Hello, I've been lurking in the background, trying to catch up on
all the messages that seemed to address questions that I needed
answered about the course and this group. I've sent email to both
Oskar and Haukur, containing answers to some of the exercises in
Chapter One and offering suggestions for improving the course
(essentially, more practical drills designed to help us learn to read
Old Icelandic prose). I teach English at City College of San
Francisco and have written and edited grammars designed to teach
EFL/ESL. My A.B. and M.A. are in linguistics (University of
California at Berkeley), and I taught EFL/ESL for many years. So I
have some thoughts on how an introductory course that helps English-
speakers (readers) learn how to read Old Icelandic should be
designed.

In this vein, I'd like to draw the attention of those of you who are
interested to an Internet course in Old English that I came across
just a few hours ago. The URL is
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/index.html
and the course is called Old English Aerobics (OEA).

I think that the free software program used for OEA could be adapted
to the teaching of Old Icelandic. The source code and documentation
are available for downloading from the web site above. However,
since I know only the rudiments of designing web pages in SGML, I
thought that those of you who are computer whizzes would know a lot
better than I whether the OEA course could, in fact, be adapted to
the teaching of Old Icelandic and whether the task would incredibly
onerous or relatively easy.

By the way, I've found that I can communicate with Oskar and Haukur
by email in Icelandic, using Windows 98's Outlook Express with the
encoding set for Western European (ISO) and with the Windows 98
Icelandic keyboard file installed (from the Windows 98 CD) and set up
as a toggle icon on my Windows taskbar. It takes one only a short
while to learn where the special Icelandic characters are located on
the keyboard.

Well, that's it for the mo'. =)

Until next time,

Bless (which, I understand, is modern Icelandic for "Goodbye").

Gordon