In the latest Absolutely Intercultural show there is a chance to win a free trip to Germany. Naturally there are a few ifs and buts. The main ones are that you must live in Europe (otherwise we will find an alternative prize of equivalent value) and secondly that during your visit you will host one of our shows. How do you win? Very simple. Just add yourself to our Frappr map which is on our blog at http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com (could be at the bottom of the very long page depending on your browser) and if you are the hundredth person to do so then you will get the prize.

Other reasons to listen to the latest show are to hear the differing views of student life from Finland to Hungary and to hear about the internship experience of a German who worked for WHO in Denmark

Everybody is talking about Second Life at the moment and I hope to explore it further in the not too distant future. But I have just found an alternative virtual world which is billed as a 3D blog. Developed by a French company and as far as I can see, completely in French, MyBlog3D actually runs on my laptop, which is more than Second Life does. Your 3D blog is your private space which you can arrange and decorate how you like and you can populate it with pictures, videos, podcasts and documents. You can invite friends in and there seems to be strong communicative support with instant messaging and Voip. One of the big draws seems to be the opportunity to play multi-user games such as Paintball. It is all free but as I said it is all in French. Another drawback for me and half the world's population is that there are no female avatars. Not sure an American or even British, company could have got away with this!

I am really bowled over that Absolutely Intercultural has been nominated and has made it into the final 4 in the Best audio or visual blog of the Edublogs awards. The company we keep in that category and across all the categories is so exalted that I am sure that I will be recommending many of the other nominees as worthy of attention for the participants in our forthcoming Experience Based Learning teacher training courses being run by my institution.

As is traditional with these awards, the results depend on internet voting so I am once again asking you to take half a minute of your time to go over and vote for us if you find our material beneficial.

Experience-based learning is the English title of an EU Social Fund project beginning now to disseminate ways of bringing the outside world into the classroom. Our participants will be teachers from schools in the local area and we will be running taster sessions at the beginning of 2007 and will be following up with more in-depth workshops according to expressed interests in the late spring.

Our institution is taking a lead on the pedagogical content of the sessions and I have taken the view that it should be learning by doing. So I have set up a wiki at http://experience.pbwiki.com which I hope that participants will contribute to in the course of the next few months to create their own dynamic course textbook. If for no other reason, my poor written Danish should galvanise them into finding the edit button. At least that is the plan and the reason why I have not had any of my written Danish edited or checked as I normally do when my Danish is destined for the public domain.

I shall shortly also be setting up a group blog either in elgg or in edublogs on which I hope participants will be able to cut their teeth by adding comments and ultimately joining in the conversation.

One challenge has been finding Danish interfaced tools to work with. Pbwiki has a Danish interface and I know that there will be one for elgg eventually. Since the project remit is for teachers of all subjects rather than just teachers of languages then this issue is important.

These free online courses have been a major contributor to my professional development over the past 4 years or so. Each year there are new topics as well as old favorites and I have a hard job limiting myself to the recomménded two course maximum since it all sounds so interesting. Quite apart from the content is the opportunity to make worldwide contact with people of like mind. The sessions are aimed at teachers of English but some really cut across subject boundaries and I have always found the moderators very welcoming of diverse participant backgrounds.

I will definitely be recommending these courses to my forthcoming participants in our own Experience-based learning sessions.

Tonight I am plunging into deep waters and hosting a live session of Absolutely Intercultural which will be webcast through Worldbridges. I have been learning how to webcast over the last few weeks and I have to say that it is the most intensive multi-tasking ever. You need to actively monitor aproximately 5 open windows simultaneously while concentrating on the dialogue and not being distracted by hearing your voice echoed back at you through the audio repeater. Therefore I am extremely grateful that Jeff Lebow from Worldbridges will be handling some of the technicalities for me.

Wish me luck!

Well we did it! The Absolutely Intercultural podcast won the Edublog Award in the category best audio or visual blog. I tuned into the live webcast award ceremony literally the moment it was announced and I was really chuffed. Unfortunately, and not too impressively for an audio award winner, I was literally speechless as my audio settings were not right so I could not make a thank you speech until Jeff Lebow from World Bridges used the good old telephone to ring me up.

More than anything I am honoured to be in such august company as Chris Sessums for Best Individual Blog right here on elgg, Teresa Almeida d'Eca for Best Teacher Blog and Nancy White for Best Research Paper, not to mention last year's winners.

Recognition like this certainly spurs us on to continue and try to do even better in the future.

I am preparing for a series of workshops for teachers on the theme of experience based learning in the new year. To that end I am creating a wiki at http://experience.pbwiki.com and a blog here on elgg. I know from previous experience that I have to reduce the barriers to collaboration to the absolute minimum and therefore I changed my settings here in elgg to allow anyone to post comments. Within less than 24 hours I had spam on my own blog again. So the drawbridge has been raised once again. It would be nice if the settings for the community and my personal blog could be separated and I would make a plea for attention to be paid to this problem. Even I am reluctant to join a blog system simply in order to leave a comment. So I understand that teachers with little experience of using blogs will be even less inclined to go through a sign up procedure just to humour me.

It is strange that in the past two weeks I have set up learning spaces for two different groups and have decided on two different solutions for each of them. I guess the reason is that the needs of each group are very different.

The first group will be a constantly turning over group of teachers attending one off training days (and if we are lucky signing up for an additional day with more intensive focus on some chosen areas). For them I have chosen to work with an elgg community blog and a pbwiki to hold the resource collection.

The second group will be an internal group of staff from our institution practising their English and for them I initially went for an edublog with free wikispace. But then I decided that external contacts will not be so important for this group so I have decided to present the course within our own Moodle and retain the wikispace for the product of their course.

Coming so soon one after the other, these decisions seemed to me perverse and illogical at first. Why isn't there one best solution? But this made me realise that the needs of each group were quite different.

Factors which affected my decision include the following:

For my internal course my approach will be for participants to compile an audio book of hints, tips and case studies regarding telephone and presentation technique. They will not need so much external contact and I should show that, having persuaded my management that we could use Moodle that I am prepared to use it. In fact I do use it for many other purposes. Not only that, but by using the Moodle as course participants, this may act as professional development in its use for those of the participants who are also teachers. The wikispaces which came free with the edublogs blog (which is now mostly redundant) will be useful because the allowable upload limit is much more generous than with pbwiki. If the participants do indeed produce an audio book as I intend then the 10 Mb offered by pbwiki would have been quickly used up. Finally I have chosen to make the wikispace private at least in the initial stages because I now have long experience of the unwillingness of my Danish colleagues to go public. I am hoping that if they are proud enough of their final product that I can persuade them to go public at the end of the course.

For my training days, part of the aim is to create a local community of teachers hence the elgg community makes sense and the resource collection will be mostly text based and access to pbwiki seems to be rather easier than for wikispaces.