At about three days notice I have picked up some English teaching up at the main part of the college. In fact the arrangement is that I will share the teaching load with a colleague as we both travel due to our project activities and need to honour our commitments. But between us we can just about manage to cover the required hours.

I am a great believer in 'keeping my hand in' by doing some teaching and outwardly this should be a great opportunity to try out lots of new things. But in fact the situation is not ideal. The classes we are covering have suffered a lot of absence by their designated teacher as her illness developed over the year. They have had countless substitute teachers and they are in no mood to go along with whacky experiments like trying to convince them that speaking English can be fun.

I have to tread carefully. Yesterday I was going over a translation they had done a while ago and had nobody to hand it in to. I had printed it on a transparency and got into trouble. 'It is difficult to read. We usually have each sentence on a separate line...' I did try to take one tiny step by asking them to review their translation and pick out one topic we should work on in class to improve their language skills. A little step towards learner autonomy and taking responsibility for their own learning but I could see that I was asking too much and very few of them followed my instructions.

I suspect that they don't even use dictionaries. They are used to highly controlled texts which someone has pre-digested for them and added a glossary. The reaction when meeting a new word not in the glossary is irritation. We found that out in our first session when we presented them with a short easy text which we had found but which had no glossary.

So I can see that there needs to be a period of trust building before we attempt to step outside the paradigm.

 I have been using Elgg for some months and suddenly realised I had never tried to insert a picture before. Now I have cracked it but I think that the Yahoo 360 blog option is the easiest way of doing it (as long as you always want the picture to appear at the top of your post). However this picture is too long and I don't know how to adjust this.

This picture is the one I used to trigger thoughts on unique aspects of different cultures. I judge this picture to be typically Scandinavian and the challenge for the assembled teachers in our inter-cultural course held in León, Spain last week was to think of similar representative images for their own culture. The interesting part comes afterwards when analysing why the picture is unique.

 

 The project is Teaching Culture!, a Grundtvig EU project in which we are developing a course to increase the cultural awareness of teachers of adults in their everyday practice.

Added 25/3/06: Although I can see the picture in its distorted form, it appears that not everybody can. I don't understand why. But this is obviously not the way to  go.

This is my second attempt to post a picture to my elgg blog. It is the same picture as I tried last time. I am sure that this time it is going to work but am a little peeved that this seems to be the only way to post pictures. Once again I am being forced to join the big boys because of peer pressure! That is why I now have a Flickr account and a deli.cio.us account only so that I could join in the activities of various recent online courses.



The picture by the way I reckon is a typical Scandinavian scene. I have a feeling that this is not the sort of thing you commonly see on the slopes of Val d'Isere. My challenge to my students is what picture would you choose as your 'Only in ...' picture to represent your culture? The interesting part is explaining your choice of picture.

This picture shows what our students see for their English course. My point of comparison would be a modern textbook which usually tries to be attractive in layout and content. Perhaps there is a whole wreck of features I could use to make it more attractive. I have been thrown into using Fronter with no preparation. Otherwise I find this completely unappealing for students. It is simply a list of homework.

I have been back for a week from the residential element of our pilot teacher training course. It is billed as an intensive week and that it certainly was. The teaching culture project is piloting a blended learning course for European teachers in adult education which seeks to raise awareness of inter-cultural issues in the classroom. We ran the first pilot last year and adpated the second round in the light of feedback from the first round.

This second residential took place in León in northern Spain. This is an attractive old town sufficiently off the beaten tourist track to provide a real inter-cultural experience for our participants. The idea is to schedule class based activities in the morning and external activities in the afternoon during which the participants can get a taste of what life in León is really like. These included introductory lessons in Spanish or Leonnaise for those who knew some Spanish and a treasure hunt through the town where participants were expected to consult locals if they got stuck. One of these activities was a job shadowing afternoon which went down very well. This was partly due to the fact that the organisers chose the people to be shadowed very carefully to match the interests of the participants.

For once I took my family with me and even my two daughters had an inter-cultural experience by spending a couple of hours in one of the Spanish schools where the pupils practised their English by interviewing them about Denmark. My elder daughter found the Spanish class just as noisy as her class in Denmark so no improvement there!

The second round has led to much more discussion among the participants than the first round and the dilemma now is to try and attribute some reasons for this.

Was it because we made some changes, avoiding the long European summer holiday period for example and giving the online module a story metaphor so that participants could see more easily how the different units connected to each other?

Could it be that we tutors were more familiar with the course tools and that that confidence communicated itself to the participants?

Could the first group of language teachers have been less willing to discuss things online than a group of teachers of other subjects? (I find this one difficult to believe).

Or is it simply due to the different personalities of the participants in each round?

The problem is that the funding allowed us to try two rounds and we will not have the opportunity to make more trials unless we offer the course on a fully commercial basis. It would be nice to believe that there is a causal relationship between the observed improvements and the adjustments we made though.

Parallel to the teaching sessions the project partners held project meetings to assess progress and make future plans.

I have just attended this 2 day conference which showcases IT work in Denmark and tries to foster partnershps between research institutions and businesses. http://www.summit06.dk/

Of particular interest to me were the activities of Knowledge Lab Denmark at http://www.knowledgelab.dk/english who have done some interesting work on mobile learning and pervasive gaming. The work of ISIS in Aarhus was also interesting at http://www.interactivespaces.net/ where they work on creating interactive learning environments.

Welcome to the first ever intercultural podcast. ‘Absolutely Intercultural’ is its name and, as far as we know, this is the first podcast in the world to deal with intercultural issues. We’ll be releasing a new episode every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we’ll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, looking at inter-cultural aspects of the forthcoming World Cup, asking how teachers can make use of inter-cultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. ‘Absolutely Intercultural’ won’t be so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners.

Catch it at http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com