I am very pleased to have sorted out the linking problem. It never occurred to me why most people's links appeared in the same format.

Now I am wondering about something else. We set up a community blog to support our online conference last November. http://elgg.net/nordic/weblog/ Now I am writing the report for 2005 and it would be nice to know how many, if any, visitors we had. But that is not information we can easily get is it?

I guess I could embed a web counter in individual posts but that is a very clunky solution and I couldn't expect other contributors to remember to use that.

I don't think that elgg is particularly deficient in that respect since to my knowledge hit counters are not that commonly available on blogs but it would be nice to know.

Added Jan 5: I realise that there is the option of monitoring recent activity on my own blog but this only goes back one month and it is a feature which does not seem available at all on the community blogs.

As project leader of the Nordic Voice project http://www.nordiskestemme.dk I am used to holding online meetings. It is not optimal but it is better than nothing and it achieves different goals than when restricting oneself to asynchronous methods such as discussion fora.

Susanne Nyrop and I presented our experiences to another European project, LIPS, http://www.eu-lips.de about to kick off its activities last November and they were interested in trying out this meeting method.

Friday the 13th was not an auspicious day for the first trial project meeting and indeed there were a few audio problems which meant that not everyone could hear all that was going on. For me, it was a very different experience since I was moderator rather than project leader. This means that I have to keep up with the content of the project so that I can effectively steer the meeting while not having much responsibility for the project outcomes.

I am liaising with the virtual conferencing company, Horizon Wimba, http://www.horizonwimba.com to try and make the next experience a better one. If the second meeting is no better then I guess the project coordinators will abandon the medium. Having said that, the first meeting was not so bad. Everyone was able to present their results and discuss them and I was able to compile a reasonable set of minutes.

I have just spent two days struggling through the snow into the big city to attend a kick-off meeting for a new EU Leonardo project, this one called VOCA 2 and designed to work out training programs and guidelines for mentors to disabled people seeking to be inserted into the workplace. My role there is to be part of the work package creating communities of practice for these mentors and related people such as employers and the disabled clients themselves. Since I am already involved in trying to promote a community of practice in the Nordic Voice project it was interesting for me to see different approaches to the creation and promotion of such communities. The international partner group I was part of obviously visualised a fairly formalised and structured environment. I feel the emphasis has to be on creating good content which will attract comment and be of value to members. This is not a big idealistic divide. I will just be interested to see which approach succeeds best.

 

Technorati Profile

Having just created my page at Podomatic today, that makes me a podcaster. It seems that my kit is wanting and I will probably have to get a better microphone. As I don't have any classes at the moment it is difficult to identify a legitimate use for the technology but at least that takes the pressure to produce off. I do want to produce an interview podcast before the end of April however for the Teaching Culture project http://www.teaching-culture.de and that will test my capabilities to the limit since that will be an interview with several former participants and will therefore involve Skype or Gizmo in some form or other.

... is at http://foxdenuk.podomatic.com/ The content is far from educational though I think that soundscapes have potential in EFL classes. This takes me back to my hospital radio dj-ing days, a very British phenomenon I gather, where you could only play Frank Sinatra's 'My Way' if you cut out the bit about 'the final curtain'. Living in Scotland at the time, it also involved a lot of bagpipe music which puts many people's teeth on edge but I like it as long as it's played outdoors!

I would like to be able to publish on a web page the entries or a selection of the entries for a specific delicious tag. I have been trying all week to find out whether this is possible and if so how to do this but with not much luck. I have a feeling OPML files may be implicated but am not sure. I tried including the code from an RSS page for a delicious tag in one of the web pages which nearly worked but not quite. The one URL using my test tag appeared but was not hotlinked.

The effect I want to achieve is similar to this dekita page http://dekita.org/exchange where the links down the right hand side originate from a delicious tag but how to replicate? It's driving me beserk as I feel that I have been getting close to a solution many times but never quite get there.

Yesterday I ended up watching three programmes on Teachers TV http://www.teachers.tv without meaning to. Yes, it is strangely compulsive as the reviews said when it first started last year. I have ambivalent feelings about it though. On the one hand the format of 15 minute programmes, tightly focussed on specific topics of interest to school teachers is an excellent training resource which I wish had existed back in the days when I was doing my teacher training and am grateful for now. But on the other hand, why just teacher's TV? Why not doctor's TV and policeman's TV? Why not salesman's TV? I have long thought that everyone has an opinion on teaching and think they are experts simply because they have been to school. Teachers, especially in the UK, seem to have been subjected to massive interference in their right to exercise their professional judgement, the latest incident being that a reading method is now being prescribed and by implication, others proscribed.

My field of interest is language learning and it amazes me that people who are not teachers can be so sure of themselves that they feel able to dictate by law how teaching ought to be done.

The programmes I watched included two language teaching programmes and I was shocked that what I was seeing was being touted as good practice when it seemed that most of the lesson was being done through the medium of English rather than French, the target language. The programme was mainly about how to raise motivation, especially of boys, to learn languages. 'They have to be given a reason to want to understand French' said the teacher using boy friendly images of motorbikes to teach colours. Yes, absolutely. And one good reason might be so that they understand the instructions they are being given in French! A much more direct reason for understanding the language than looking at a powerful yellow motorbike.

And this was from a school specialising in languages. There really is no hope for the Brits!

One of my major fields of interest at the moment is inter-cultural competency training. Therefore I take note of what other people are saying in this field and one thing I have noticed recently is that there are people who maintain that there are no differences of culture and I am trying to work out what they are getting at.

This is mainly stated as an excuse for not taking any special considerations when planning online communication. I think that what they are saying is that everyone is an individual and that we shouldn't lump people together and have a whole slew of expectations about how they are going to behave and think just because they come from a particular culture. But to me inter-cultural competency is more than merely describing a list of cultures. It is about expecting and respecting differences. It is about making an effort to find what those differences might be and perhaps adjusting behaviour in the light of what is learned. It is also about recognising that we all have a culture which we carry in our heads and which leads us to a certain set of default reactions and judgements. Overcoming the default reaction is what inter-cultural competency is all about and I simply cannot see how denying that there are different cultures helps in this.

A practical example includes the tide of constructivist thinking that is sweeping the English speaking Internet world. This leads to the teacher as mentor, teacher as facilitator type of approach. I cannot see that it harms to admit that this approach is simply not recognised as teaching in many parts of the world. In fact one doesn't have to go too far to meet this blank incomprehension. Almost 20 years ago I did an EU sponsored teacher exchange with a teacher in Belgium. When she came to my institution she sat in on an IT lesson because she was also interested in IT. Students were working through an exercise book, one to each machine, calling on their tutor when they got stuck. When she came out she said to me 'Well that wasn't really teaching was it, they were just doing their homework.'

To me that was a clash of cultures. I could see that her default reaction was to disapprove of what she had just witnessed and therefore she never sought to understand it.

I have just been directed to this article http://www.structuredblogging.org/index.php about structured blogging. I'm not sure that I understand it completely though it seems like a GOOD THING. Isn't elgg a structured blog? Or is it only internally structured and not externally structured?