My main interest in Second Life is for its educational possibilities but up until yesterday I had only read and imagined what this might be like. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be allowed to observe a class in English Village. The class was based on preparation and prompts provided at the accompanying blog. And there will be correction follow up on the text chat histories generated by the activity (for those students who wish).

The lesson was an experiment in team teaching which I gather they had not tried out before. This probably made the pace a little slower as everybody had to be organised but the activity itself was viable only with several 'teachers' for the students to interact with. Prior to getting myself seated on the observation deck I had a chance to wander round English Village and marvel at all the effort which has gone into providing role playing opportunities and other facilities.

'Students were given the task of asking the teachers and lesson observers preselected questions while simultaneously making use of common interjections. It was up the students to initiate conversation as they made their way through the three "Conversation Stations". A prize will soon be given to the student who managed to ask the most questions and make use of the most interjections! The lesson was concluded with a fun display of fireworks. '

Like all digital meetings I had the feeling that what happened in the session could have been done in half the time in Real Life but that is not really the point. The point is that a group of people from very disparate places got the opportunity to practice their English which they might not otherwise have had. Indeed, the one 'student' I ended up talking with admitted that he was from Hawaii and therefore did not really need English lessons but had just come for the interaction! It was interesting that the students often got engrossed in the conversations and in so doing failed to follow the rules of the lesson which was to ask questions and use interjections on hearing the answer. This must count as a positive.

Second Life is soon to incorporate voice chat as a standard feature. This may alter life there substantially with all those women masquerading as men and vice versa being outed. It might also be a shame for classes such as this since the slower pace of text chatting helps students at lower levels have time for reflection before they 'speak'. Though text chatting will not disappear of course.

I am not ready to venture into teaching in Second Life as I feel I need to be much more comfortable and familiar with the environment before I attempt it. Another issue is bandwidth of which it appears I have little. The counter in the top right hand corner of the Second Life screen was telling me that I had about 20 kbps throughout most of the session. Maybe I misunderstand and that indicates only what it needed to use but I was also getting dire packet loss figures so I think I'm right in thinking that I'm right at the edge of what I need to run SL comfortably. One problem for me is that it is difficult to spot when my machine has had enough and freezes completely. I often think that people are just not doing very much! Still my ISP is giving everybody extra bandwidth for free as from tomorrow so things may get better. (That's not an April Fool I hope).

That was the name of a recent conference organised by the Intercultural Management Institute in Washington DC to which the makers of Absolutely Intercultural were invited. Unfortunately we couldn't attend but we invited Chris Saenger of the institute to report back to us and part of his report is in the latest episode of the podcast.

This includes some hints and tips about how women's voices can be heard in patriarchal cultures by, for example, arranging for your male colleagues to all look at you (the woman) during the meeting so that the other participants have little choice if they want to catch the eye of the delegation you are leading.

Absolutely Intercultural is not a music podcast but I felt justified in including a whole song from a gypsy trio we were privileged to hear while I was in the Czech Republic a couple of weeks ago. Rivus play traditional songs, many of them of gypsy origin, on traditional instruments including the cimbalom or hammered dulcimer which is enormously versatile. The way they use their voices is also stunning and it is difficult to believe at times that there are only three people in the band. You will find downloads on their website and I recommend 'Hore dedinu sel' as definitely worth a listen.

It was inevitable that as soon as version numbers started to be added to the web, learning, education and so on that the temptation would be to spot the next version before it hove onto the horizon. I am having enormous difficulties in putting over the idea of Web 2.0 (with or without the tag) and am horrified that the talk is now of Web 3.0, Learn 3.0 and so on. Web 3.0 seems to be a technical term referring to the intelligent web but Education 3.0 is something else. I found a very good picture of it in this article by Keats and Schmidt in which they describe an educational utopia in which students are active in searching out, remixing and ripping material.

They see Education 3.0 as 'a breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning' and use the effective device of a fictional illustration of how this might work in practice at the end of the article.

But sitting here as I am trying to persuade teachers of the value of Web 2.0 (with or without the tag) I sense immediately the counter-argument which they may have concerning this story. For the story deals with art and poetry, feelings and emotions. I have a feeling that the teachers here would challenge me to describe how Education 3.0 could help their students acquire scientific knowledge for example. I have a feeling therefore that a more concrete, mechanical example would have been more convincing.

I have just come across this informative and succinct Horizon Project  report , a joint product of the New media Consortium and Educause, which I think provides a good context against which to place my work. It goes through new learning approaches/tools with a projected timeline for full accpetance and integration into everyday educational practice.  I came across it while reading about the successor to the Flat Classroom project,  the Horizon Project in which five classrooms around the world are involved compared to the three in the original project. I think that the Horizon Project is much more structured than the Flat Classroom project (which was also quite structured) and it includes many guidelines and templates which could be used in similar projects in other contexts.

The teacher guidelines are interesting though. They include the following:

'The teacher must be willing to put in long hours during the project. An asynchronous project like this where students are not in the classroom at the same time requires your availability both to your students and to the other teachers. You will be a pioneer and no one will be there to "nag" you to do the right thing. You should plan on at least one workday on the weekend to allow your students to come in and complete their projects. '

 

And this is where your average teacher will say to me 'And where do you think I will find the time to do this?'

This is the question to which I need a convincing answer pretty soon. Are we talking about an initial investment of time in adapting to the new reality after which it will become self-sustaining and second nature or are we talking about a permanent ratch in time needed to run a classroom? If the latter then structural changes are needed to allow for this or I will never get more than a few curious pioneers to take part.

I spent an interesting day yesterday on a course led by Anne-Marie Dahl, a futurologist (I'm sure I don't remember meeting futurologists when I was a child but now I've met three in less than a year!) about finding out how future trends can be used to plan the future. The topic was not entirely new to me as I have been consulting sources such as the Horizon Report regularly. What was new for me was the idea that for every tendency there is a counter-tendency such as the globalisation-glocalisation pair. And what we did was to explore many possible futures with the help of opposing quadrants setting one mega trend and its counter against another pair.

In the end I wondered if this neat pattern was not a little bit too neat. For example glocalisation is only possible as a concept because of globalisation. So the two kind of go together. A real counter tendency to globalisation would be to block out modern communications altogether which is perhaps more the 'simple living' idea but that concept was used as the counter to so called 'turbo-living'.

Another device used in our discussions was to take a ten year time frame as this is thought to be sufficiently distant for us to avoid thinking that things would be much the same as before and yet close enough for us to have some idea and some stake in what things might be like then.

The mega trends can be divided into financial, environmental and values and I was reluctant to take on the value trends as I don't think that values are prone to such drastic change that they would make a difference over the ten year period.

Then today I found this amazing article from the Guardian with a four hundred year perspective on why depression has become more prevalent (because we have forgotten how to have fun) which made me wonder about the value of a ten year perspective!

I am often amazed at the number of educational institutions in this small town of 14,000 people. We have our business college, a technical school which is in fact part of our institution. There is also a grammar school, a teacher training institution, a football college, a fishing college (short-lived and now defunct), a nature college, a spiritual growth college, various general adult training institutions, a gym college and I have probably forgotten a couple.

This morning our weekly meeting took place at 3D college Denmark which is yet another constituent part of our institution and yet just across the road. It seems to be a very intense training experience with students living and studying in the same place and coming from all over Denmark to do so. Inevitably the students are mostly male (in fact 100% male this year) but efforts are being made to attract more girls to this very creative course. The college is unique in Denmark with an intake of mainly 16-19 year olds. 3D animation is a growing market and we were told today that one Danish animation company recently needed 50 new staff to fulfil a project and could only source about 4 people from within Denmark. So the graduates of this course should be assured of a profitable future. There are some examples of the students' work on the website but I couldn't find a way of embedding them here however and I also found a couple of videos made by staff at the 3D college which give you an impression of Grenaa!

Yesterday I took delivery of an all-singing, all-dancing pda. I will probably never find out more than 20% of its capabilities but at least I now feel more qualified to join the debate about the potential of mobile learning as before I had a phone which would only phone and text.

I also came across this presentation about mobile learning produced by a consortium of 4 colleges in the UK which struck me as entertaining, well presented and above all, realistic.

The latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural deals among other topics with the difficulties of communicating in a foreign language during an emergency. As I listened I thought it was incorrect to say that the emergency number in the EU is 112 as the UK has not abandoned it's traditional 999 number - another example of the British not signing up to the European project. However a little online research showed me that common sense has prevailed and that panicky continental Europeans can confidently ring 112 as both numbers are in operation in the UK. It's just that 112 has not been much publicised (probably to avoid the apopletic reaction of the europhobes).

I am coming to the end of a short English course for my colleagues and want to think about follow up. I am forever teaching short courses which last from two weeks (full time) to five weeks (one day a week) or six or ten weeks (2 lessons a week). I don't think that anybody taking one of these courses can honestly expect more than to be re-activated into the language and maybe pick up one or two useful habits to extend after the course, especially since many of my students end up only thinking of English when they are in the classroom, in spite of their oft-stated good intentions that they will read, watch films without sub-titles and so on.

Therefore I think my job is far from done when the course ends next week and I am trying to think of a solution which will achieve language progress and student motivation while being acceptable to management for financing. Suggesting a second eight-week round is unlikely to fit the bill. The lessons were at the end of the working day (to suit those who had teaching commitments themselves) and now that summer is in full swing people are really reluctant to be tethered indoors for even longer than they have to, even though we have had three or four sessions partially or completely outdoors.

What to do? I think that the solution lies in an informal learning set-up of some sort but can't quite work out the best model. I believe that little and often is more productive for language, especially here in Denmark where there is lots of external English in the environment to reinforce points met in learning sessions. I know that I have pushed people out of their comfort zone so that they felt obliged to write mails, closed forum posts and blog comments in English outside of the lessons and I could capitalise on that as a good habit. There has even been a case of a totally unrelated thread started by one of the participants quite informally and spontaneously through email.

So I am looking at some sort of blended model where we could have weekly or fortnightly conversations for half an hour at the beginning of the working day before teaching starts supplemented by forum conversations and exercises based on their input (eg cloze, vocabulary). I cannot see the blog posts continuing as we would no longer have an audience - at the moment we are running a mystery guest exercise. This more hands-off approach would require that even more attention was also paid to language coaching, promoting good habits, promoting the compilation of a portfolio, monitoring participation and diagnosing necessary input and remedial action required.

The final element in the model as I see it, is a monthly meeting to review these last-named meta-aspects.

I work with these people every day so this is a one-off situation. I could suggest that I just interact with them in English instead of Danish but I don't think that that would work for many reasons, not least because I'm not sure that I would have the discipline to do it.

 

I have just found this video of a half hour talk by Sugata Mitra about his famous Hole in the Wall experiments which first caught my eye a couple of years ago. This seems like one of those stories which means vastly different things to different people. Some people pick up on the fact that this is a story about how children can learn without teachers (in fact even better than with unmotivated teachers Mitra seems to say) while others concentrate in the collaborative aspect of the children's learning and yet others focus on the way in which the children taught themselves a basic English vocabulary.

The story revolves around an experiment, which Mitra has by now replicated many times and not just in India, whereby simply making a fully functioning and internet connected computer available is enough to motivate children as young as six to learn about browsing, mailing, games, the paint program, music downloads and much else besides in very little time and all spontaneously and in collaboration with their peers.

A short video showing this learning in action can be seen here. Mitra's four tenets are that:

1. Remoteness negatively affects the quality of education.

2. The marginal benefit of ICT is greatest in the most remote and deprived contexts.

3. Values are acquired while dogma and doctrine are imposed.

4. Learning is most likely a self-organising system.

These lead him to conclude that the four tenets could form the basis for a vision of educational technology which is digital, automatic, fault tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organising.

His final point is that most ICT applications used in education are borrowed from business and it is time that education developed its own specs.