Jacinta: Hi, Lewis – it's Jacinta here.
Lewis: Oh, hi, Jacinta. I was just going to call you. I was thinking we ought to do something about accommodation for our trip to Queenstown.
Jacinta: Yeah, actually that's just why I rang you. I've been looking on the Internet – there was one place that looked OK called Travellers' Lodge, but when I checked availability for January when we're planning to go I found it was fully booked.
Lewis: Right – well, we'd better do something now I suppose.
Jacinta: I've actually got a list up here on the computer – there's one place called Bingley's that looks possible. It's 19.75 dollars a night – that's US dollars, they quote all the prices in US dollars.
Lewis: So that's about 26 or 27 New Zealand dollars. That's OK. That'll be in a dormitory, is it?
Jacinta: Yeah – they say 8-bed dorms. And the hostel's right in the town centre and they've got a café ... they have theme nights every weekend, whatever that means ...
Lewis: Oh, you know, like certain sorts of food and music ... and people might wear special clothes like that Egyptian evening we went to last year.
Jacinta: Oh, OK. What else ... they've got a sundeck area, and then all the usual things – Internet access and so on.
Lewis: Sounds good. Was there anywhere else?
Jacinta: Yeah, a couple more places. There's one called Chalet Lodge which is just 18.00 US dollars – that's for a bed in a 12-bed dorm. They do single and family rooms as well. It looks as if it's a bit out of town ... says it's got an alpine setting ... a 'quiet' alpine setting. What do you think?
Lewis: Mmm, not sure ...
Jacinta: Oh, but actually it's not far out at all ... it says 10 minutes' walk from town, so ... Oh, and it says it's 'children friendly'.
Lewis: Mmm. I'm not so sure about that. What about the third place?
Jacinta: Aah. That's called Globetrotters – let's see, they do private rooms, or 5-bed dorms for 18.50 – it's in the centre, just by the lake ... and that includes breakfast.
Lewis: Didn't the other two?
Jacinta: I don't think so. They didn't mention it, so probably not. Oh, and it says something about a free skydive ... wow!
Lewis: Don't know if I'm all that keen on jumping out of aeroplanes ...
Jacinta: Oh, actually what it says is you can win a chance to do a skydive – they give one away every day to one of the guests.
Lewis: Well, if I win it, you can do it ... Anyway, do they have room?
Jacinta: Yeah, I checked the availability. Shall I go ahead and book there then?
Lewis: Fine.
Jacinta: I was looking at what there is to do, too ... there are lots of sites offering deals for adventure sports – ah, I suppose we have to do a bungee jump.
Lewis: Why?
Jacinta: Well, it's Queenstown where they more or less started it as a sport.
Lewis: You can ... if you really want to jump off the side of a bridge with an elastic rope tied round your ankles. I'll watch!
Jacinta: OK. So what do you want to do?
Lewis: As far as adventure sports go? I was talking to someone who went white-water rafting there – he said it was really awesome. They drive you up the Shotover River and then you come down on a rubber raft through the white-water rapids, where the river's really narrow and fast, and end up going through a tunnel nearly 200 metres long. I think it's quite expensive, though.
Jacinta: Oh, I'm on for that if you are.
Lewis: Cool!
Jacinta: The other thing you can do is the jet-boat ride ... that sounded just a lot of noise though. It's basically just whizzing round on the river on a very fast boat, isn't it?
Lewis: My friend did that as well – he said it was a bit touristy but worth it, I'll give it a go. You go right up the river canyon. He said the drivers were really skilful. But I don't mind going on my own.
Jacinta: But there's lots to do as well as the whole commercial adventure bit ... we ought to do some trekking. The scenery round there's amazing, I don't want to miss that. The place to start's Glenorchy, apparently – about 40 minutes' drive, that's where lots of the wilderness trails begin.
Lewis: OK, I'll pack my walking boots. I'd better start getting in training ... I haven't done anything except sit at my desk for months. Now, is there anything else we need to decide?
Announcer: There's been a great deal of interest lately in encouraging people to use bicycles instead of cars as a means of transport. But not everyone is confident about riding a bike at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a city like London. Jack Hays is a professional trainer who works for a London-based company, CitiCyclist, which provides cycle training for the public. What exactly does CitiCyclist do, Jack?
Jack: Well, our basic purpose is to promote cycling as a sustainable form of transport. We believe the best way to promote cycling is to teach people to use their bikes safely and with confidence. In European countries, people all learned from their parents, and they also learned in school, and when I tell them I teach people to ride bikes they laugh, they think it's crazy, but here in London it's completely different, you're approaching the point where a whole generation of people have grown up not being allowed by their parents to cycle, because it was considered to be getting too dangerous, and so in turn, they can't teach their children ...
We believe in realistic training, so if someone wants to use a bike regularly, say to get to work or school, we aim to train them by teaching them to ride on the actual roads they'll use, so they can develop the basic skills they need and build up their confidence that way.
At CitiCyclist we believe cycling's for everyone, no matter what age or level of ability or mobility. We do complete beginners and also advanced courses – that's for urban cyclists who want to deal with things like riding in streets with complicated intersections and things like that. We don't promote the use of personal protective equipment for cyclists and we endorse the policy of the European Cyclists Federation that parents should be allowed to make an informed choice as to whether or not their child wears a helmet. We believe the key to safe cycling is assertiveness – taking your place on the road. This has to be instilled right from the beginning. Assertive road positioning and behaviour is the key to safe cycling in congested urban environments. Some people are surprised that we don't promote the segregation of cyclists from motorised traffic, but we don't think that's practical in all urban environments. Instead, we teach people to use as much road space as they need to travel safely and effectively.
Now as well as courses for individuals, CitiCyclist provides a number of services for organisations. For example, we can deliver fun, safe cycle-training activities at schools, arranging courses so that the disruption of curriculum time is kept to a minimum. As well as this, in order to promote safe cycling we have provided training courses for employees and staff of local councils. And we are also increasingly looking at developing training courses in companies in order to help employers work towards green transport plans by helping to increase the number of staff cycling to work.
Right, so that's a brief summary of what we do. If any listeners would like to find out more about the organisation, you can have a look at our website – that's citicyclist – c-i-t-i cyclist – .co.uk. And in order to book lessons, you can either phone us on 020 7562 4028, or do it online – there's an application form on our website, and you can just download that and send it in. We charge £27.50 per hour for one-to-one lessons plus £6.00 for each extra person – so you're looking at just £39.50 for a family of three, say. If you've never been on a bike in your life before, we reckon we can get you riding in one hour, and for most people a course of road training usually takes three hours. But whether you're a parent or a child, an individual or an institution, we'll be happy to discuss your special needs and make a programme just for you.
Tutor: So, Sharon and Xiao Li, in your presentation last week you were talking about the digital divide – the gap between those who can effectively use communication tools such as the Internet, and those who can't. And you compared the situation here in Northern Ireland with South-East China. Right, so I asked you to do some self-evaluation, watching the video of your presentation and thinking about the three main criteria you're assessed by – content, structure and technique. What do you think was the strongest feature of the presentation, when you watched it? Sharon?
Sharon: Well, I was surprised actually, because I felt quite nervous but, when I watched the video, it didn't show as much as I expected.
Tutor: So which of the criteria would that come under?
Sharon: Er, confidence?
Tutor: That's not actually one of the criteria as such. Xiao Li?
Xiao Li: Technique? It's body language and eye contact, isn't it. Well, I didn't think I looked all that confident, but I think that our technique was generally good – like the way we designed and used the PowerPoint slides.
Tutor: Mmm. So you both feel happiest about that side of the presentation? OK, now on the negative side, what would you change if you could do it again?
Xiao Li: Well, at first I'd thought that the introduction was going to be the problem but actually I think that was OK. We defined our terms and identified key issues. It was more towards the end ... the conclusion wasn't too bad but the problem was the questions, we hadn't really expected there'd be any so we hadn't thought about them that much.
Tutor: Uhuh. OK. Anything else?
Sharon: Well, like Xiao Li says, I thought the conclusion was OK, but when I watched us on the video I thought the section on solutions seemed rather weak.
Tutor: Mmm. Can you think why?
Sharon: Well, we explained what people are doing about the digital divide in China and Northern Ireland but I suppose we didn't really evaluate any of the projects or ideas, it was just a list. And that was what people were asking us about at the end, mostly.
Tutor: OK. Now, I also asked you to get some peer evaluation, from the other students.
Sharon: Yes, er, well, people said it was interesting, like the fact that in China the Internet was used more for shopping than in Northern Ireland. They said sometimes it was a bit hard to understand because we were talking quite fast ... but we didn't think so when we watched the video.
Tutor: No, it's a bit different though, because you know all this information already. Mmm. If you're hearing it for the first time, you need more time to process it ... that's why signposting the structure and organisation of the talk is important.
Xiao Li: That seemed OK, no one mentioned that as a problem. Some people said that we could have had more on the slides ... like some of the other groups had nearly everything they said written up on the visuals as well, but other people said the slides were good, they had just the key points.
Tutor: Yes.
Sharon: And most people said we had quite good eye contact and body language. They all pointed out we'd over-run ... they all said we were five minutes over but we timed it afterwards on the video and it was only three minutes.
Xiao Li: We were a bit unsure about the background reading at first, but I think we did as much as we could in the time ... anyway, no one commented on that under content, but one thing that did come out was that they liked the fact we'd done research on both Northern Ireland and China – most other people had just based their research on one country. We managed to get quite a lot of data from the Internet, although we had to do our own analysis and we did our own surveys as well in both countries. So the class gave us best feedback for content but it was all OK.
Tutor: Right. Well, that's quite similar to the feedback I'm giving you. I was very impressed by the amount of work you'd done and by your research methodology ... so, actually, I'm giving you full marks for content, five. The structure of the presentation was good, but not quite as good as the content, so, I gave that four, and the same for technique. So, well done.
Xiao Li/Sharon: Thank you.
Tutor: Now, the next stage is to write up your report. So, just a few pointers for you here. First of all, in your presentation I think your ending was rather abrupt – you suddenly just stopped talking. It wasn't a big problem but think about your closing sentences in your report – you want to round it off well. One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that I felt a very strong point was that after you'd given your results, you explained their limitations.
Xiao Li: The fact that we didn't have a very reliable sample in terms of age in China?
Tutor: Yes, that section. So don't forget to include that. And you had some excellent charts and diagrams, but maybe you could flesh out the literature review a bit – I can give you some ideas for that later on if you want. OK, is there anything else you want to ask?
Xiao Li/Sharon: No ... Thank you. / Thanks.
Well, Adam's just been talking about some of the problems that have resulted from the rapid growth of cities in the last hundred years – things like housing, sanitation, crime, and so on. For my presentation, I'd like to look at some examples of what cities are doing to try to solve some of these problems.
As part of its healthy city programme, the World Health Organisation – the WHO – has come up with a set of criteria for a healthy city. The WHO says, that amongst other things, a healthy city must provide a clean environment which is also safe – it mustn't be dirty, or dangerous for its inhabitants. As well as that, the WHO says a healthy city has got to be able to satisfy its inhabitants' basic needs – that's all its inhabitants, not just the rich ones or the ones with jobs. Everyone who lives there. A third thing ... a third criterion, is that it's got to have health services which can be used by all the inhabitants, and which they can access easily. The final point's to do with local government – the WHO says this is something that the whole community should be involved in, not just a few powerful politicians or businessmen. So, a healthy city's not just a matter of avoiding illness, that sort of 'healthiness', it's the way that the whole city works together for the benefit of its population.
OK. So what I'd like to do now is to look at some projects in different cities around the world where cities have tried to meet these criteria – to make their cities 'healthy' ones.
Right, the first project I'm going to discuss took place in Sri Lanka, and this project was called the 'Community Contracts System'. Its aim was to improve the places where the poorest section of the population lived – the squatter settlements. Basically, the problem was lack of infrastructure – things like drains, paths, wells for water and so on. So, a programme was set in place to construct this infrastructure, but what was different about it was that the residents did this – the people who actually lived there, not people from outside. And this meant that not only did the people end up with improved housing and infrastructure, but also because they had contracts with the community, it improved their chances from an economic point of view. So that's a way the lives of people in one urban environment were improved.
The next project I'd like to discuss took place in the capital city of Mali, in West Africa. This project involved setting up a cooperative to try to solve the problems of sanitation in the old central quarters of the city. One of the main problems was a lack of a system for garbage collection, which meant that there were a lot of insects, and this was causing disease. And again it's interesting to look at who was involved in dealing with this problem – in this case, the cooperative involved students who had graduated from secondary school in getting a system going. As well as that, the cooperative set up a campaign to educate the public about the importance of good sanitation, through showing films and setting up discussion groups among the local people, especially women and adolescents. And the outcome was an increased environmental awareness which led to changes in household behaviour as well as improved living conditions.
OK, the third project was in Egypt, just outside the capital, Cairo, which is a city that's grown very rapidly in the last few decades. This project was based in a Women's Centre in a poor area called Mokattam. The aim of the project was to support girls ... young women from the area from poor families, so these were women who had no education – they'd never been to school, so they were totally illiterate, and they had no chance of getting jobs. At the Women's Centre, they were shown how to sew and how to weave, and once they'd learned these skills they were given the equipment – a sewing machine or a loom – so that they could make things to sell, and have a chance of earning their own living. And this project has meant that these young women have greater status in the community, but as well as that, they can enjoy a better quality of life. So I don't think the problem is that cities are bad. This world and its cities have the resources to provide for the population that lives there. What it takes is a stronger will and a better distribution of resources.