Isn't it ironic that those times when you are busiest with interesting things are just those times when you have the least opportunity to sit down and write.

Today I took part in a little experiment as part of the Nordic Voice conference by linking up a class in a local college with my good friend, Susanne Nyrop, on the other side of Denmark for a live interview over the Internet.

Both the topic and the manner of its doing were interesting. The topic was the closeness or not of the Nordic languages. The class was a group of adult migrants and they were trying to find out how much they could expect to understand of Norwegian and Swedish once they have mastered Danish.

My willing colleague in Kalø, Kirsten, had initially thought that she would pick out a small group to carry out the interview after the whole class had prepared questions generated by an article stating amongst other things that a Swede should be able to speak Danish after only 16 hours of lessons. When I arrived there today I discovered that the interest level was so high that they all wanted to take part.

This meant that I didn't have a headset and spent most of my time making sure the technical stuff was OK so I don't know what made them all laugh until I listen to the recording later. I do know though that Susanne persuaded them to sing their favourite Danish song at the end of the session.

More on the technical stuff in the next post.

My little experiment this morning started with an online article described in my first post. The idea was to set up an interview with a Dane living in the greater Copenhagen area where Sweden is very close especially now that the record-breaking Oeresund bridge links the two countries.

I decided to collect all the online stuff together on one page

The page contains

1. a link to the original article
2. Two pictures created on Google earth showing Sweden from our region and from the Copenhagen area to show how close it is to Denmark.
3. A link to the live interview software (in this case Wimba Voice Direct)
4. A link to a Brave net guest map so the class could enter their different countries of origin.
5. A link to Susanne's blog so the group could communicate with her in writing.

The audio software worked perfectly and the group especially liked the guest map. There was a sense of unfinished business as I left so I suspect the group may use the comment feature on Susanne's blog to continue the conversation.

I also had a question about whether it would be possible to link up with Greenland using the audio software. My answer was that Skype would be probably be a better bet for one to one conversation.

I had forgotten though that the Voice Direct archive saves conversations in a very bitty way so listening to the recording is going to b a bit of an ordeal although it may help with pinpointing interesting snippets for when we report back on the trial.

I have been very busy with the online conference for Den Nordiske Stemme. One of our guests was Etienne Wenger who, as luck would have it, was in Denmark this week so we arranged to go and meet up with him at the University of Aalborg. It's not often that you can meet up with one of your heroes quite so easily. Wenger's thinking includes the importance of identity for effective learning and the recognition that one can have many different identities depending on context.

Last week there was an article about Tariq Ramadan - the first time I had heard of him. The article rang some bells though because it seems that one of Ramadan's themes is that Muslims should cultivate or accept several identities in order to play a full part in western societies. I wondered if there was a connection between these two reasons for latching onto the importance of identity and more significant, the need for several different identities.