Anne Fox :: Blog

Ever since I heard about the Culture Shock game about a year and a half ago I have been curious about it. C-shock has been developed to help foreign students coming to Portsmouth University settle in more quickly than they might otherwise. It is meant to act as an introduction to British life with some details specific to the university thrown in.

I tried it out with my daughter for the latest Absolutely Intercultural show though my daughter was rather microphone shy so it is mainly me you can hear as we go round parts of the game. The game is online at the University of Portsmouth site and can also be played on your mobile phone. The game is made up of several sub-games as you go round the campus and the town. These sub-games are either shoot'em up or quiz type games. The range of topics covered is quite wide from student jobs, to appropriate dress and norms in student accommodation. As you attempt the different sub-games you decrease your level of culture shock.

I must say that I found some of the sections brutally honest such as the drinking culture and what it might lead to. My daughter wandered into a sub-game on anti-social behaviour during which it was made quite clear that while in Britain you are liable to experience a great deal of bad language and that it's not worth calling the police if you see drugs being consumed though it might be worth calling them out if you witness drug-dealing. The scores are given in terms of the British university scoring system from a third to a first so that part of British university life is absorbed almost sub-conciously.

In the end the question is what this game achieves. It is certainly an innovative gimmick for the University of Portsmouth as the first HE institution in the UK to feature such a game on their website and it does convey a great deal of information about the British way of life, not all of it flattering. I am sure that it will be played by visitors to the site. I don't know whether someone would make a decision about whether to go to Portsmouth or even to the UK or not on the basis of this.

I also featured an interview about virtual mobility in this show speaking with Eva Abramuszkinová from Newton College in the Czech Republic. A great deal of effort is being made to promote physical mobility of university students but sometimes it is appropriate to give students the opportunity to study courses at other institutions without leaving their home institution. In the project Ready for Virtual Mobility consideration is given to all aspects for ensuring the success of such schemes including preparing students for intercultural differences when studying online. Another aspect which Eva discussed with me was the type of person who would be good at organising virtual mobility and it turns out that this requires quite an impressive set of skills including a belief in the value of virtual mobility and experience of being an online student yourself. The intercultural survival kit for the Ready for Virtual Mobility project can be found here.

My younger daughter came home from school in tears today. One of her main class teachers is leaving which means the class won't see her after next week when the summer holiday begins. The reason she is leaving is because she has found a job nearer home but one can't help feeling that the news that the school is to be closed down within a year probably had something to do with that decision. Not only that but today my daughter learned that one of her classmates is also leaving, transferring to the feeder school which will take over the pupils from her current school a year early so that she has time to get used to it, her parents say. The head teacher has also found another job and this is all within a week of the decision being taken by the local politicians. The fear is of course that a condemned school will simply languish in its last year of existence, haemorraging teachers and being staffed by inexperienced temporary staff.

From what I know of the Danish school system, the local politicians must have found this small village school a tempting target in spite of its reputation for successfully integrating children with various learning problems thereby saving them considerable sums of money which would otherwise have to be spent on dedicated services. The school has been threatened with closure several times in the 12 years we have lived in the village so it comes as no surprise that finally it is happening and we could selfishly ignore it since our daughter was due to move to the big school in the next village in 2010 anyway. But it's clear that the closure, which still has to go through the appeal and approval procedure, is already affecting the local community negatively.  But in Denmark, any group of parents can apply to set up a so-called free school and this is of course what the parents have decided to do. The central government funds 80 % of the cost and so parents only have to contribute about 270 € a month which is about equivalent to the fee for the afterschool club we currently pay and which would include an afterschool club facility anyway. Central government is not duty bound to approve the application but the local government politicians have indicated that they would not object to the application. Of course they won't! Neither would I. What an easy way to offload the cost of educating 100 children!

But the uncertainty is not healthy and is having a predictable effect on staffing, as my daughter learned to her cost today.

I get to one or two conferences a year on average and have just returned from my first visit to the EDEN conference which this year was in Gdansk and my main impression was how friendly everyone was. Large conferences such as Online EDUCA Berlin and hip conferences such as Reboot in Copenhagen make efforts to use the technology to help people get together but at EDEN without the technology I think I probably talked with more people at a conference than I ever have before and that was simply down to good old-fashioned human friendliness and concern. At one point for example at the end of Friday's proceedings, it was too late to go back to the hotel and change but everything else was over and so I was swept up by a project network with people from Spain, Germany, Italy , Finland and Greece and we had a great, if cold and windy, hour in a cafe while we waited for the coach to take us to our evening dinner venue.

I had gone to EDEN with Helen Keegan to present some of our experiences in the VITAE project training teachers to integrate ICT in vocational teaching while mentoring colleagues to do the same. The session was based on a great paper which Helen has written on the topic of the role of communities of practice in learning in collaboration with Cris Costa. And on the same platform as us later we heard Thomas Fischer tell us about his very interesting Mobi-blog project in which university students on mobility semesters blog about their experiences and in so doing encourage more students to take up this option because they are better informed.

The University of Leicester had a very strong presence led by Professor Gilly Salmon and her media zoo. I am not being disparaging here. Media Zoo is the clever metaphor used to identify the status of the different ICT tools which teachers may consider using ranging from the LMS/VLE in pet's corner to more dangerous and untried ideas in the tropical house.

At the conference I also met one of my distance learning students who is coming to the end of her Certificate in teaching languages with technology course which I tutor with The Consultants-e in Barcelona. But I found it easy enough to maintain the boundaries between social interaction at the conference and continued business talk through the course VLE. This is something which is not likely to happen very often since my students have been spread literally all over the world. But it was yet another friendly event which happened at this conference.

The conference theme was about innovation but I missed the inspiring case studies which told me about the activities of individual students and individual teachers. But I did come away with quite a few contacts for use in current and future projects as well as for the podcast so in that sense the conference was useful.

Having talked with Elisabeth Plum about her version of Cultural Intelligence I next got in touch with the Cultural Intelligence Center in the US to find out about how their approach differs or not. I talked with David Livermore who has a very interesting background in preparing missionaries for foreign placings. In the case of the CIC there is a very deliberate attempt to align themselves with the other intelligences and they follow the same framework of action, knowledge and emotion and strategy. It is the strategy factor which differentiates the CIC brand of Cultural Intelligence with that of Elisabeth Plums, where strategy equates to meta-cognitive awareness about what you are doing and why. In fact Elisabeth Plum also mentioned this aspect but did not separate it out.

The CIC approach is based on international research and they do talk of a cultural quotient which means that they have tools which give you a score for your cultural intelligence level at the end. When I expressed doubts about this numerical approach, David Livermore was quick to reassure me that, unlike IQ which seems relatively fixed during an individual's lifetime, CQ is flexible and you can be trained or train yourself to improve your score. Whew! What a relief!

In fact there are a clutch of quizzes which you can try out on the CIC webpage so that you can get an idea of which areas you need to work on. So that is definitely fun and potentially useful. David Livermore is about to publish a book called 'Leading with Cultural Intelligence' about how cultural intelligence can be applied to business situations so this approach will be better known.

This whole strand on the podcast started with a reader comment and we got another comment, this time from Debbie Swallow in the UK, who asked a timely but difficult question, namely, can you name someone who you regard as culturally intelligent and who some of us might know. I thought long and hard about this one and had difficulty in naming anyone and when I thought even harder about it, it occurred to me that maybe, by definition, most famous people do need to be culturally intelligent because their fame reduces the need for these skills. In the end the only name I could come up with was Ray Mears the survivalist because his approach to survival is about extreme awareness of his environment and where that includes people, he tends to be culturally intelligent in his dealings with them. So there's the challenge. Can you think of anyone who is famous and could be labelled as culturally intelligent?

I follow many blogs and am inspired by many of them. The most practical blog I follow is the rapid e-Learning blog which is attached to the Articulate website, an e-learning authoring tool. Although the blog is hosted on a commercial site, its contents are full of practical advice for making e-learning courses which anyone can put into effect immediately even without the proprietary software the site is promoting. Since Articulate is based on a Powerpoint template many of the articles deal with different ways of making better use of Powerpoint for e-learning purposes and here I can't even begin to list the number of tips and tricks which I have learned as a result of the weekly blog posts. Oh all right then! I'll try.

I didn't know for example that the images which come with Powerpoint can be disassembled, re-arranged and re-assembled. I was amazed by the Powerpoint copy made of a famous online Flash frog dissection simulation. This has been one of the demos which has convinced me that Powerpoint can be a poor man's Flash. There are lots of good tips for professional use of graphics and of course lots of good advice about designing e-learning courses. This is all the more welcome since the types of courses being discussed here are at the extreme end of left-to-your-own-devices learning. This is not the type of course I ever find myself devising but it seems like good ideas come from operating at the extremes. You therefore get a lot of advice about letting learners steer their own way through the course and to give them problem solving tasks instead of overwhelming them with facts.

There are so many good ideas here that come at regular weekly intervals that I doubt that one man can be behind them all. So although the blog is hosted by Tom Kuhlman I have a feeling that there must be a team of people behind this. Whether it's one man or a whole stadium of people, I don't care because this is solid advice which can be applied immediately.

What I like also are the wider perspectives on learning in general. I have been trying to get to grips with informal learning for the past couple of years and find it a most slippery concept because as soon as you try to systematise informal learning, it ceases to be informal right? One of the best explanations of informal learning I have found has been on this blog. Kuhlman's starting point for this post is to ignore the training event mentality and instead focus on the 2000 working hours available to any one worker:

'Let’s look at a year in the life of a trainee.  The typical work year represents about 2000 hours.  During that year people learn.  In fact, they’re always learning.  You don’t have an on and off button when it comes to learning.  It just happens.  In that sense, we can say, that a person has 2000 available learning hours. 

So the question when building a training program is how to make the most of the 2000 learning hours.'

I find this type of perspective very refreshing and inspiring even if it doesn't provide me with the holy grail of what is informal learning. I at least feel as though I am one step nearer.

Even the archives on this blog are easy to search and that's saying a lot!

I was pleased to be able to take part in the biennial Webheads in Action Online Convergence which this year was an Unconvergence which means that this online event was organised on the lines of an unconference. Since it was a bank holiday plus I had family visiting I was unable to do more than to host my own session so thank goodness the sessions are recorded so that I can catch up with the likes of Dave Cormier and Nancy White who were also leading sessions.

I did a session on using games in professional development with reference to some of the games which we have used in the VITAE project training course.

My session was recorded in several different ways. There is a Ustream recording where I sound as though I have a lisp and where the chat is missing and which I can't embed here. A better recording can be obtained through Elluminate here but that necessitates a download or two. The least I can do is embed my slides but no, it seems I can't even do that!

I got some great interactions with those present for which I am grateful. Thanks to everyone who attended. Couldn't do it without you! Your comments will help me to write this up in the VITAE project book which will come out later this year.

I have signed myself up to do a session on the use of games in professional development in the forthcoming Webheads in Action Unconvergence! To see the full range of sessions on offer for free, click here.

So this is an invite / reminder for you to be sure and attend the 3rd biannual international Webheads in Action Online Convergence, free, completely online, and around the clock for three days May 22-24, 2009

Among the portals:

Register at the WiAOC Ning:
http://webheadsinaction.ning.com

Find the schedule here:
http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/schedule

Keynote and featured speakers (in order of appearance:

Sugata Mitra
Kim Cofino
Jeff Utecht
David Warlick
Nancy White
Robin Good
Jozef Colpaert
Alec Couros
Jo Kay and Jokaydians
Angi Malderez
Alexander Hayes
Dave Cormier
Wesley Fryer

plus many other presentations exploring the conference theme:
Lifelong Learning, Connecting Facilitators, Transcending Borders

This unconvergence is driven mostly bottom up and organized, implemented, and publicized by its many participants in collaboration at its wiki site: http://wiaoc09.pbworks.com/

In my own session my idea is to look at the experience of using three different games I have found and to think about the wider implications of whether it is a good idea to do this.

As the coordinator of a European project, VITAE, developing a mentor training course to promote ICT integration in vocational education, we have 'toyed' with the idea of inlcuding playful elements in the course. Unfortunately we could not find a game which incorporated the integration of ICT in teaching supported by mentoring so instead I have gathered three games which cover these elements separately and we'll see if we can learn anything from them.

What you can do:
1. Try out the following games and report back on your experience to the WIAOC forum I have set up for that purpose.
Diffusion of Innovation Simulation (about 90 minutes)
Mentoring Ms Montfort (about 30 minutes)
Social Media game (needs playmates! and also to be adapted to a teaching context)

2. Join me in my synchronous session in Dimdim on Sunday may 24th at 18:00 GMT (joining details later)

3. Follow up comments in the forum after the live session.


Why?
Games-based learning is increasingly being recognised as an effective way of learning, may be the best way of learning?

Specifically games, and especially video games, include the following features:
- fantasy
- rules/goals
- sensory stimuli
- challenge
- mystery
- control

which are conducive to learning.

Not only that but online and video games may foster 21st century literacies as follows:
- Risk-taking- Critical reflection
- Collaboration
- Meaning creation
- Non-linear navigation
- Problem-solving and problem definition
- Innovation

I'll add prompts and new information in the WIAOC Unconvergence Ning forum as the week progresses.

Every subject has its grand old men who have laid the theoretical groundwork for the discipline and in intercultural communication these would have to include E T Hall, Hofstede and Trompenaars. So it's refreshing to come across new thinking in the field and this is exactly what happened after a podcast listener alerted us to the fact that a new book had just come out called Cultural Intelligence by Elisabeth Plum. So the latest show in the Absolutely Intercultural podcast is devoted mainly to exploring this new concept of Cultural Intelligence.

Plum is very much on the culture general rather than the culture specific side of the fence and she looks at culture in its widest sense so that it is not just nationality and ethnicity which comes into play but many other aspects such as gender, age, religion and work field. Her background as a psychotherapist led her to recognise the huge part which emotions play in the field of intercultural communication especially when things go wrong and we start feeling insulted, angry or puzzled.

It is clear that the concept relies on the interplay of 3 factors, emotion, cognitive, action or what you feel, what you know and what you do. We hear how Elisabeth Plum explains the three factors. One thing is clear and that is that the three factors are all equally important and interplay with each other; hence the illustration.

So what do you think? Is this an idea that would help you in your intercultural encounters? If you want to find out more about cultural intelligence then go to Elisabeth Plums blog where you can find details of her book and an article explaining the basic concepts of cultural intelligence. The phrase cultural intelligence is also used by a research group in the US in a slightly different way. So we will try and follow up on that so that we can see how the ideas compare.

The idea that we shouldn’t focus on just one aspect was also the theme of Barry Tomalin’s talk to the ICC conference in Florence, Italy a couple of weeks ago. Tomalin is Director of Cultural Training at International House in London and was at the conference to present a new project called Diversity in the European Workplace or DEW for short, which is preparing some exciting intercultural training materials based on critical incident methodology. Tomalin started by talking about the different aspects of diversity which you typically find in a European workplace. These he called the 7 – ‘isms’. Watch out for an explanation of the Somali worker mystery at the end.   The recording comes courtesy of Carl Dowse who does intercultural training as part of his Business English courses in Germany and I hope to be talking to him in more detail about his approach in a later show.

Last Friday I was invited at short notice to observe an English literature class in Tajikistan. Since this was happening through the medium of Yahoo chat I accepted immediiately. The invitation came from Ibrahim Rustamov, a trailblazer for ICT integration in learning in Tajikistan.

Although I have often held chat sessions as part of project business or as part of teacher training sessions, it is a long time, (6 years?) since I saw it in action for purely educational purposes. Teaching through the medium of text chat may seem clunky and old-fashioned when you consider all the bright, shiny new tools now available for synchronous online communication but this session had an amazing momentum.

The topic was the Edgar Allen Poe story, The Cask of Amontillado, which the students had read in simplified English before the session. The teacher prompted her students to discuss the nature of friendship, whether the action was in proportion to the perceived wrongs, common English sayings to do with friendship and much else besides in an intensive session which lasted about 45 minutes.

I was impressed that the simple chat tool could be used to such good effect. I was also impressed by the depth and range of vocabulary of the students who expressed themselves very fluently and who were able to explore quite deep concepts prompted by the story.

So in this age of built-in webcams and Skype, this session has demonstrated to me that there is still a place for the simple chat tool which can be used to achieve fairly sophisticated pedagogical outcomes.

The last Absolutely Intercultural show was our third anniversary! Last time we had an anniversary we had a behind the scenes look at how the podcast is put together so this time I was looking for something different and decided to put together an intercultural FAQ based on what we have been doing for the last three years. We tend to go for themed shows which look at certain topics one at a time so I thought that an overview of this sort might be helpful.

Q1 What is culture? Are the Screaming Men of Finland culture? Is what they do singing?

Listen as Laurent explores the idea of culture as the software of the mind with two guests.

Q2 Why do we need to know about intercultural differences?I once had a colleague who was very proud of the fact that he had gone to work in Morrocco without doing any research beforehand; the idea being that the voyage of discovery was all the more pleasurable that way. However when I spoke with Mark Karstad about his time as a technical assistant at the Dubai Women’s College I could appreciate the value of a little forewarning about the expectations of behaviour between males and females there.

Q3 What are Critical incidents?These are the times when you break the unwritten rules of culture. These tend to be the incidents that make the most impression on you. Here are a couple; firstly we hear from Fernando, a Spaniard, talking about a strange party he was invited to during his stay in Germany.

And  a second example from Turkmenistan where American peace corps workers come to work and often wonder about some of the situations they witness.

You can see that things can be very different and that this can take some getting used to. So this brings us to

Q4 What is Culture shock? This is when so many rules are different that you get a psychological reaction.

Listen how Mark Anderson from South Africa describes his reaction on accepting a job in Korea.

Q5 Can you learn cultural competence? We have discussed several different ways in which you can train intercultural competence. One of the most innovative was surely the Swedish Living Library initiative.

Q 6 Are cultural differences apparent in different communication media such as email and virtual worlds? Does IT flatten the world and make everyone the same or does it also reveal cultural differences? I discussed this in relation to the Virtual World Second Life with Helen Keegan and Sus Nyrop.

Q7 Is there a connection between culture and language? Language is intimately connected to culture. For example Europeans going to China may experience much more of a culture shock because their languages have so little in common. I discussed the issue with Ken Carroll in Shanghai.

Greenlandic is not only a little spoken language but also difficult to learn for other reasons. Hear why from Jens Nyeland, a Dane who worked in Greenland for 3 years.

Q8 Are there any topics Which tend to arise more often? Looking back it seems that we talk a lot about education. Here is one example of the difference in attitude to learning as described by Bob Compton of 2 Million Minutes

Another topic which crops up rather a lot is the link between culture and music. We started with the screaming men of Finland and this is an extract of Weightless Escape by Moussa Diallo, a prime mover behind the Global Music Festival in Grenaa Denmark whose aim is to build bridges between the native and immigrant populations in Denmark.

So that’s a taste of what we’ve been doing over the last 3 years. Thank you to everyone who has taken part. We couldn’t have done it without you. If you have any comments then you can add them to our blog .