Mark Nightingale’s Story

First, a few memories of my time as a CAWEB Master’s student

Transcription :

“I remember, during my first year, my professional project which was very interesting. We had to design the website of a wine merchant in the south of France, and as a reward he sent us two cases of 12 bottles of wine to share between the four of us, so we were pretty happy to have completed the project! 

I also remember, in my second year, the Master’s website project, as it still exists. The students were also in charge of the CAWEB site and at the time, the site was on Joomla, the Joomla CMS version 2.5 if I remember correctly, and it was a question for our class of converting the Joomla 2.5 site into a Joomla 3.5 site, which required rewriting all the theme templates. Basically, we had to rewrite the whole technical part from scratch on the basis of a CMS we knew absolutely nothing about and on which we had very few courses, and above all, no technical courses, so it was a big discovery for me and for the team. I was the project manager for the site animation project that year, and we spent a lot of sleepless nights towards the end to finalize all the technical elements needed to launch the site on the big day. And then I also remember my disappointment the following year: immediately afterwards, I was the teacher in charge of the “website animation” module and the team decided to redesign the site on WordPress… so our work didn’t have a long life [laughs]! 

Then, right after I finished my studies, I joined the CAWEB Master [ teaching ] team thanks to Madame de la Paix, in Renate, who contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to teach English first. At that time, I had only a few years’ experience in teaching English, but I was in the starting blocks to join the teaching team. Over the years, I’ve taught quite a few different things in CAWEB, but I still have the same course today: the current M1s know me from the “Writing for the web” course in English, and it’s the same course I had almost ten years ago now. 

I took this course directly after my studies in CAWEB, and that’s why I’m emotionally attached to it. For me, this represents the first teaching I’ve done in CAWEB, as well as the beginning of a beautiful collaboration that has lasted until now ten years and that I hope will continue to last for years to come!” 

And during my second year:

“I also remember during my 2nd year in CAWEB, as a student, that at the beginning of the semester we discovered that the CAWEB room we knew from the first year no longer existed and that we had been dismissed! Well, as students, that’s mostly how we experienced it, but I think there’s a story behind it that I don’t know. We were sent away from the Esplanade campus to a building that I believe now belongs to the IEP (Institut des études pédagogiques), where there was a room for the CAWEB master’s degree. On the first floor, I believe there was a nursing school, and on the second floor there was a CAWEB room for us. 

So we were quite far from the Esplanade campus: a ten-minute walk down to the docks, towards Gallia. As a result, we felt a little out of touch with university life, and also a long way from the teachers’ offices, because the teachers’ and teaching assistants’ offices at the time were still in the Patio. 

However, we also found it to be an asset, in the sense that it welded us together as a class and we spent a lot of time together. There were also better options for eating in the area because there’s the Place Saint-Nicolas-aux-Ondes right next door, and there were quite a few interesting things to eat for lunch, which isn’t necessarily the case on the Esplanade campus! So we were pretty happy with that aspect of it and spent several afternoons eating various things in the Krutenau !” 

Memories of my teaching days !

Transcription :

“A few more memories that come to mind, when you think of the CAWEB Master, particularly memories of the time when I was a teacher, are the times when everything changed very quickly, particularly with the launch of EAD which was a major event for everyone, but a big success as we can see today. 

And the launch of the TCLoc Master as well. Prior to Covid, the M2s visited the offices of several Silicon Valley companies in the USA. It was a very, very much appreciated moment by the students and I didn’t go because I wasn’t asked to attend, but I heard a lot about it and I think it was also a big success for the Master! 

I also remember being present at several stands, fairs of sorts. I have an anecdote in mind: Madame de la paix, Renate had asked me if I could take part in a stand at the ATCOM trade fair for technical communications in Stuttgart, Germany. At the time, I was living in France, I didn’t speak German very well because I’d done some German at school but then, from high school onwards, nothing at all. But I said to myself, yes, why not, I can go, I can attend, and so on. So I went there, there was a CAWEB stand, and then I found myself all alone in a big hall in Stuttgart, near the airport. I had seen Madame de la Paix, I think, the evening before, and then the next day, I was on my own at the CAWEB stand, where I had to promote the Master’s degree in competition with other German Master’s degrees and so on. And I stupidly said to myself that, as it was an international show, everyone was bound to speak English. But that was absolutely not the case! So I found myself speaking, or at least having to find the words in German, to explain things about the CAWEB Master’s program to German-speaking students from various universities in the region. It was a bit of an unexpected linguistic challenge that I encountered at the fair, but it was a great success, and we managed to recruit two or three people for various masters programs, and above all to forge a few informal links with local universities in Germany. I’ll always have that moment in my head when I realize that everything is going to be in German and that I’m going to have to explain everything: the course and the technical words of the CAWEB Master, etc. in German, and that threw me for a bit of a loop! But now I live in Germany [laughs] so maybe it was fate. It made me rediscover my old German a bit, and it’s a pretty funny memory for me of the CAWEB Master’s degree.”