The latest Absolutely Intercultural show features an extract from the WIAOC Connect conference. I would have liked to include more as there were several revelant sessions but the quality of the sound recordings is probably more than the ear can tolerate. I therefore restricted myself to Elaine Hoter's explanation of the contact hypothesis of fostering intercultural tolerance and how this has been applied to teacher training students across the three communities of Israel. I find the hypothesis very interesting and I am sure that it has potential application in millions of other settings. The final piece is a conversation with Carla Arena, a Brazilian, living in Florida who has run straight into the stereotypes of what a Latina woman should be like. And I begin with a chat with Collette Wanjugu Döppner about what it was like for her as a Kenyan woman being pregnant in Germany. And what it's like feels pretty damn intrusive to somebody where you don't even tell people you are pregnant until it is obvious. Collette has had her baby and the differences in expectations don't stop with pregnancy but that will have to wait until future shows. I found that I could talk with Collette about this topic for hours!

This is a really intense conference period both online and offline, both traditional and unconference. It started with the Webheads in Action online conference with its emphasis on language teaching, continued with Learning in the Workplace where I learned a lot about mobile learning and then went virtually 3D with the Second Life conference on Best Practices in Education where I only succeeded in attending one session on the Schome project. Schome is neither school nor home but an attempt to re-design learning literally from scratch.

Then I discovered that the local government area in which I went to school is abandoning the timetable in favour of personalised targets and workgroups across the whole secondary sector in their area. This sounds very exciting as long as it isn't just spin as I have met so often in my years working in the British educational sector. I can see that the locals fear that this is an attempt to sell off school land to the lucrative private housing sector while yet others see diminishing school options for the non-Catholic population.

Back to conferences and the next one was the face to face Reboot in Copenhagen which attracted people internationally. Here I found myself facing really fundamental questions about life, death, work-life balance, how children fit in, new consciousness created by the always-on internet and how to achieve happiness! Others have done a much better job of recording Reboot than I could have done. See for example Ewan McIntosh's running summaries starting here and Stephanie Booth's starting here. My enduring impression is that I am often confronted by arguments that online is not as good as face to face; the implication being that those who operate online are cold-hearted geeky nerds, whereas it is quite obvious from the sessions here at Reboot that those behind Web 2.0 tools and mash-ups are actually intensley caring and social. That's why they develop these types of tools.

Reboot was an unconference in the sense that the programme was fluid (at least at the edges) with anyone being invited to contribute, the sessions were not always in traditional conference format and there was a great deal of back-channelling for example on Jaiku. There were disruptive elements such as the miniature robot Zeppelins flying randomly around the conference hall on Day 2 having been built by participants the night before (see below). And of course it was great to meet up with people known only by their blogs such as Ewan McIntosh and Trine-Maria Kristensen as well as meeting new people such as Fred Oliveira and Delphine Ménard, more of which later.

Back home to another online conference with grand ambitions, The Future of Education, featuring such speakers as Jay Cross and Sugata Mitra. The infrastructure behind this conference with its discussion forums helps us to continue the conversation at our leisure while the recordings are good for those of us not based in the Americas.

And finally there will be another Second Life conference at Edunation Island this time, specifically about the potential of Second Life for language learning. I hope that I will have mastered the technology by then to attend.

Then it is back down to earth to my real life challenges which include devising a mobile English course for my time-pressed colleagues, train the trainer course to teach technical English and staff development sessions on the use of Web 2.0 tools.

I came across this article some weeks ago and I don't really know what to make of it. It tells the story of what happened when a world class violinist, Joshua Bell, became a busker in the Washington underground together with revealing videos (4 in all so make sure you scroll down completely to the end of this fairly long article). Most people completely ignored him. Does this mean that we have to be told when something is worth listening to because we can't recognise it ourselves? Or was it completely unfair because this was done at the height of the morning rush hour? Would the results have been very different on a Saturday afternoon? Or is it unfair to to expect our poor habituated brains to be on the lookout for world class violinists in unexpected corners?

Well the online conference boldly entitled 'The Future of Education' is over and I have only attended or caught up with three sessions so far. Although the sound is bad, it was great to hear Sugata Mitra enlarge on his idea that education can be self-organising to a much greater extent than we allow it to presently. Interesting to hear his definition of an expert as someone who has not yet demystified his subject, though again I don't think that this can be applied across the board. The implications of the experiments that Mitra has done over and over again potentially have huge implications for the way in which we think of education. But will we dare to question the structures which we have built up over centuries?

 

 

This brings me on the Jay Cross session in which he asserted that incrementalism is the enemy of innovation. One example was the introduction of blogs which he said, if done against the background of a bad education system, was of no value. Cross talked about the need for entrepreneurial learners or free-range learners who determine their own learning paths and are not tied to a pre-determined course package. An interesting observation in this session was that there is no real dichotomy between formal and informal learning and this was illustrated by a clever use of the Kolb experiential cycle diagram overlaid first with formal learning tools and then by informal learning tools (above).

You could tell how revolutionary these ideas were from the furious text chatting going on at the same time as the sessions in which attendees obviously had furrowed brows as they struggled to imagine these ideas embedded into their formal, certificated and documented systems of the present.

There are several sessions I want to catch up on which were scheduled awkwardly for my timetable so thank goodness for the archives which have mostly been recorded as a screencast which may be an advantage to some who do not want to download the conferencing software.

I thought this was a very connected online conference with its associated Moodle discussion forums, tailormade Pageflake page and Twitter channel. These were not isolated podcasts simply 'made available'. This was a real conversation both during the sessions themselves and contiuing through and beyond the conference period. A model to emulate.

Happiness is the key to societal success (implied but not mentioned is economic success) according to this short but amazing article in the Guardian. It is so important that it should be taught in schools by specially trained professionals and... (the rest is drowned out by howls of derision from the tabloid wing, I'm sure). Yes, give it a go, I say. Still I am left with a sour taste in my mouth by the meaness of the Guardian newspaper in never giving links so that you can follow up their content. OK, so I can usually get there with a swift Google search but WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO in this day and age??? There will be no links to the Guardian in this post beyond that necessary to get you to the original article!

So here are the missing links. This is based on the work of Richard Layard, at the London School of Economics, where he is founder director of the LSE Centre for Economic Performance. There is a great deal of background in this series of lectures.

This new direction in economics almost makes me want to go back to the discipline for which I was originally trained at university.

I must mention Pachelbel's Canon in D Major which was almost my downfall this morning when I couldn't control the sound on the computer and could neither stop it nor make it quieter. I found it on a blog made by a mathematics student while I was looking for examples to use in a short talk about blogs in education to my colleagues. The only solution in the end was for the computer to have its innards spilling out while a vital connection was severed!

This was both professional development and language class in that I was asked to give my short presentation in English.

The number of online conferences seems to be growing exponentially and I have signed up to another two taking place in the next two weeks, e-Trends in Australia and SLanguages2007 in Second Life. It becomes difficult to catch up with the sessions I missed in previous conferences but I was very glad to catch up with Carla Arena's session on blogs from the WIAOC conference a month ago. Together with her colleagues, Erika Cruvinel, and Ronaldo Lima, Carla went through a wealth of examples of the use of blogs in English language teaching. The point is not to copy what Carla and her colleagues have done but to realise that  the potential is enormous and that ideas should come from your own circumstances.

It seems like some sort of Arthurian quest fulfilled when I read about the Met school template reaching its tenth anniversary in the USA, thanks to Jeremy Hibert's post. The idea of a personal curriculum built around the following areas; empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, social reasoning and personal qualities grounded in the real world through internships and sustained contact with the parents seems to be the key. The recipe seems to be successful since it has lasted over ten years and has now expanded into a network of similar schools. When you read about how the school operates you wonder about the time commitment required from the teachers but it seems to work and would appear to be a practical template since the original school comprises 700 students.

Coupled with the idea of internal student-led inspections this might ensure that the needs of the students are met.

Our latest show for Absolutely Intercultural was prompted by a comment from a listener, Irene Hansen some months ago about the power of religion to bring people together. Since she was attending the Protestant Church Congress in Cologne at the beginning of June we sent her out to talk to people for us.

We also talked to Fernando, a Spaniard living in the USA who observes the different ways in which Catholics are perceived in the two countries and we round off with some outdoor proselytising in the streets of London.

This is the first time that the podcast has tackled this issue but it is a rich vein which I am sure we will revisit.

How to make good decisions according to the New Scientist from May 2007

 

1. A bad decision won’t be as bad as you think and a good, as good as you think.
2. Often a gut reaction is better than a considered reaction.
3. All emotions apart from sadness impair decision-making.
4. Explore the possibility that you might be wrong.
5. Don’t be distracted by irrelevancies.
6. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
7. Try reframing the question.
8. Beware social pressure.
9. Limit your choices; too much choice leads to paralysis and inaction.
10. Let someone else choose.

So I'm a bit slow in catching up with my reading but I thought these might be worth noting as regards future projects.

Integration of white collar and blue collar areas was one of the most notable features of this company which we visited as part of our annual staff development outing yesterday. All is not what it seems however as Østjydsk CAD/CAM (great graphic on the front page of this Danish site) are a training institution so it is very convenient for them to have the computers on which designs are made and the machines executing the designs so close together.

The rest of the day was spent canoing, firing soda bottle rockets, making fire without the aid of matches the Ray Mears way and cooking pancakes on a floating bonfire dressed in waders and waist high in the Randers fjord waters. All this courtesy of the Randers Fjord Center.

It is possible to view these activities as simply the most enormous fun, or not depending on disposition, or at a more meta level about what it takes to master new skills and so on.

The latest Absolutely Intercultural show is a report of my attendance of the Reboot 9.0 conference last month. On the face of it this is an IT conference which immediately attracts a certain sector and repels the rest. However the subtitle was 'Human?' and reboot in any case is traditionally cutting edge. Although not explicitly intercultural, any meeting involving so many different nationalities is bound to throw up a few interesting stories. In actual fact the landscape of this show could have taken on many different forms depending on which combination of people I chose to approach. The spread of topics and experiences was wide and spanned the whole of human life from birth to death.

I made a beeline for Ewan McIntosh because I have been following his blog for quite a while now and he didn't disappoint. I got him talking about his time as a lecteur in France and lots of other stuff besides.

Ewan introduced me to Delphine Ménard, who works for the Wikimedia Foundation in Germany and she had some fascinating observations to make about the pattern of donations to the Foundation.

And finally when I heard Fred Oliveira's story, turning his back on the Bay area and returning to his native Portugal, to run a successful hi-tech business. I just had to talk to him about it and the implications of his situation.