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THE ULRICIANUM
TIMES celebrates its 10 th birthday
by Reinhard Donath
Exactly ten years ago, in March 1989,
the first edition of THE ULRICIANUM TIMES was produced in a sort of
helter skelter atmosphere. Roughly fourty pupils were eager to write
articles, to type them and to lay-out them under technical
conditions which seem to date back to the last century. The
computers were XTs (what the hack is that?), the printers worked
with 9 needles and the disks had a format of 5 ¼ inches. The data
transfer from a pupils‘ news-agency in England had an amazing
speed of 1200 bps (each single byte appearing on the green screen
was greeted with a hand-shake!). And the newspaper which finally was
finished in the early evening looked absolutely messy, was full of
mistakes (the articles which were proof-read disappeared for unknown
reasons). Nonetheless, the papers of the other schools must have
been even worse as we won International Newspaper Day Competition
First Prize, were awarded a computer with a really big hard disk (around
100 MB, the first 286 the school had at that time!) and were invited
to the Prize Award Ceremony in London, wow!
Since then a lot has happened: 12
editions of THE ULRICIANUM TIMES were produced, this one is no. 13.
We have won First Prize International four times up to now (hoping
this edition will be our fifth winning one), quite a lot of pupils
have seen London and the Award ceremony in the House of Commons,
some editions were produced together with pupils from our partner
schools, one with Bitterfeld pupils, one in Newquay/Cornwall (we
took six computers with us at that time). Uncountable newspaper
reports were written about this amazing project, publications by
students as well asprofessors (changing the ways of learning
English) were printed, radio reports and television features
broadcasted (3 sat, NDR, ARTE), Prince
Charles wrote a letter to us (well, actually we wrote first, not
knowing whether to address him as "Dear Prince Charles" or
"Your Royal Highness), and what’s most important: An
uncountable number of pupils showed what they were and are able to
do with computers and the Internet and of course their English
language skills, some even turned their first contacts into a
profession! And even if it looks like the teachers are in charge of
the whole project: They only pretend to be, it‘s the pupils who
make sure there’s enough money to pay the printers, it’s them
who research and write the articles and run around like crazy for
more than one day to produce another edition of THE ULRICIANUM
TIMES, the only English newspaper in Germany, published regularly by
pupils. That’s something to be proud of especially as their spirit
hasn’t changed, although the hardware and the technical and
organizational conditions have. It looks a bit more professional
these days (with Pentium, ISDN and Laser) but still: It’s a
rewarding hectic until the final pages are taken to the printers and
the well-deserved pizza finishes an unusual school-day. Thanks folks,
and now read the other articles as well, they are worth reading,
dead sure!
BTW: More bytes and pieces about the history of THE ULRICIANUM TIMES
are just a mouse-click away.
aus: Online-Ausgabe 1999 http://schulen.nordwest.net/Ulricianum_Aurich/tut/school.htm#10y
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