CALL@Hull

CALL@Hull selection criteria

Note

I evaluate sites using Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension for the sake of my sanity. If any site is overloaded with adverts such that its usability is affected, please contact me with the details and I'll ditch it from the collection.

Selecting which sites to go into the collection has been ad hoc from the start, although various loose selection criteria have evolved as time progressed. In the early days of the collection, I actively searched for language sites (of which there were precious few in 1995/6) to add. As the collection has snowballed it has acquired its own momentum, and now more time is spent evaluating sites submitted to me than in actively seeking out new resources, although this does still take place.

Selection criteria

There's no rigorous selection schema, but instead loose criteria which have evolved over time. The main criterion for inclusion is:

Does the site contain a significant amount of freely-available high-quality resources which would be of use to language teachers and/or learners in university education?

This is because the target audience is primarily teachers and students in the UK Higher Education sector.

Other loose evaluation criteria are:

  • Is the website usable and well-designed?
  • Is the site usable by all browsers?
  • Does the site contain resources which are not available elsewhere?

And so on. As can be seen from the collection, though, some sites don't necessarily fulfil all, or even any, of these criteria: they were added on personal whim simply because it seemed like a good idea at the time :)

Commercial sites

This is an amateur collection of links, not a commercial advertising site, and as it's only maintained in my spare time I'm increasingly picky as to what goes in it, as it takes significant time to evaluate sites. There are thousands of commercial languages sites, selling products and services. When, in the past, I included a Commercial section in the site, I was flooded with cut & paste requests addressed to "Dear Webmaster", and spent increasing amounts of my time evaluating sites which offered little or no freely-available resources, such that the majority of link requests I was getting were from commercial sites seeking free advertising.

If you're a representative of a commercial site and the site only sells products/services, please do not email me requesting its inclusion in this list, as your email will be dropped into the 'memory hole'. If your site does have meaningful free resources, it will be considered for inclusion.

Site suggestions

I welcome suggestions for sites to include in this collection, particularly from teachers and students of languages. Please fill in the short site suggestion form or email me at at fred DOT riley AT gmail DOT com.

All emails addressed to 'dear webmaster' or similar are summarily deleted - if you can't be arsed to address me by name, I can't be arsed to read your email.

Link exchanges

I never 'exchange' links with anyone or any body. If you want to link to this site then fine, just do so, and if I find a site worth linking to then I'll do so without asking - it's (still just) a free Web, after all.