Software Tools
All the software on this page is open source; i.e., it is both "free
as in beer" (you don't have to pay to use it) and "free as in speech"
(you can use it for any purpose, alter it, and redistribute it under
the same licence). It is also multi-platform, meaning that you can use
it with Windows, Macintosh or Linux/Unix operating systems.
Software Produced Within FAE
This performs simple concordancing and word-frequency counts on
corpora of student work using Robin Turner's Perlconc program. The
source code can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project site. It has recently been updated to include features added by Gregor Sieber at the University of Tuebingen's Elisa project.
A program which allows you to submit a text file and compare its vocabulary to the Academic Word List. The source code can be downloaded from Robin Turner's home page.
Other Useful Software
This is a complete open source office suite, containing a word
processor, a spreadsheet program, a Powerpoint-like presentation
program, an HTML editor and a drawing program. It uses the new
Open Document format, but has the advantage of being able to load and
save Microsoft formats such as .doc, .xls etc.
This is more for people doing serious academic writing who want to
produce professional-looking documents without spending ages fiddling
with formatting (most of the PDF files on this site were produced using
LyX). For the technically minded: LyX is a visual front-end to the
LaTeX typesetting system.
Simply the best browser there is: lightweight, powerful, extendable and
standards-compliant. Now there is no excuse for using Internet Explorer!
An excellent e-mail client from the people who brought you Firefox.
An HTML editor with both HTML source and WYSIWYG views (in other words,
you don't need to know HTML to use it, but if you do know HTML, CSS and
so forth, it doesn't interefer with what you want to do). It's not
quite up to the standard of Dreamweaver, but then it doesn't cost $400
either.
An educational content management system which is becoming an
increasingly popular alternative to commercial systems such as
Blackboard (the Open University recently announced that they are going
over to Moodle). It provides a simple way for teachers to construct
course websites incorporating discussion forums, online submission of
work, quizzes, collaborative glossaries, wiki pages and more. You can
see it in action at the
FAE courses site.