Today I was at an art exhibition and maybe I will bring up the topic of the accompanying website at my next meeting with my English group. See if it tallies with their idea of putting art online or not.

Yesterday I went all the way to Copenhagen for a one day conference on pervasive gaming. We flew and nearly had to turn back because of fog but finally, after two hours in the air instead of the usual 25 minutes, we came down.

We were perhaps one conference too early since the next one in spring 2006 will be about pervasive e-learning while this one was more theoretical and abstract and probably won't lead directly to the inspiration we were looking for for future projects, though indirectly it might. The highlight for us was the contribution from Learning Lab Denmark which seems to be a font of good ideas. They described a school project and a management project both of which were of great interest.

Another good thing about the conference was that my virtual colleague Susanne Nyrop was also able to attend and so we had one of our few face to face meetings. Not much time to talk though as we rushed off to catch a plane which was cancelled.

One totally incidental benefit was to discover that I could understand spoken Norwegian but not Swedish. I also discovered that the much derided Powerpoints do help a lot when trying to follow a talk in a language you are not fluent enough with. This was an insight for me as I am involved in the planning of a virtual conference aimed at a Nordic audience and the issue of language has been plaguing me from the beginning. Embarrassingly enough for me as project leader, I cannot understand my Norwegian project partners and this must be because they speak the other kind of Norwegian to the speaker at this conference. (Yes, there are two Norwegian languages).

And finally we met up with Lars Clausen who is also at elgg, no doubt as a result of the recent Odense conference.

I talked with Lars on Tuesday about the idea of getting some international comments regarding buying from the Internet and he thought it would be a good idea and he was sure that his colleagues would respond. So I went ahead and contacted the wonderful webheads groups who rose to the challenge and put some comments on the Voiceboard.

But by Friday only one of the group had added some replies. We talked about it on Friday. We couldn't do much else because we discovered that even though we were in a computer room, the right software hadn't been dowbloaded and I wasn't prepared to use an already fore-shortened session to wait while several megabytes were downloaded.

So I still have not witnessed the software working in situ. This makes me profoundly uneasy. We are now switching over to virtual meetings and my first virtual meeting with them is on Friday. It will be very interesting to see how many turn up.

A free online conference, free DVD with case studies, a certificate of participation and rich follow-up possibilities for continued collaborative work. That is the offer from Den Nordiske Stemme or The Nordic Voice to teachers of Nordic languages and any others interested in being inspired and exchanging their experiences in the use of ICT in their own classroom as well as over the net.

We have a wide range of teachers and developers participating as presenters both from the Nordic countries as well as from Australia, the USA and Germany. From Australia we have the singer and teacher Michael 'the voice' Coghlan who experiments with the spoken word using ICT tools. From the USA we have Etienne Wenger who will share his expertise in learning through participation and social activity in a community of practice, expertise which we will build on once the conference is over. Ruth Vilmi from Finland has worked with written inter-cultural projects for over ten years and will talk about them while using one fo the newest technologies, namely podcasting.

There will also be contributers from Denmark, Sweden and Iceland which will cover the use of pictures and video, blogs, webquests, learning neighbouring languages and intercultural issues. Both the conference and follow up Community of Practice are free thanks to financial support from the Nordic Council of Ministers.