As the recently appointed leader of a European project about mentoring who is shortly to lead the second project meeting I thought it might be worthwhile to be agreed on the definition of a mentor. Mentoring is what the project centres on and it is not my area of expertise. I will ask my project partners to give examples of mentoring from their own experience but not everyone has a mentor and still fewer are involved in structured mentoring schemes the like of which we are proposing to institute.

So then I had the brilliant idea of referring to a movie about informal mentoring which all would know and all could refer to but my big difficulty was findng such a movie. The only examples I can come up with so far are 'The Old Man and The Sea' and 'The Matrix'. It seems such a rich seam to mine that I am surprised that I cannot think of other movie examples. I am not really a movie buff so I wonder if I am missing some obvious examples.

PS. Someone has recommended The Karate Kid (19 June 2007).

I do so little these days to benefit the wider commúnity that I was very pleased to see the Irrepressible Info initiative by Amnesty International which anyone can add to their website. It is a very simple idea which could do some good and consists of replicating a snippet of text which has been censored away from the Internet elsewhere in the world. I am very happy to be able to do this very little thing if it can help in some way.

This was brought to my attention on Ewan McIntosh's blog which is always worth reading usually for information about elearning in language teaching.

As I am now project leader for a project mainly about mentoring I thought it would be a good idea to attend a one day course in the local city. The trainers have gained their experience from a project which mentors new Danish men (as recent immigrants are referred to here) to help them in obtaining and retaining employment.

It would be too much to hope to go from zero to fully fledged professional mentor in one day and many of the participants were already mentoring to a greater or lesser extent in their current jobs. So potentially the most valuable part of the course was meeting and discussing with the participants about their experiences in diverse settings.

For me the most valuable part was probably the opportunity to attempt a coaching conversation as I have never done this consciously in a professional capacity before.

I went with a much more experienced colleague and she was dissatisfied with the lack of definition of the mentor role as against the coaching role or counselling role. So this gives me an indication of what I need to work on. The intention is not that I should become a mentor myself but that I should have a deeper understanding of what it is about so that I can better coordinate the VOCA2 project I now find myself managing.

The VOCA2 project is about setting up a mentoring system to support the disabled into work. My recent trip to Lisbon, Portugal was my first as project leader. Inevitably things had slipped a little during the transition period but I felt we made good progress. Our hosts, ELO SOCIAL were an inspiring organisation full of engaged people who have built up a fantastic support system for their disabled adult children.

We were constantly reminded that the world is built for the able-bodied as our one wheel chair user was prevented from joining us time and again at restaurants, hotels and historic monuments. I could certainly sympathise with his view that it is the rest of the world that needs educating rather than him who needs a mentor to hold on to a job since he is more than competent to fulfil his employment duties.

Something I was keen to try out was links with other projects and so we have established links with the mentoring validation project in that we share a partner and we also met up with the Me, Myself and I project which was coincidentally also meeting in Lisbon at the same time.

I also could not resist the temptation to set up a meeting with a cyber-colleague who has helped me out in various e-learning activities but who, until now, I had never met. So it was that I met with Teresa Almeida d'Eca who turned out to be just as lovely in real life as she is online.

Even though it made my toes curl rather than made me laugh out loud, there was something about 'The Office' which caused instant recognition. It was translated to the US and I don't really know how successful it was there. I was interested to discover that it is currently running in France as a French series. The scripts are more or less straight translations but with some interesting cultural adaptations.

What I found most interesting was the changes that had to be made in order to adapt to the new French setting. Thus the ethnic minorities are North African rather than Caribbean. But also French office culture had to be reflected. So no nipping off to the pub after work but rather, the boss offers selected colleagues champagne in his office after hours.

There are video snippets at the TV station website. More details at the Guardian newspaper website.