The workers of an essential service are on strike all over Denmark and it is creating chaos. Some years ago a lorry driver's strike was pretty disruptive especially for Christams trees to the Germans and beer to the Danes but this strike arguably hits at something even more fundamental. It is a strike of childminders and kindergarten staff and it is wreaking havoc.

The child care system is pretty much embedded into the Danish  social system so this strike is hitting hard since in most families, both parents go out to work as do the grandparents. Many people are using their holiday entitlement to look after their children but this is not a sustainable option in the longterm.

A majority of the parents actually support the strike and have demonstrated against the Government which is proposing the severe cuts against which the child care staff are protesting. The strikes are also spreading to the schools and I have had to stay home already one day to look after my children due to a teacher strike. I am lucky that unless I have a meeting scheduled I can pretty much have just as effective a working day at home as at work.

The theme of the latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural is internships with pieces on exchange studies and internships in China, Germany and Sweden. When we first planned the podcast we envisaged that the topic of internships would dominate but still we have managed to get to episode 15 before giving them due prominence.

I think the focus would be too narrow if we concentrated solely on internship aspects but even so I think we can expect more on this topic in coming episodes. Comments are welcome either here or on the podcast blog.

In the Nordic Voice project we were (let's be honest) trying to replicate the Webheads effect in the Nordic region. The aim was to draw Nordic language teachers into learning more about applying ICT in their teaching to make use of the rich repository of resources and possibilities for communication which exist there. But it never really worked - at least not in the way we had intended.

We started with an online conference in November 2005 to create a kernel of interested language teachers and the idea was that the conversation would continue in 2006 to become a self-sustaining community.

So I learned a great deal about putting on an online conference and in particular about the amount of back-up support which is needed to carry it through. However this did not follow through into a continued conversation as planned despite the best efforts of the project group based in Denmark, Iceland and Norway. We offered some free online training sessions during 2006 to try and stimulate an ongoing dialogue but again this failed to ignite sustained interest, even though the individual events were successful in their own right.

So our next strategy was to inaugurate a competition to find the best example of the use of ICT in Nordic language teaching. We weren't looking for an all-singing all-dancing technically sophisticated example but more for instances of where classes had been truely inspired by the use of ICT.

We eventually found our two winners, one in Norway and one in Sweden and we were delighted when both winners, quite independently of each other, announced to us that their iPod prizes would be used in further competitions in their classes. Both winners do not teach traditional language classes, the one, improving language through media studies and the other working with students with learning difficulties and both found their students' motivation really flowered when they gave them the opportunity to podcast. The fact of winning also generated extra publicity for our project so it looks as though the competition idea was an inspired one in the end.

We were very grateful for the financial support of the Nordic Council of Ministers to try out our ideas. But just because the money has run out doesn't mean that we will abandon the project completely. Our second Danish partner Susanne Nyrop has announced that she will continue to look after the community and she and I have also decided to try and carry on some of our pædagogic conversations in the community so that it lives on until other members decide to take it in a different direction.

 

I found this an interesting commentary on current everyday culture. My daughter's class are preparing a theatrical sketch for the forthcoming school festival. The class chose a comedy piece set in a western genre. All the students have parts but they also have other tasks related to the production. My daughter chose to work on costumes and when she asked what sort of clothes people wore, her teacher told her to watch a western.

I hadn't realised that the genre was entirely missing from my daughter's life. Even though I have never been a fan, I could certainly not avoid it as a child but for my daughter cowboys and Indians seems to have passed her by. So I turned to the TCM channel reasoning that a channel specialising in old movies was bound to show a western every now and then. We found 'Ride the High Country' from 1962 which depicts the western era in a more than usually realistic way but also includes the obligatory saloon bar fights and shoot outs.

Mission accomplished! Wardrobe mistress should be able to fulfil her obligations by Thursday evening.

I am currently investigating online conferencing systems. We have been using these systems at my institution for several years but the one we use requires a fairly hefty download and things do not always work optimally and for this we pay a substantial amount of money.

So now I am looking for something else and one of the primary requirements is that it should be browser-based so that participants at least (if not the presenters or meeting chairs) find it as easy to attend an online meeting as it is to surf the internet.

But here's the rub. Most, if not all, of the browser-based online conferencing systems I have found so far are flash based and since I work a lot with disabled groups I need to be aware of accessibility issues. And as far as I can find out, Flash is not at all accessible to people with certain disabilities.

Our current system is partly accessible but I don't think that accessibility is one of its key features. I think that I know that the people I want to hold online meetings with currently WILL be able to acccess a browser-based flash page so I now face a minor dilemma of whether to go ahead with a Flash based conferencing system because I need one or do I do without online conferencing completely because there is currently no accessible version? Obviously I favour the former in the hope that Adobe will soon take accessibility seriously so that Flash becomes accessible for all.

There are different sorts of accessibility. Our current system is not accessible for many because of its technical complexity. A Flash browser-based system would instantly be much more accessible to the able-bodied but still has problems for the disabled.

The systems I am looking at include Dimdim, Flashmeeting, Webhuddle, and Hear Me.

'All rights reversed.
All lefts converted to rights and exported to Japan. '

Just found this at the bottom of an online recipe. Is this possible? Can copylefts be converted into copyrights or have I misunderstood the whole thing?

We have made it into the top ten of the Best Podcast category of the BOB Awards!  To have a chance of winning we need votes from the jury, who are inaccessible to us, and our listeners, that is you, we hope. 

If you have been listening to our Absolutely Intercultural podcast at www.absolutely-intercultural.com and maybe have even used it as learning material then please consider voting for us in the BOB (Best of Blog) Awards. Please go to BOB Awards,where you can vote for our show. Go to the best podcast section and check the Absolutely Intercultural line. There you'll be asked to type in your name, your email-address and a security code, and then you can click on "Send" to cast your vote. That's it!

The latest show was released last Friday and features my family, my bilingual children talking about how they live in two languages, my brother talking about the value of two internships he did in France nearly 20 years ago and my husband who experienced one of those incomprehensible intercultural moments at a conference down the road from here in Germany.

Went to a seminar today to learn more about applying for Grundtvig projects and Nordplus Voksen from the Nordic Council of Ministers. Having also recently attended a course on applying for FP7 funds I can see that the EU is responding to complaints about paperwork by being less demanding. This should certainly ease the administrative burden but project monies are still not a way of getting rich!

Specifically relating to Grundtvig, it is good to see the concept of life-long learning percolating through in a practical way.

Since we have not got round to installing Dimdim, at http://www.dimdim.com the online conferencing system, on our server I have been waiting and waiting for the opportunity to try it out. Finally that opportunity came today in a meeting hosted by one of the founders of Dimdim, Sundar Subramanian as one of the events of Moira Hunter's open weekend, a session offered by the Knowplace people in Canada. Find them at http://knowplace.ca/moodle/index.php There is still time to enroll for this weekends Weblearning with the Human Touch Open Weekend when more trial Dimdim sessions are planned. The session went very well considering that I chose to work on my slowest computer. I was receiving audio and video from the presenter. The audio quality was good apart from breaking up on screen transitions (a common problem with online conferencing but one which Dimdim are hoping to overcome). The audio today was one way only but in the upcoming beta version which they hope to release before the end of the year, there will be two way audio and this would be a basic requirement for me. We were able to share applications and co-browse as well as text chat and there will be an archive of the session. During the session I discovered that there are plans to make dimdim accessible to those with little bandwidth. This will be really useful for one of the projects which our institution is partnering where they intend to use Moodle to disseminate technical knowledge in Asian and African countries. Integration of Dimdim with Moodle is well underway so it seems like an ideal solution. For a balancing post on how online conferencing can go wrong see Salvor's post from yesterday at http://elgg.net/salvor/weblog/135741.html No sophisticated links in this post because the WISIWYG editor seems to have disappeared and I'm too lazy to look up the html.

Just picked up on this movie detailing the Perfect Storm that is building in education from George Siemens' blog.

George Siemens blog http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/
The Movie http://nostatic.com/work/diyTimed-web.mov

A reason for spending time on presentations such as this is that I am investigating ideas for projects in informal learning.

It made me smile to read this breathless account of the first outdoor nursery in Scotland http://education.guardian.co.uk/earlyyears/story/0,,1934990,00.html?gus
and I was not surprised to find out that the idea was inspired by similar institutions in Norway. Here in Denmark many parents have an outdoor nursery as one of their childcare choices. As the article notes regarding Norway so it is in Denmark that the outdoors plays a much more important role in all levels of education than it seems to in Britain and even though my daughters have not attended one of these outdoor kindergartens they have still had huge amounts of time outdoors doing all manner of activities. Up until age 9 they had 'Outdoor life' as a regular timetabled session at school.

It doesn't even have to be timetabled. I remember vividly when my husband chatted to the class teacher one morning telling her that he had just seen a flock of rather colourful birds in a garden near the school (waxwings i think they were) and when our daughter came home that day she told us that the whole class had gone out to see these birds.


It helps that the climate of risk assessment is not so strong here and my daughters have been certificated in their use of penknives, are trusted to start bonfires, have made their own stone age tools and so on. One thing you often hear here is 'There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.'