I think I am more than busy enough but that hasn't stopped me from being persuaded to sign up to a webcasting course at the Webcast Academy. part of the Worldbridges set up. And of course it doesn't stop there. The best way to learn is to do it and so I am now seriously considering my first webcast as part of our regular Absolutely Intercultural podcast slots sometime in mid-December.

Dare I mention that there are only a few days left before voting for the Best of Blogs award closes? So still time to give a vote to your favourite podcast which must be ABsolutely Intercultural (at least out of the ten nominees!).

New organisation, new name, new boss. All this has to lead to changes and it has. We now meet once a week first thing on a Friday morning and I must say this makes me feel much more well-informed about what my colleagues are doing and what is going on generally. Two weeks ago it was suggested that we should sing a song and that is now part of the ritual. We use the standard Danish songbook which has just been updated and now includes at least one Beatles song.

Tomorrow at 12 noon GMT we are offering a live online session on the basics of mentoring led by Connie Friman of Grow2 and president elect of the Nordic chapter of the International Coaching Federation. I had hoped that I could use Dimdim but it is not interactive enough yet (though it looks as though it soon will be). So I have chosen Flashmeeting and am hoping that it performs well tomorrow.

The recording will then form part of the template for a mentor training course which we are developing as part of the VOCA2 project. There are a few vacant places if anyone cares to mail me for the URL of the meeting.

At my recent annual staff development session we agreed that I should undertake some training relevant to project management. The question now is what is best. I could go for a quick 1-3 day course giving me the basics or I could go for something a little more involved which gives me some certification. I have researched a little into what is available and it seems that there is an accepted certification called Prince2 which I should consider. My only worry at this stage is that this is somehow linked to specific software and that I may be buying expertise in running the software rather than general project management expertise. Since I have since seen Prince2 as a requirement in some recent job adverts, this is an additional sign that this certification may be worth having.

In last week's free newspaper there must have been a gap they couldn't fill because there was an article based on figures from the Danish Statistical Office; not a common occurrence. But the topic was completely Scandinavian and some of the figures surprised me. The piece concerned how flexible employers were in allowing flexible working time to fit in with family commitments; for which read caring for children in one form or another.

The first surprise was that men enjoy more flexibility (74%) than women (63%); the second surprise for me was that the figures were so high. I know that the Scandinavian nations are generally good at integrating family life with worklife but I hadn't realised how good the figures were. The final surprise was that the private sector at 77% for men and 75% for women performs much better than the public sector where about 67% of men and only 50% of women have that flexibility. So much for the public sector leading by example.

There has been a buzz about Second Life http://secondlife.com/ and its potential for education recently. It has taken me a long time to try it out because most of the computers I use are not powerful enough to run it (first warning signal). Once there, I had a specific destination in mind, Edunation, an educational island set up by the Consultants E http://www.theconsultants-e.com/ and went there without delay as there was a scheduled meeting there. Perhaps that was a mistake but I only discovered later that I should have spent some time on the Help Island one lands on initially to learn about how SL works. So I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to get to my final destination (second warning signal). In fact I never made it to the real meeting and was distracted by a water cooler conversation I stumbled across with some people I know. In discussions afterwards it was suggested that we need to take a social learning view of our time in SL and organise help in a more structured and open way so that people don't get lost.

So what is the potential for learning activities in SL? I must obviously give it more time but I have heard of a couple of universities which have set up shop in SL to deliver learning, plus there is an initiative to integrate Moodle with SL, the SLOODLE (inevitably) project http://www.sloodle.com/ I have seen pictures of a virtual classroom where students can pick up their assignments which seems to kind of miss the point to me but others seem to recognise this http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/2006/08/19/postcards-from-northern-illinois-university/ and are starting to think of more innovative approaches.

I have a feeling that SL or something like it is part of the future of learning but that for the time being it may be limited to an elite of the digitally rich and savvy. And I will continue to explore it.

In our latest Absolutely Intercultural show, ( http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com) listeners may be surprised to hear that the UK has a good balance between work and home life. Of course this all depends on your starting point and this view is put forward by a visiting systems engineer from India who also found the British polite and caring. The show also features the stark difference between the British and Danish educational sytems. When Tommy Søholm, a Dane on a 3 year assignment in the UK, took his 3 children to the local school he only expected the two older ones to be enrolled and was most surprised that his four year old should be eligible also. So four year old Matthias went from playing all day in a sandpit at the kindergarten to sitting at a desk doing serious work dressed in his school uniform.