I like this article by VAnce Stevens and Barbara Dieu very much because it does not just wax lyrical about the latest Web 2.0 clutch of applications but systematically runs through those which are of most use to educators and explains how and why they should be used in pedagogical terms. As the authors themselves say:

"it is important that education practitioners keep themselves current with not only the eclectic range of tools that are available to them now on the Internet, but with the concepts underlying their appropriate use."

... watching Wimbledon on streaming Internet TV. Well last week actually. When the Danish terrestrial TV station which usually shows Wimbledon moved it to a satellite sports channel which I don't get and don't want to pay for just to get Wimbledon two weeks of the year, I thought that was it. But I found LiveUKTV which was offering a free 7-Day trial and so managed to get the best of the tournament in the last week. I thought streaming TV was better than I anticipated. The stream broke very seldom and it was only a couple of very short periods that no signal was coming through altogether (not at all during the tennis). The picture though was not brilliant for tennis though I am sure that for the talking heads which dominate most TV it is fine. Even so I don't think I will be signing up any time soon. They want $45 a month for the major British TV channels and that can come down to $25 a month if I managed to persuade some other sad British expatriate to sign up. But that would be on top of what we already pay for since there is no way of avoiding the Danish TV licence which has been re-branded as a multi-media licence to cover programming over the internet plus our satellite package which is the best we can get. On top of which, Wimbledon notwithstanding, I watch less and less TV and therefore object to having to pay more and more for it.

But on the whole I am amazed that I am even thinking about watching TV over the internet. This development has come more quickly than I anticipated.

Other internet options for watching Wimbledon are by paying for it from www.wimbledon.org and free on the BBC website but only if you are located within the UK itself. The BBC is very good at differentiating its online offerings according to geography.

The most recent Absolutely Intercultural show features podcatsing and Second Life in education. There is a report from Podcast Day in Cologne last June which our producer, Karsten Kneese was invited to contribute to. There is also an interview with one of Apple's Distinguished Educators, Sebastian Dorok, who describes some of his classroom activities with podcasting which earned him that title. And finally there is an interview with Nicky Hockley (my former TEFL MA tutor) now of Consultants-E who have purchased a Second Life island for the purposes of teacher training, called Edunation. This is where the SLanguages2007 conference was held not so long ago and which I was able to attend fully much to my great surprise.