In the latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural I had a discussion with Helen Keegan and Susanne Nyrop about whether entering Second Life, the virtual world, can be considered as some sort of inter-cultural experience. I think that there are many aspects of being in a virtual world which can be compared to an intercultural experience such as the decisions one makes about one's avatar (the graphic representation of myself that I use in Second Life), acceptable behaviour and gender differences.

The other feature was about a new society called B-Samfundet in Denmark campaigning to make the structure of the working day more flexible. Time and the structure of the day are often distinctive features of different cultures and in Denmark everything happens very early in the day so B-samfundet want to introduce more flexibility for those B-people who only come alive later in the day. I interviewed several of my colleagues about this and whether they were B-people or A-people. I did make one mistake though and that was to misinterpret the fact that the organisation no longer say on their website how many members they have. I took it as a bad sign that not many people had joined but found out later in a (Danish) newspaper article that in fact the total membership is up to over 3000 up from the 25 I had last seen.

Finally there was news of the upcoming conference called 'Does Culture Still Matter?' organised by the Intercultural Management Institute in Washington on March 15 and 16. We will have a roving reporter and hope to be able to include some impressions of the conference in a forthcoming podcast.

Last week I was managing a meeting of the VOCA2 project where partners in seven European countries are working on a comprehensive approach to mentoring and supporting disabled adults into work. It has been a long time since our last meeting and a great deal has happened since then. Now that we are well advanced in the process of preparing and piloting our mentor training we are finding wide differences. For example in Spain the legal framework seems comprehensive and here the VOCA2 approach is not so much new as just a different way of approaching the mentoring while in Portugal where the mentoring approach is not well known our partners there, Elo Social,  are planning an ambitious peer mentoring approach with their mentally handicapped clients. My enduring impression of that meeting will be the amazing breadth of solutions which have come from our basic common model of how the mentoring should work.

The social side included spine tingling gypsy music in Krnov and then a day in Prague which even in mid-March was very crowded. This was my first time in the Czech Republic and I definitely want to return for a more leisured visit.

Even though I have only been a resident in Second Life since October 2006 that gives me a headstart compared to many. So it was that I was invited to speak to a new group here in the local area interested in Hybrid Learning Environments about the educational possibilities of Second Life.

As Helen Keegan has found out before me, it is much more interesting to be in Second Life when you have got company in Real Life and even more impressive when your antics are being projected on a big screen.

We decided we would try to meet up in Second Life on a more social basis in about a month's time but this time we had to really think about bandwidth when planning how many we would be in each physical venue.

Before this second outing with this group I aim to have visited at least one SL teaching session so that I can report back.

I was surprised by the content of this video. It is not my history and I had no idea that book publishing and early radio were such grassroots activities in the past. This does make the fears for the abolition of net neutrality much more concrete for me.

Karsten Kneese, my podcasting colleague, alerted me to the Ning Social Network and to Classroom 2.0 there in particular. I love the idea of both the tool and the community.

The Ning tool allows you to create your own social community fairly easily. Comparisons with elgg/eduspaces are unavoidable and for the moment, Ning seems more aesthetically attractive and perhaps easier to set up than elgg/eduspaces. Having just tried to introduce a group of teachers to Eduspaces and the communities in eduspaces, I appreciate anything that makes that job easier.

The Classroom 2.0 community within Ning seems to be buzzing as Karsten says and there are many names that I recognise there.

I was alerted to this video by Bee Dieu's post. I think it is a fantastic explanation of what can be a rather abstract set of concepts. I love the way that the video can achieve so much in such a short space of time. However you do have to have some prior knowledge of the jargon to appreciate it.