I have just finished a month long online conference on Web 2.0 technologies over at CP square. It was a roller coaster tour of the emerging social technologies some of which I was familiar with beforehand and some of which were new to me such as mash-ups. One of the most important aspects was to discover whether and how these technologies help to build online community. One of the concerns I expressed was that there are huge swathes of people who are excluded from the conversation and named as a possible example women in Lebanon because I have a little second hand knowledge of the situation there.

I think I was told not to assume too much and indeed on opening Yahoo Messenger this morning I was confronted with an article about Syrian bloggers where two out of the three featured bloggers were women. Syria is not Lebanon and this is just anecdotal evidence so I still don't know if I am right or wrong. I think I will maintain my concern until more hard evidence comes to light one way or the other.

There has been a lot of comment recently about the move by Oxford University to require students to attend lectures. The theory here being that lectures = learning.

A less well known proposal is to remove the option of the group exam in Denmark. I only found out about this because it was being abolished and so have not had the time to get to know it and love it. But it does seem a very retrogade step in this Web 2.0 era of collaboration and connectivism to abolish the possibility of an exam in which answers are arrived at by a group discussion. As far as I can see this group option was available both to school students and student teachers. Learning Lab Denmark's latest quarterly has a short piece on the proven advantages of the group exam in solving maths problems (not yet available online unfortunately). And there is a petition one can sign to get the governement to change its mind only in Danish at http://www.bevargruppeeksamen.dk/index2.php?tekstid=1 As far as I can gather the group exam option was exactly that, an option and no student was forced to do it.

So just as a consensus seems to be emerging on the value of constructed knowledge through interaction, one of the few examples of this theory in action in mainstream education is being taken away.

Overall then a very traditional view of learning seems to be taking root.

Today I participated in a kick-off meeting for Den Nordiske Stemme (the Nordic Voice) project which was held online. The project team is not new since this is a continuation of a project we started last year. But the funding allocated this year made the option of a face to face meeting uneconomic. We met once last year and managed the rest of the project through asynchronous discussion and synchronous online meetings.

Online meetings are not a real substitute for face to face but still have advantages over purely asynchronous communcation. So today was our official kick-off meeting for the 2006 section of the project. As it was an important meeting in which we defined our aims and goals for the coming period, we tried out a different structure. The thought of a four hour live online meeting was too much and so we decided to have an hour of live meeting followed by breakout time in which we got on with different tasks discussed in the meeting and then to meet up once again live two hours later for a further hour. This last hour was spent reporting on what we had achieved during the break and assessing the implications for our work plans from now on. A sort of sandwich structure.

One of the most rewarding parts of the meeting was our response to three polls in which we all contributed in text what our visions, themes and priorities for the project should be. This exercise highligted quite effectively where we agreed and where we had a difference of perspective. And in fact the follow up discussion showed that it was quite easy to reconcile our viewpoints. For me as project coordinator this was a very valuable result from today as it showed that we were all on the same track, even though we all have a slightly different perspective of course.

The meeting was preceded by an asynchronous discussion about priorities and wishes for 2006 and so it really felt as though we were building on a solid foundation.

I have read a couple of articles recently about a new enterprise in the UK called Inter High which is an Internet school. I toyed with the idea of educating my children at home and since there is always the chance that my husband gets posted back to the UK I have to give some thought as to how we could manage the transition from Danish education back to the British system. I have since found that work is too interesting to consider also being a full time teacher to my children. Added to which I soon found out that I have zero credibility as a teacher with my eldest. I told her once about newborns being able to swim underwater and she adamantly refused to believe me because 'my teacher hasn't told us that'. I brought that up at a parent's evening once and the teacher, instead of saying something along the lines of 'You know Gwen, you should believe what your mother tells you.' said 'You know Gwen, it's true.'

On the face of it Inter High seems like a good idea, providing the National Curriculum through the Internet. I wondered if this might provide a good transition while we found our feet and found schools for the girls which we would all be happy about. Then I took a look at the website and discovered that it is an attempt to be a carbon copy of a school as far as the technology allows.

The virtual classroom does not simply show who is in the room but there are icons for each expected person with present or absent marked above them. Pupils turn up for timetabled online classes in the morning and are expected to spend their afternoons doing homework. The staff are presented entirely in terms of their formal qualifications and nothing else. This is extracted from the description of the pastoral care system:

To enable informal communication between pupils, discussion boards will be set up for year groups so that pupils may support each other in terms of help with work ideas or social discussions. These boards will be monitored by staff of Inter High School to ensure correct usage and access will be restricted.
Parents / guardians have an important role in pupil support because pupils will be working on line from home. A supervised discussion board will be available to parents / guardians so that they too can communicate informally with each other.
Termly reports will be given to parents so any fall off in effort can be addressed.

It amazes me that the opportunities presented by online working are not exploited and that a very 'command and control' approach has been taken. Many of the potential advantages of a home education are precluded because of this rigid attendance requirement. It seems to me that someone has simply taken the existing school model and tried to replicate it online as far as possible. This may be reassuring to the parents of potential users, who include school phobics and the disabled but it feels like a great opportunity lost to me. I am sure that it is possible to study for mainstream British exams online but I feel that it could be approached much more imaginatively.

It is a common and understandable approach to try and replicate the known but the more rewarding approach would surely have been to start from the opportunities offered by the online, collaborative, inter-cultural environment.

This is a real dilemma which I have had to deal with in my teacher training sessions. People are more reassured to see their familiar routines translated to the online environment (such as grammar exercises) rather than asking the question, What does this environment allow me to do which I could not do before?

I keep seeing the problems inherent in our efforts to create communities of practice and my project partners often have to work hard to get me to see the bright side. And then I come across something like this http://www.jarche.com/node/682 in which Bill Bruck is quoted as saying that 90% of the communities he tries to start fail. Actually I find that quite cheering since it means that I won't feel quite so bad if our efforts come to nothing. Food for thought

Thanks to Ben for alerting me to the Opera Mini browser which transforms web pages into pages readable on a mobile phone. I was beginning to think that I might need to sign up to something like Winksite and make special mobile enabled websites but now it seems that is unnecessary. I tested my own website with the preview function on the main Opera browser (shift F11) and the results are great. I am exploring the possibility of using podcasting in language learning and this makes mobile learning opportunities even more practical.

I was involved in an EU, Leaonardo project, VOCA, which was about transforming vocational training into blended learning for the benefit of the disabled. One of the products was a guide to e-learning which I finished just before Christmas and this is now freely available and can be downloaded here.

It is not the way I would recommend as a first choice but this story from the BBC about an American who learned Welsh almost exclusively through their online courses is very heartening and encouraging.

It lacks one of the key ingredients which I keep banging on about when asked about effective language learning and that is interaction. But I think the key ingredient in this case was motivation.

It particularly demonstrates what can be achieved when one wants to learn a lesser spoken language such as Welsh for which there are not that many traditional resources available especially outside of Wales and the UK.

An example of consensus processes in everyday life. 

A couple of weeks ago, just before half term, it was decided that one of the boys in my younger daughter's class should be moved to the next class up as he was a discipline problem in his current class. This came as news to me and my daughter never mentioned the decision even though it had been announced in class amid great unrest. I only found out when the mother of the affected boy phoned me to find out what I thought about it.

The next we knew all parents in the class had been invited to a meeting to discuss the problem. Even though I am a teacher I have no experience with this age group (9 year olds) and so even as a teacher I wondered what the school expected we could contribute to the discussion.

The meeting included the class teacher (who faces the prospect of following the class for the next four years), the headmaster and the chairwoman of the Parent Teachers Association. A fundamental problem for me was understanding the true nature of the problem. The boy's mother kept saying that she didn't recognise the boy as described by the school and there was talk of bad chemistry between the teacher and the mother affecting the relationship between the teacher and the boy.  I don't think that I was the only one confused by the nature of the problem as there were several suggestions relating to the class needing to be observed. But everyone recognised that as soon as a third party enters the room the behaviour of the class is affected. The headmaster had already tried this as had the mother.

It was a heated discussion though everyone remained in control and was doing their best to be constructive. One of the parents voiced what must have been a common concern stating 'I wouldn't come to ask you to solve a problem at my place of work so why can't you come up with solutions yourself?' Another parent voiced what must have been another common concern when she said 'When I heard about this, I wondered if my son would be next to be moved.'

The general feeling though was that the boy 'belonged' in that class and that everything should be done to try and keep him in that class.

From my point of view the discussion was rather negative in that it was mainly focussed on what sanctions could be applied for misbehaviour. The teacher felt that she lacked sanctions since we had voted to stop a system of bad behaviour detentions at a previous parents meeting last year. The prospect of the meeting had made me dig into the issue of school discipline a little and what I emerged with was two main points.

1. Sanctions need to be tempered with positive reinforcement.

2. It is important for a whole school policy so that the children experience consistent discipline (in spite of the fact that Danish children keep the same teacher throughout their school career, they still have cross class, cross year activities).

There was positive reinforcement but the only thing that got reported to parents under the old and proposed new systems was going to be the transgressions.

So this was my contribution to the meeting even though it must have seemed a little wet and liberal when they were looking for suitable sanctions.

When I got home I was still wondering what the point of the meeting was. In the end I came to the conclusion that the headmaster had realised that all the parents were discussing this among themselves and he just wanted an opportunity to clear the air with us all in the same room together and to show that the school were doing something to tackle the problem. The turnout was pretty good (about 70-80% of the pupils represented). So he probably achieved his aim. Plus we agreed to bring back the bad behaviour detentions. I also think they agreed to look into reporting good behaviour back to parents. I'll have to wait and see on that one as I can't always rely on understanding 100% of the Danish I hear.

My only point of comparison is with the UK but I have never been a parent in the UK. I have a feeling that things would have happened very differently. More formal and without the involvement of all the other parents.

I have been working with virtual presentation tools for over three years now and can easily forget that this is not normal for most people. My husband has stood by (his role being to keep me awake) and watched in wonder as I get up at 3 in the morning and give a virtual presentation in Australia while still in my night clothes (no video link thank goodness) and has often remarked that they should make more use of these tools in his world.

We have both been travelling extensivey, especially in the last year, in connection with our jobs and so the lure of a workshop in Vancouver, Canada was not that great for him this time round and yet he didn't want to let his colleagues down. And so he decided that now it was time to use these wonderful virtual meeting tools.

To my surprise the Canadians were just as unfamiliar with these tools and so the set-up was very carefully explained and planned. Friday was the big day and in the end nerve failed somewhat and they went for a hybrid solution whereby the Canadians were clicking through my husband's Powerpoint while he talked through the virtual presentation tool, Horizon.

This was partly because my husband likes to give presentations with very high quality graphics and the virtual meeting room took a long time to process them even after he had removed the animations.

Virtual meetings are never as satisfying as face to face but the Canadians were able to engage my husband in a dialogue about his topic in a live forum afterwards. He also saved himself a week away from home as well as jetlag just one week before he is himself due to host a big conference.

So I think everyone was reasonably happy and so the meme spreads that this is a viable alternative to face to face meetings if the need arises.

We need to do a little internal marketing and dissemination here at my institution. The others see us travelling often to exotic places and begin to wonder what it is all for. 'What do the teachers look at?' I asked our IT department. The reply was the school's LMS which is Fronter. In our little outpost we use Moodle so Fronter is unknown territory for me.

The idea is that I should collate the usable results from our projects so that our colleagues in the main school can have free access to them. So far I have only seen Fronter as a very occasional user. And now as an active contributor I find it entirely lacking in appeal. The layout is nothing more than a filing cabinet which users are invited to peruse with only the file names as a way of revealing what the content may be. There is no opportunity to give users a reason to click.

There is an opportunity to add a more detailed description to each document but the IT person told me that users very rarely consult this as it needs an active click to see the details. So the only alternative to 'sell' the content is-to-have-very-long-descriptive-file-names.

I will be very interested to see how many 'reads' this leads to.