The best news as far as elgg is concerned is that a new anti-spam feature has been incorporated into the blog. I really hope this works. I last opened my blog to external comments not so very long ago and accumulated spam almost immediately. This is very timely if it works since my teacher training sessions begin on January 5 when I hope to convince at least some of my participants to start blogs.

I don't think that the news has been widely publicised though. I stumbled on it by accident.

The Nordic languages are supposed to be inter-intelligible ie if you speak one, you can understand the others but I have just seen evidence that this may not be so, twice this evening. The first was in a consumer program explaining why Danes are flocking across the sea to live in Sweden while commuting to Copenhagen (much cheaper in Sweden) but the Danish couple who were interviewed did mention that things sometimes got to the stage where they had to use sign language. 

The second was a TV ad where a Danish tour company is using a series of spots playing on this supposed fact of inter-intelligibility. All you need to know is that the tour leader is Swedish and the tourists are Danish and the Danes are saying at the end 'Er.. could you repeat that... from after you said hello?'

I have just learned about the existence of a new type of IT qualification called the INGOTS. I got my computer driving licence the ECDL in the late nineties and went on to teach it, or more exactly to supervise students working through the prepared materials leading to the online multiple choice tests which determined whether you were awarded the so-called licence or not. I worked alone and never felt the need to contact anybody about any aspect of the ECDL. It was completely mechanical and I could usually work things out for myself.

The INGOTS by contrast do seem to be a very great improvement in that they highlight those areas of IT which require reflection such as appropriate use, copyright, online behaviour and so on. I am very impressed and am intrigued to see whether they will catch on in the UK, their country of origin as far as I can see, and further afield in Europe and beyond which seems to be the intended objective.

I have been giving this issue a lot of thought recently as I prepare to go out to various institutions under the Experience based Learning project. Reservations abound about the Web 2.0 tools I would like to champion amongst other things and I have a gut feeling that this is over-reaction. Two posts in the last week make enormous sense to me and will furnish me with a few counter-arguments if the anticipated objections are voiced.

The first post is from Pete Reilly who has dug up a wealth of statistics to show how insignificant the threat of online predation is in the US. Less than 1% of sex abuse is due to online strangers predation. Is there any reason to suppose that the trends are significantly different here in Europe?

The second is from David Warlick's blog looking at Social Networking according to the results of a recent Pew Internet Report which found that 55% of young people use social networking tools and of those 66% do not allow their information to be made public outside of their known friend's network.

I don't think that this information means that the problem is not a real one but I do think that it puts the level of risk into perspective. I would advise education about the potential for problems rather than banning.

Thanks to Scott Macleod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog for alerting me to these two.

On Monday I start teaching an English course with SCA Denmark employees and today I and my colleagues, who will be leading different courses, had a workplace visit. It was nice to be guided by an enthusiast who has seen enormous change both in the factory we were visiting and in the industry of packaging in general and who has a vision for the future. I am sure that the four hours spent there today will be valuable in helping me to develop the necessary activities for the group starting Monday.

As part of my teaching in the last few years I have visited several factories here in Denmark and am always impressed by the cleanliness and orderliness. I recall being present when a delegation of foreign students were being shown round a printers here in Grenaa some years ago. This was the culmination of a course for the employees of the printers, to take charge of the guided tour of the group arranged by the local business polytechnic. One of the visiting students was british and at one point in the tour, he took me aside, as a fellow Brit, and asked me whether the company had cleaned and tidied up specially for the visit. The answer of course was no, it was always this tidy.

This is in stark contrast to for example the Jaguar factory in the Midlands in the UK which I took my students to visit about 15 years ago. There the windows were dirty and broken and the weather just whistled through. I remember being struck by the mismatch between the luxury image of the brand and the conditions in which the cars were made.

In Britain I remember being impressed as we walked over a river of molten metal in a cable factory. That feeling of awe is quite well reproduced in the Magna Adventure centre in Rotherham, an old steelworks. While here in Denmark I have visited aluminium extrusion, windturbine, aircraft electronic, yeast and alcohol factories.

Today I was impressed by the level of automation which is ongoing and astounded by some of the jobs which are still done by hand, such as sticking labels. The gender divide was also very apparent with the slightly more technical jobs being done by the men and the more mechanical jobs being done by the women.

The latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural includes the third and final part of my conversation with Mark Anderson in Pretoria, South Africa in which he relates the recent history of apratheid in his country and the ingrained attitudes it led to. He also mentioned the controversial idea that the Zulu culture may be a manufactured one of recent origin.

Also I was able to talk with Kate from Poland who came to Grenaa on a teaching observation stint and she talks about some of the strengths of the Polish educational system as well as identifying what she is taking back with her from Denmark.

I have chosen to use pbwiki over wikispaces in the Experience Based Learning project which is starting up here in our local area. I have been hearing for weeks now that the off-putting 'classic' editor was about to be replaced by a 'point and click' editor from amongst others Ewan MacIntosh but it never seemed to come to my pbwiki. So I have gone hunting and have now discovered how to activate this much more user-friendly editor (akin to the one used here in elgg).

The information was buried in a community forum and I hope that in altering my settings this will be the editor which all users see when they try to use the wiki. I also had trouble discovering how the tagging function worked and finally had to ask a question in the forum to discover the secret.

So pbwiki may be great but I for one need more accesible information on how to use it.

One of the many things I have to familiarise myself with is interactive whiteboards. This has been difficult in the absence of one in my day to day work environment. However today I arranged a one to one introduction and finally understood why it has been so difficult to get hard guidance about these tools. I am sold and can see that they have masses of potential but I can also see that they are something that one needs to get used to over time with use and experience. I can now see that my question 'What does an interactive whiteboard do?' was as unanswerable as 'What does a computer do?' The answers are far too wide and I guess only limited by human ingenuity.

I still don't know however if my work environment is going to include such a tool any time soon. I feel that it is not worth my while investing a lot of time in familiarisation until it becomes an everyday tool.

Update: A couple of days after I had my introduction to smartboards, my daughter met her first one at school. They were in the classroom where the new interactive board has been placed and expressed curiosity in this new piece of kit. So the headteacher obliged and then invited the students to have a go. Her verdict? Cool!

The latest episode of our podcast Absolutely Intercultural includes a great deal about the experience of bilingualism. This is close to my heart as I was brought up almost bilingually with a French mother and a British father, living in Britain and our two daughters now live in yet another bilingual situation with English speaking parents at home and an otherwise Danish life.

I have been surprised at how many people (monoglots usually) express doubts that anyone can master more than one language successfully but research, such as here, seems to be bearing out my point of view. I was really taken aback some years ago when a participant in one of my English classes told me that I was not doing my children any good by using English in the home. How, I wondered (silently to myself), were they supposed to communicate with their family?

The word bilingual itself is also misused in Denmark as far as my not so good Danish can inform me. The word for bilingual in Danish is tosprogede meaning literally two-languaged and yet the word is used to describe immigrant children in school when the point the writer wants to make is that these children are a problem because they haven't mastered Danish. If they were truely tosprogede there would be no problem.

I feel a rant coming on in the next show which I will host.