Camsoft Educational Software
Modern Foreign Languages

Who are we?

Updated 4 May 2012

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Camsoft is a small family partnership of three, so don't bother to send us junk mail offering us discount rates on our fleet of cars, offers to cut our telecomunications bill by £1000 per month and requests to employ you as an ICT consultant on £40,000 per year.


Sally and Siân in the Crown Bar, Belfast

Sally Campbell is the founder and senior partner of Camsoft, which she set up with Graham Davies in 1982. Here's Sally (right), enjoying a Guinness with her daughter Siân (left) in the Crown Bar, Belfast. Sally is the only non-linguist in the team - apart from perfect mastery of the Belfast dialect and bar German. Don't try to involve her in debate as she has an Open University degree in Philosophy and can shoot a hole in a flawed argument at 50 paces without her reading glasses. Yes, you've guessed it, Camsoft is named after her - not Cambridge or Cambrian, but Campbell Software. Some people know her better as Sally Davies.

Siân Davies used to be a partner in Camsoft, but she has now set up her own graphic design and Web design business, MDM Creative. Siân studied Art and Graphic Design at Buckinghamshire College and Plymouth College of Art and Design and she has worked in the advertising department of Electronic Arts (EA), designing posters and computer games packaging, and directing ads for commercial TV. Siân designed the EUROCALL logo and the ICT for Language Teachers project logo. She's a keen skiier and speaks reasonable French. Like her sister, Francesca (below), she is now a busy mum. Her daughter Aela was born on 2 August 2006.


Fran_and_Whistler

Francesca and "Whistler", Maidenhead

Francesca Davies is a graduate in German and Spanish from the University of the West of England. As part of her university course, she taught English in Spain and worked for the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst in Bonn, Germany.

Fran is a good downhill skier when she can afford it, and can order almost any drink in German and Spanish. The picture on the left shows Fran with our greyhound "Whistler", who raced at Wimbledon under the name "Derrymore Whistler". Whistler died in January 2002 at the grand old age of 14.

Francesca has become the proud mother of Rebecca, born on 21 June 2004, and Joseph, born on 23 December 2008. She now works part-time for Camsoft.


Graham in Brussels

This photo shows Graham Davies in Brussels, three months after undergoing major surgery and well on the way to recovery. Belgian beer helps!

Graham began his career as a language teacher in secondary education in 1968, and switched to higher education in the early 1970s. He first got interested in language technology in 1976 while working as a lecturer in German at Ealing College London. This eventually led to the setting up of NCCALL, the National Centre for Computer Assisted Language Learning, which he directed from 1985 to 1990. In 1989 he became a Professor of Computer Assisted Language Learning, and in the following year he set up a Multimedia Language Centre at Ealing College. Ealing College was later transmogrified into Thames Valley University (TVU). Graham retired from his full-time post at TVU in August 1993, but continued to work part-time as a consultant to TVU on EU-funded projects until December 2001.

Graham speaks German fluently. He can get around adequately in French and can survive in Italian, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian.

Click here for Graham's CV


© Graham Davies 2012. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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