly confident) making them competent in some adult eyes. Thus we erroneously assumed the learners had the skills to carry out the tasks we set them. As they didn't, help was required at virtually every step of the way. The effect of eighteen young learners simultaneously demanding help is a little hard on the nerves after more than two minutes.

Overall, the course was a definite 'hit' but resulted in stressful teaching sessions in the computer room and involved a lot of teacher overtime to finish off student web pages and polish presentations.

So what sage conclusions have we come to a year on?

The presentation / publication objective works well as a course goal, as it brings together the beautifying instinct to make things look pretty (presentation) and the type of creative effort and enthusiasm normally associated with writing for a school magazine for example (publication).

Not a conclusion but a question: Are we capable of evaluating learners' IT skills accurately and of identifying what exactly these people who are supposedly "good at computers" can in fact do? It should be empowering for teachers to reali! se there are skills learners need which only we can teach them.

With regard to a particular course, it is important to recognise the skills required to fulfil course objectives and plan to teach them if necessary. Perhaps skill acquisition could be a course goal in itself.

Do we ourselves understand the new media? One of the inherent dangers in adopting new techniques and methodologies is that we leave behind much of our experience and common sense when experimenting with the new. We wouldn't take a pile of! reference works into a classroom and hand them out with the instruction "Find something interesting". Yet in 'Internet lessons' we may offer insufficient guidance in setting tasks, placing too much trust in the oracular powers of search engines. In addition, there are a myriad of issues thrown up by the new medium. Take, for example, whether browsing is more akin to reading or zapping, and therefore whether it is fair to have similar expectations to a reading activity.

The wondrous resource of digital information available on the Internet and CD-ROMs presents many basic information management issues:

This is far more information than we have previously exposed learners to. They need to learn how to navigate through it; how to evaluate not only its relevance to their needs but also its reliability and itspurpose, how to store and retrieve it and how to process it meaningfully. A tall order, perhaps, but if we can't satisfy ourselves that we are helping them to learn from it, what are we doing?

Note: the original course was designed by Devo Forbes. All credit for the inspiration and setup of the first courses goes to him. I am responsible for most subsequent remodelling and anguished reflection. Colleague Clea Rawinsky also taught the course from the start and many of the ideas in the above article came out of conversations with Clea.

Paul Sweeney is Senior Teacher in the British Council Lisbon. His areas of responsibility include designing courses with an IT component and teacher IT training.

The above-mentioned courses and this years' counterparts are on the net at http://www.britcoun.pt.org