Anne Fox :: Blog

When we first started the Absolutely Intercultural podcast back in 2006 and wrote on the podcast website that we were the first podcast to deal with intercultural matters I thought it wouldn’t be long before we had many competitors. But now four years later something has happened to make me look again to see what is available for people interested in intercultural issues and it seems to me the situation has not changed that much. The podcast was tagged as ‘one to watch’ by Valentina Dodge, a teacher of English and online teacher trainer who writes a blog called Life Long Learning. Being tagged gives us the obligation to nominate ten more blogs to watch. This tagging or nomination is part of an initiative called “Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog”, which means “It’s worth keeping an eye on this blog”. So how does this work? The chosen blog has to copy the picture above, with a link to the blog from which it has received the award. And since this is a podcast I thought I would nominate a mix of blogs and podcasts and I thought that they should be about intercultural issues. And what I found is that there are certainly no other podcasts doing quite what we do but I think I have found some interesting ones anyway. In all I found 5 blogs and 5 podcasts to feature in the latest show.

1. Intercultural Eyes
My first choice is Intercultural Eyes  by Bettina Hansel an American geographer and here is an extract from a post she made about friendship as a cultural value:

Nowhere do you find the values of a society so clearly marked as when you look at what educators are trying to teach children. I am still mulling over a recent New York Times article that discussed the efforts of some U.S. educators to discourage children from having just one “best friend” on the grounds that other children will feel excluded. Those from other countries who have puzzled over the seemingly superficial nature of U.S. friendship would do well to read this article and see if it sheds some light on the experiences you have had. Apparently these schools claim to be worried about the nastiness that can take place with exclusive cliques, and don’t want students to be ”so possessive about friends” but I am not convinced that their attempt to encourage children to form big groups of friends is a cure for social exclusion or bullying. I haven’t noticed that bullies have a single “best friend.” Yet, according to the Times article, school and summer camp personnel are concerned about children who form a tight friendship with just one other child. The goal is “healthy” (read: not too dependent) relationships with everyone.

2. Global Voices
My first podcast choice is Global Voices, a huge multi-lingual portal with both text, audio and video. I’ve chosen an extract from an interview about an online initiative using blogs and video to bring American, Armenian and Azerbaijani teenagers together to work on creating socially conscious media. If you want to hear more you’ll have to go to globalvoicesonline.org/-/podcasts

3. Pocket Cultures
And for my second blog I have chosen Pocket Cultures which is written by many different people all over the world. At the moment there has just been a series about intercultural marriages where couples answer a standard set of questions which include where did you meet, what language do you speak at home and do you try to cook food from each other’s countries?

4. Interfaith Voices
The second podcast is about religion. It’s called Interfaith Voices and basically explores issues relevant to all the major world religions such as the recent child abuse scandals in the Catholic church or whether there is a relationship between terrorism and Islam. I found this piece about how your idea of heaven may be shaped by your culture interesting.

5. Intercultural Memories
For my next blog recommendation I nominate Intercultural Memories by George Simons who is one of the directors of SIETAR France. Sietar is the Society for intercultural education, training and research and what Simons does in his blog is mainly review books about intercultural issues. He doesn’t post very often but if you want to build up a strong intercultural library then this is the place to go for guidance.

6. Quanxi
Often you need intercultural knowledge because you are doing business across cultures. One of the biggest business blocks is now China and many people help you to understand the Chinese approach to business. Britain’s Open University make a great deal of their material freely available and here is an example from a series about business in China which explains the concept of quanxi which I guess could be translated as reciprocity or obligation.

7. Cindy King
Blog number four is Cindy King’s blog  In fact Cindy is an expert on cross-cultural communication in social media and is a prolific Twitterer too. One thing I especially like about Cindy’s blog are her regular International links posts in which she rounds up on interesting intercultural web links.

8. The World
Now for podcast number four which is PRI’s The World. This is a co-production of WGBH/Boston, PRI, and the BBC World Service. Basically it is designed to explain the world to an American public and the topics covered range far and wide. One nice feature of their podcasts are that they provide full transcripts so if you’re learning English this may help.

As England and the US both took part in the FIFA World Cup I thought I would choose an extract from a piece they did about the relationship betwen the two countries when it comes to football (recorded before the start of the World Cup by the way).

9. Separated by a common language
And now to my final blog choice which continues the American versus England theme. The blog attempts to explain the difference between British English and American English. The writer, Lynne Murphy, is American and married to a Briton. The blog is often very funny and here is a short piece about toliets!

 Why is it that the (BrE) cubicles in American (BrE) public toilets never go all the way to the floor or the ceiling and there’s always a huge gap that keeps the door from ever fully being closed, meaning that one can never have true privacy?

 

10. Enough to make your head spin
And so to my final podcast which is from the American Peace Corps website and their wonderful Coverdell World Wise Schools Service. I can’t recommend too highly their intercultural communication training materials which are available free of charge on the website and this extract is from on of the many recordings made by former peace corps volunteers about their postings all over the world. This one is about the Bulgarian way of saying yes and no. It’s a cliche of intercultural communication that you nod your head to say no and shake it to say yes but when you actually have to live it then its quite a different matter.

Thank you to all those podcasters who gave us permission to bring you these extracts.  Do go and visit these blogs and podcasts but I hope that in the end you will still come back to us. And if you still think we’re pretty good then why not vote for us in the European Podcast Award. Voting is open until the end of July and you’ll find details about how to do it here.

Don’t forget that you can still vote for us in the European Podcast Awards both on the German page and the Danish page.

Tags: absolutelyintercultural, AnneFox, BBCWorldService, BettinaHansel, CindyKing, CoverdellWorldWiseSchoolsService, culture, Elmar-LaurentBorgmann, football, GeorgeSimons, GlobalVoices, InterfaithVoices, language, LynneMurphy, OpenUniversity, PeaceCorps, PocketCultures, podcast, quanxi, SIETAR, soccer, ValentinaDodge, worldcup2010

An article about the scientific basis for social learning which appeared in the New Scientist recently was quite timely.The Trinity accredited course which I moderate for The Consultants-E, the Certificate in teaching language with technology, tends to immerse participants in the various online tools available to enhance language teaching both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 tools in particular tend to put the group at the heart of everything since they are about the exchange of digital artifacts be they blog posts, flickr photos or YouTube videos and this ties in very neatly with the dominant social constructivist paradigm which says that we learn only by interaction with others. As we progress through the 20 week course we begin to take a broader view about integrating ICT into our everyday practice, when and how it is appropriate and at this point one of my participants began to have doubts especially after reading the following in an article by Dieu:

 " Students can only learn if they put to work the knowledge and skills they already have, put to work their creativity and inventiveness, learn from one another, work efficiently together and reach out for new knowledge and skills."

Isn't there a place for individual learning, she asked? Isn't it difficult to get learners to work together most of the time? Do real world tasks always have to include technology? Doesn't language learning involve a great deal of drilling?

I must say that when I was first introduced to the social constructivist paradigm I did have my doubts that this was so universally applicable. The phrase 'the blind leading the blind' quickly came to mind. But recent experience has demonstrated the importance of social learning. The Cert ICT itself is a prime example. It consists of a set of tasks which we expect participants to complete but the richness always comes from the pooling of experiences by the participants and the to and fro of discussion between them. In tasks where the participants simply leave their answer to the task and no more, not much is gained. 

But the blind are not all equally blind so there is indeed benefit to be had in the blind leading the blind. In the Cert ICT course for example we always experience differing levels of experience with regard to Interactive Whiteboards and some of the richest exchanges occur when those who are used to working with these tools are able to give those who aren't, the benefit of their experience. So I am coming round to the idea of social learning much more enthusiastically than when I was first introduced to the idea. Certainly where languages are concerned your mother tongue is learned in a completely social way and so second language learning should probably try to replicate this together with as many shortcuts as possible which are proven to be effective. So if drilling is effective then it becomes a part of the armoury for learning a new language but language learning should probably be learned mainly in a social way. And the fact that it has not been taught in a social way up to now may account for the chronic lack of motivation in many language classes.

The New Scientist article stated that the majority of our learning is done in a social way and that the majority of this social learning probably happens outside of formal classes. The article described findings which indicate that we should spend between a tenth and a fifth of our lives in social learning. More than that and we forget to have a life, less than that and we don't know enough to be able to function effectively. The article also talked about the balance between social learning which is essentially copying, and innovation. Innovation is necessary for adapting to changing circumstances, such as climate change maybe, but too much innovation will be disruptive and not based on sound experience. The article also re-iterated the benefit of staggered practice which suggests that it is not a brilliant strategy to pack all your learning into an intensive period, as we do with compulsory schooling. Back at the Cert ICT course, I am convinced that this works because of the social dynamic created by the group and that the course tasks on their own are not sufficient. That is why we include a great deal of pair and group activity and why the course is served up in strict weekly chunks so that everybody is thinking about the same topic at the same time. I know that this is demanding but in the end it is successful. I am glad to have confirmation of this approach.

You may not have noticed but May 21 was UNESCO's World Day for Cultural Diversity, for Dialogue and Development. As a change to the cliched international fair of ethnic cuisine Debbie Swallow, crosscultural expert based in the UK, decided to start a blog called the World at Work. The idea would be to invite people to contribute critical incidents on the actual day of May 21st. Since she announced this on about May 14th I thought that this was an interesting initiative and might garner about half a dozen posts. I also thought it was potentially very useful since the one thing I miss when doing intercultural training is often the right critical incident to start the whole process off. In fact there have been many contributions and the archives stretch back over about 4 pages now. The contributors come from far and wide and the topics range from business to small talk. So I think that in the end Debbie has created a very useful resource here. The big challenge becomes what to do for the next WDCDDD day in 2011! Contributors include George Simons of Diversophy and SIETAR, Sanda Ionescu of the Culture Broker and Richard Cook of Global Excellence

I was happy to give Debbie's initiative a mention in the latest edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast which also includes an interview with the author of a new course book on intercultural matters, Adrian Pilbeam. The show also features extracts from a webinar on Language and Lifelong Learning which took place in April in Finland and featured new paradigms of culture as a box and as a peninsula!

May 21st (Friday) is UNESCO's "The World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development" and Debbie Swallow has organised a new website for collecting workplace critical incidents. Do you have any examples of intercultural differences you have come across while working in other cultures? If so why not share them at the World at Work website to build up a repository of critical incidents which could be useful to people crossing cultures for the first time.

I was amazed at the prevalence of tired old stereotypes about Africa when I spoke to Ekene Ajufo and Polly Anna Sanches Martinez about a discussion forum event they organised on behalf of the African Student Union at the University of Florida to discuss the theme of ‘Us v Them’. They called them National Geographic images. The problem is that not enough everyday news comes out of Africa and that only leaves the stereotypes on which to fall back. I wondered what the advantage of scheduling a discussion was. Surely the topic can be discussed spontaneously? But Ekene Ajufo who is the Vice President of the African Students Union at Florida University pointed out that in a scheduled event such as this the discussion can be moderated professionally and this could lead to more productive discussions than spontaneous dinner party talk. When I saw the video recording of the discussion I had to agree. Unfortunately I could not include extracts from the video into the latest podcast but you can hear the discussion I had with Ekene Ajufo and Polly Anna Sanches Martinez in the latest Absolutely Intercultural show. 

The show also includes two more extracts from the Anna Lindh Foundation forum including one very noisy conversation I had with Merlijn Twaalfhoven, a Dutch composer who uses his music as a way of confronting cultural differences.

Last school year I experimented with Ning in various ways including using it to house a course I was teaching with three classes and recommending it as a way of extending the conversation for the schools service of a local attraction. Ning is a personalised, scalable, social networking site which you can configure for your own network and needs. In fact, it's a bit like Elgg/Eduspaces where I house my blog at the moment except that Ning was just getting very useful for educators with many different ways of interacting and of storing digital artefacts. Ning had adopted the familiar business model of free and premium plans and has just announced that the free plans will be abolished. This has upset the education community in particular and there is a furious buzz in the educational world at the moment with people desperately looking for alternatives and worried about how easy it is going to be to transfer what they have already invested into Ning elsewhere.

The situation with Ning is one that is familiar across a great many of these Web 2.0 tools. Most of them are not created with educators in mind. Educators take to them and tweak them to fit but cannot be surprised when business considerations weigh more heavily than any obligation to the education community. I can imagine that it is difficult for Ning or any other Web 2.0 company to see the difference between free and extremely cheap. In the case of Ning we are talking about $10 a month currently though this will change after May 4th.

I was invited to complete a survey about the Ning product as a prelude to the re-organisation which is being rolled out on May 4th and wondered while I was filling it in if companies such as Ning understand how education works. The key point, not just with Ning, but with any Web 2.0 tool in education is that you have to convince teachers one at a time and you do this by offering a free version. Teachers already subsidise education enough without expecting them to pay just $10 here and $5 there. Each tool on its own could be cheap enough but if you want to use a palette then it could get very expensive. Of course a responsible institution will have a budget for these types of applications but care needs to be taken how this is run. A decree that in the school year beginning 2010/2011 there will be a college-wide adoption of Ning is unlikely to result in a great deal of buy-in and runs completely counter to the prosumer idea of decision-making at the individual level.

In my own case, the teaching Ning is a completed project and its only value for me now is the lesson material which I have housed there and which I wanted to recycle for the next school year. But as Ning had added functionality I was warming to it more and more as a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and recommending it to other teachers. The local attraction will no doubt be prepared to pay the low premium rates to maintain their Ning, if they don't already do so anyway.

 At the very least this is making educators stop and think about what they actually value about Ning and whether it can't be found elsewhere. But it's going to be a pain rescuing the material!

My husband had to hurredly prepare a two hour teaching session yesterday to stand in for a colleague stuck in the Azores because of the European flight cancellations. There must be thousands of people in similar situations especially in Europe but also around the world if an event involves travelling Europeans. It's at times like this that the benefits of virtual conferencing seem so obvious. The set up does not have to be elaborate and can be in place within 5 minutes wherever there is an adequate broadband connection. Ensuring that the correct ports are open may take longer for a heavily protected system if permission needs to be sought and approved.

However the practice is not widespread yet and is surrounded by a great deal of mystique. I have helped my husband to give two virtual presentations to conferences in North America in the last couple of years.  The organisers really wanted his input but in one instance he would barely have had time to return from one location before setting off for the States while in the second instance I think nobody was prepared to pay his travel expenses.

I suggested giving a virtual presentation. The immediate worry was the stability of the connection to enable the showing of slides. Being a scientist, my husband generally wants to show tables, graphs and diagrams. But there are many ways to skin a rabbit so it was not really a problem to set up a solution with a couple of back-up options if these went wrong.

In both cases we tried out the connection and the showing of the slides beforehand with the conference organisers. This is essential to put both the speaker and the organisers at ease.

In both cases the presentation went smoothly.

In both cases my husband bemoaned the fact that there was no opportunity for questions at the end. However I think that was more psychological than real. I suspect that the tension had built up so greatly that both parties were just grateful that the presentation had happened and immediately wanted to relax. There is no reason why there can't be interaction with the audience as well. So the next time a virtual presentation is looming I will build in consideration of audience participation.

I think that this solution is platform agnostic. There are many tools which can be used and while I might veto some, I certainly have no strong preferences. In fact a conference organisation may have their own preferences.

All this was done from home using free versions of conferencing tools. So if the altenative is a £3300 taxi journey then it might be worth considering virtual conferencing instead! My rates are very reasonable!

I am just returning from my first IATEFL conference which this year was held at Harrogate. Why was this my first time even though I have been teaching English for over 10 years? I guess that I have been attending events which are geared to e-learning rather than teaching English. I get the impression that this is a conference which people attend on a regular basis so maybe this is the start of an annual ritual for me. The conference is certainly friendly and caters for many different interests including teachers looking for tips on how to teach specific items, teacher trainers, school managers, publishers, authors and elearning specialists.

I was able to meet a couple of my former online course participants, colleagues who are spread all over the world as well as TEFL celebrities. I was also able to catch up on the materials which are commonly used in the classroom through the commercial exhibitors. This was quite timely as I released the contents of the new week in the Certificate in ICT online course I am moderating for The Consultants-E which happened to be a critical look at what publishers have to offer.

Wandering through the exhibition I realised that the self-access centre which I helped to set up in 2000 would probably look very different today. Back in 2000 we were purchasing mostly stand alone programs such as Rosetta Stone and Issues in English. We did purchase the Reward CD-Roms which accompanied a series of books but that was the exception rather than the rule. If I were starting again today I think that I might be totally reliant on the print publishers’ electronic materials because these have now become so comprehensive  and varied where ten years ago they seemed to be like a grudging add-on to the main business of the book.

Finally having been steeped in the Dogme approach eschewing the slavish adherence to following a course book almost since its inception it was interesting to listen to the rationale behind the new MacMillan series Global whose main author is Lindsay Clandfield. Amongst other things it was great to hear that they have a policy of not referring to celebrities and that there is the opportunity to use many Englishes, not just American English or British English.

The main themes for this conference seemed to be learning technologies and cultural communication. Twitter was especially popular, so much so that I wasn't able to get into a couple of sessions about it because it was full to capacity.

Since the conference also served as a sort of staff meeting I guess that it’s very likely that I may attend a few more in the series. A colleague has even suggested what the topic of my talk should be!

An aspect of intercultural learning which we haven’t looked at much so far in the Absolutely Intercultural podcast is experiences gained through voluntary work. In Barcelona at the Anna Lindh Foundation forum, I was fortunate enough to meet Rachad Izzat from Morocco who has gained a huge amount of intercultural experience through his involvement in short, medium and long term volunteer placements. It hadn’t occurred to me before that this is a great way of finding about new places and really becoming integrated into the host community especially when the accommodation is with host families. Rachad has worked in Italy, Denmark and Norway and I was curious to find out about his Norwegian stay. I was also delighted to discover that he had learned some Norwegian and we were able to speak in Danish and Norwegian for a short while (the two languages are very similar and almost mutually intelligible). One unexpected aspect was that Rachad said that volunteering in all these different places has made him more aware of his Moroccan culture and more proud and protective of it.

Now Rachad works for Chantiers Sociaux Marocain which is a national volunteering organisation in Morocco where Rachad helps in their aim of offering volunteering opportunities to both young Moroccans and foreigners.

There was also a volunteering aspect to the second person featured in this show which was Cornelis Hulsman, a Dutchman now living in Egypt with his Egyptian wife where he is greatly concerned with improving the quality of media reporting in the country. Over the years he has built a series of organisations which seek to build up information databases so that reporters can set their stories into context and lexical databases to help translating articles to and from Arabic and a great deal of this work is dependent on volunteer labour, some of it Egyptian and some of it foreign. Some of the foreign volunteers don’t even need to be in Egypt to help when they support the IT work. But Hulsman told of some great work done by pairing up Egyptians and foreigners whose task is to build up background information about given topics. The partnership between foreign and native students ensures new perspectives on both sides.

I hadn’t set out to make a volunteer themed show but that is how it turned out in the end and I was very pleased to meet these two people who are really helping to make a difference in their communities.

On Monday 15^th March I attended an event which is new to me; a learning event conducted entirely through the medium of Facebook. Now you could argue that with text and voice chat, Facebook is more than able to host live events, learning or otherwise, but this one took place entirely through the message walls.

 

There is a video competition which I would like my Communication and IT students to enter. Not only do they have the chance of winning a fair amount of money but the competition is based on the needs of real organisations which have themselves paid a fair amount to be able to take advantage of the creative juices of the general public. The brief is to produce a viral video (or idea for one) to fulfil the specific needs of the organisations involved. Most are purely commercial propositions such as the soda company Cult but I found some of the briefs interesting such as the organisation which supports the aged which wants to encourage young immigrants to visit elderly Danish people.

 

This is not the first time that the organisation Kort og Godt has run the competition but they are increasingly using social media to create interest amongst the competitors. Inevitably they have set up a Facebook group which they use to let people know when new organisations have added a brief to the competition or when the competition is featured elsewhere in the media. However I was intrigued by the idea that you could run an innovation training event through Facebook so I decided to try it out.

 

The event ran for about three hours and it worked best if you were working with a small group of people who were physically in the room with you at the same time. What happened was that tasks were posted on the wall with deadlines. So for example we had 5 minutes to find some headlines and 15 minutes to choose which headlines we liked best from the assembled company of participants. Responses were posted as comments to the wall posting and you were alerted when new comments came in by the Facebook interface so then it was just a matter of clicking refresh to see what the others had written. As an exercise in how to get new ideas I think it worked very well.

 

I was curious also to see if the organisers would leave the wall postings in Facebook. I suspected the event would be deleted and so it was. In that way they retain the element of surprise should they decide to repeat the event. Meanwhile I am happy that I cut and pasted the event as it was going on. I plan to do a more mundane version face to face in class at some point.