As I have been writing a VITAE-related text this week I have been browsing materials about the Flat Classroom project and it occurred to me that this would be an ideal format to follow. Therefore I shall soon be looking for a partner classroom, ideally in India, but anywhere outside Denmark would be interesting so that we can do some joint work on global climate change. I have also thought that this would be an ideal testbed for piloting the lesson plan template which is part of Module 5 in our VITAE course. The final product of the project would be a video to illustrate some aspect of climate change and I would like to try and find an angle which is directly related to the students' lives. Possible avenues inlcude The Nag which is a UK website on which people report on their sustainable activities and the website collates these together to show the cumulative benefit. A similar website is The Carbon Account also mainly for the UK. I even had the idea of seeing if we could invite the most credible climate change naysayer or rather sceptic Bjørn Lomborg to speak with the students since he is based here in Denmark. The Flat Classroom project is incredibly complicated and involves judges and evaluators and now includes up to 5 schools at a time so I would aim for a more manageable two institution link up. A big unknown in all of this is how the students will react since I have not yet met them as they will be new first year students. I can be fairly certain that it will be a mainly male group but more than that I cannot say.

I want to get started in mid-August when my colleagues are back and available for consultation. I do hope for example that they don't change the theme we have decided! But in the meantime, does anyone have any good contacts in India?

Also in the podcast is a recording of part of the closing event of a European project using sound in vocational education. The recording is of a Skype video link between the project participants in Aarhus, Denmark and a partner instution in Turkey. The conversation was not planned. There was no agenda. So the topics which were raised were rather general but even so careful listening reveals some cultural misunderstandings. The Turks were asked about student support for university study and it took a long time for them to understand that what the Danes were asking about was a student grant for living expenses rather than just tuition fees. I think that Denmark is one of the few European countries to retain  such generous support to university students. Another example was when the Turks were asking about a potential exchange of skills in the carpentry field. The person who fielded that question had obviously been to Turkey with carpentry students already and you can hear him struggling to explain that the styles favoured in Turkey probably wouldn't go down well with the minimalist preferences of Scandinavian customers. The project was called Brydlydmuren in Danish which means 'Break the sound wall'. On the project website you can find a great deal of documentation to help teachers wanting to introduce sound work in their classrooms.

The Evolve project is organising a series of international on-line events and seminars.

The objectives are:

• To provide a space for participant driven discussion and debate
• To promote critical inquiry and discourse
• To allow for the presentation of ideas in progress
• To share expertise, ideas and future thinking around common research agendas

My own session was entitled 21st century skills and mentoring and was an opportunity to test out the ideas developed in the project so far to a wider audience. I had planned the session to be a presentation followed by a workshop in which participants tried out for themselves responding to the mentor questions which form an integral part of the VITAE training approach. I guess that the workshop element did not work so well and there could be two reasons for this. One could be that the mentor sessions are not good enough and do not elicit responses. The second option (which I want to believe) is that much more time was needed for reflection before answering the mentor questions and especially that the course tasks needed to be attempted before proceeding to the mentor questions.

It was undoubtedly a good exercise for me as project coordinator to have to set out my stall in this way and although we did not follow the mentoring questions too closely there were some interesting discussions, which after all, is mainly the point. It was also interesting to learn about another ongoing European project which could have a great deal in common with VITAE in a complementary fashion. This is the MUVEnation project which is also using the peer to peer teaching idea but which is more closely focussed on the use of multi-user virtual environments as learning tools.

The link to the archive is http://elluminate.jiscemerge.org.uk/play_recording.html?recordingId=1213208486375_1213960145754 You will need audio.

As well as presenting the project another main objective was to present the VITAE community of practice which has just been set up as a Ning community at http://vitaeproject.ning.com The Ning space is designed primarily for the participants in our forthcoming training courses but we would love to see anybody who is interested in the project as well so that we can help each other along the way.

It's not every day that there is Royalty in the classroom so the students at the University of Applied Sciences in Koblenz were especially curious about a German engineer, Mr Michael, who was made king of a village in Ghana after contributing to its development over some years. Was there any protocol involved? Of greater interest to the students was to find out about effective development aid. The key to success was motivation rather than the involvement of large organisations.This was an event management exercise.

The show ends with the effectiveness of personal improvement plans in English as a way of giving responsibility to the students for their own learning outside of the classroom.

Date: June 20

Venue: Elluminate

Time: 12.00 GMT (13:00 UK, 14:00 CET)

It was the digital native and digital immigrant cliché which inspired the intercultural approach of the VITAE project to ICT integration in adult education. A significant proportion of teachers are still hostile to the integration of ICT in everyday practice even though this means that they miss out on opportunities to enrich and engage. If this hostility is re-cast as a culture clash then maybe an intercultural journey led by mentors is a way of smoothing the path. My session will take you on this intercultural journey giving you a taste of how mentoring could help by concentrating on the pedagogic benefits of ICT integration.

The purpose of the newsletter is first and foremost to draw learners of French to authentic francophone websites but I also include a more pedagogic link as well to dictionaries, other language tools or learning websites. The idea is to remind people of the reason for learning French by highlighting intrinsically interesting websites and giving them a linguistic exercise based on the content. I first got the idea from Tower of English which does this for English language websites. The newsletter goes out once a month and for June I had decided to feature a website I first learned about through Graham Attwell. The site was bilingual which I always think is interesting for learners. It was pedagogic but not in the direction of language and it was interactive, almost immersive. Ideal! I was clicking round and started looking at the conditions when I found this:

“Moreover, the creation of hypertext links leading to the Site shall only be possible with the written and prior authorization of XXXX "

There began a long email correspondance with the sponsoring company about my wish to feature the site in the newsletter. I had to give exact URLS and the text I proposed to use. Some additional text was suggested for inclusion which did not fit at all with my reason for featuring the website. I did not for example see any reason to explain how many languages the site is available in since the newsletter is only about helping people with French. And at the time of writing, the ball is in the company's court. I am waiting for a reply to my latest email supplying the additional details they requested. I must admit that I have pursued this just to see how far this would go. I realised long ago that I would have to give up and find another link for June. I find it incredible that a large well-known company expects to have so much control over something which they have put into the public domain. I thought that the whole idea of the internet was to link. I know that Google got into trouble for basing a service on links but in general moderate use of links I thought was accepted practice. I just wonder how many people even find this small print.

So this month's link is a blog of cartoons, Le Blog Krobs, because these are stories which work mainly without words and I thought it would be a good exercise for learners of French to write their own stories in French to describe what is going on. If they feel brave they can record their stories on the Voicethread of my blog. There are many different stories on the blog and so users can choose the story which appeals to them or which they think they can talk about with their current level of French.

The pedagogic link is to one of those websites which I mentioned above which make me ponder the wisdom of continuing. The site is French Pod run by Ken Carroll who has proven his approach with Chinese and Spanish. I like the site because there are lots of free short podcasts which are categorised according to level. The podcasts are short and for the lower levels include lots of repetition. The site also includes guides to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. You pay for transcripts and exercises if you are a serious learner. What I particularly like about the site is the community of users which it facilitates so that learners can support each other. This is a feature of many of the sites which I find exemplary at the moment.

I also added a third link this month which was to a Collins dictionary widget which you can embed in your website and which I have now added to mine. In fact I have also embedded a podcast feed from French Pod as encouraged by the website. So two very different business models, one of which will make me very careful to read the small print in the future.

Added June 23: I got permission to use the link!

The first event I attended was a Christmas party. The next event was a chat show with Juliette Towhidi, screen writer of The Calendar Girls. Towhidi is half-Iranian so there was lots of scope for asking how she came to do the screenplay for such a quintessentially English film. Language Lab are experimenting with recording these events and I was lucky enough to be able to edit a couple of extracts from this event for the current Absolutely Intercultural show. In the extracts you can see how the audience can interact with the chat show guests and let's face it, it's not everyday that you can quiz the screenwriter of a box office hit.

The event approach reflects the dogmetic approach of focusing on the language which occurred naturally, which I think has a lot of merit but which requires a lot of hard work at the time of the event. With planned teaching, the work is concentrated at the front end.

The show also includes a short interview I did in Oslo with Timo Väliharju  of Mediamaisteri Group when he was questioned about the success of Finland in the PISA evaluations. His diagnosis was that the secret of Finland's success lay in part in the spontaneous study groups which students set up  to help each other.

SLanguages 2008, a 24 hour conference in Second Life about teaching and learning languages in Second Life, has just finished. I have to admit that I did not stay the course and took a normal nights sleep even though the events continued unfolding throughout the 24 hour period. This is the second such conference put on by The Consultants E and this time in association with Avatar Languages.

For me it was a chance to catch up with what is possible in the field of language learning in SL since I have rather left the field since I gained my Language Lab certificate in January mainly due to a weak computer and a very variable timetable which makes regular ongoing class teaching difficult. I feel rather guilty about that plus my SL skills rust up in the meantime. There were two presentations from Language Lab, one on the teacher training process and one about innovation in teaching. Regarding teacher training, a willingness to try out communicative techniques is valued over high qualifications and technical expertise. But I think this is not specific to SL teaching and would be a desirable list of priorities in many language teaching situations.

One thing which might make me try again in SL is the desire to try out some of the free tools given out by Gavin Dudeney as part of his presentation. I am sure that you can achieve a lot with notecards and the use of audio and text chat but other tools would certainly expand the repertoire by allowing you to show presentations or to create an instant classroom by throwing down a seating arrangement.

I also appreciated the opportunity to go on a language learning tour of various Sl sites designed for learners. Of particular interest was the Dubai Women's College campus since I had attended Mark Karstad's session about how he has enabled the heavily protected female students in his college to visit other parts of the world vicariously through Second Life. This was the most interesting session for me because it was full of contradictions. VOIP is banned in the United Arab Emirates and therefore the session was completely text based. The women have to dress modestly in public in real life but love dressing up in exotic clothes in SL. Through Second Life the students experience virtual exchanges with students from other parts of the world such as Korea.

I also got a personalised tour of International Languages which had a very attractive tardis, amongst other items,  to get the conversation flowing.

As in any other conference I have met up with some new people, joined new groups and gained an insight into how the issue of language teaching is approached in different parts of the SL world. It is this opportunity to gain new perspectives which is the most valuable part of the conference because it brings together organisations which are competitors for the rest of the year.

The show also includes an interview with Keith Warburton of Global Business Culture who emphasises that inter-cultural awareness is necessary across the whole organisation and should not be restricted only to CEOs and negotiators.

At one point in the show you do hear the commonly expressed view that intercultural competence cannot be taught so the show ends with a conversation among some intercultural trainers talking about their favourite awareness raising exercises.