Despite being away on holiday I managed to publish the latest podcast last Friday on the theme of raising children. The reason I chose the theme was because it strikes me that this is an area where people have strongly held beliefs mostly delineated by culture. Thus the first feature is about Collette Döppner, a Kenyan woman living in Germany, who describes the enormous pressure she and her husband were placed under when they elected to have their new baby sleep in their own bed as practised in Kenyan culture. I then talked to Michael Coghlan and his daughter Alison Waye, in Australia to find out if the Australians really were shocked when the Crown Prince of Denmark and his Tasmanian wife sent their 15 month old son to a day nursery or whether this was just a tabloid story designed to boost the circulation of the Australian magazine, Women's Day. To end there is another extract from the conversation I had with Ewan McIntosh back in May at the Reboot conference when we talked about what 4 and 5 year olds get up to in Scotland and Denmark. Is it school or is it play? Is it the same or is it different?

Last week I spent a day at the Organic Farming School at Kalø where we looked at how to use Powerpoint in a more pedagogic and interactive manner as well as the potential for podcasts. I am doing this under the auspices of a Social Fund project so this means that I am learning as well as the participants. I tried to ensure that each session was a learning by doing session but even so the evaluations tell me that the technology is still a big barrier and tends to block out the pedagogical considerations.

The Powerpoint section included for example an interactive (PPT) quiz about pedagogical considerations when preparing presentations as well as illustrating the possibility for using Powerpoint for something other than a presentation. It also demonstrated that using ready prepared templates can take some of the hard technical work out of the equation.

When it came to the podcast section I had prepared a series of activities through a series of five podcast posts on Podomatic and we ended by making a recording which could then be uploaded. But I now know that next time there is a podcast session, we will start with the recording (planning and execution thereof) and play with the tool later if there is time. One thing we all learned that day is that mobile phones do not all make recordings in mp3 format. Certainly there are sections of this student population who would benefit from the chance to produce something as audio rather than written work as there are many foreign students and many of the lessons are given in English, a second langauage for everybody. There is also a significant section of the classes who have reading difficulties so that is also a relevant target group. And finally I would guess that someone wanting to work in agriculture would appreciate the opportunity to get out of the classroom to carry out an assignment.

The best option would be for the teachers to have a lesson idea which I could then help them to carry out in the classroom by providing the technical help while they concentrate on the learning. I wonder if anyone will take up the challenge before the project period is over in March.

Ever gone on holiday and dreamt of starting a new life there? Many of us day dream like this but few of us act out the urge. The latest Absolutely Intercultural show examines just this feeling. From the 23 year old student who has already spent extended periods in Australia and South Africa to the heavy metal fan who became involved in opera in Thailand and rounding off with the jaded teacher who took a year's sabbatical which included a 3 month motorcycle trip across the USA. Did he go back to the teaching grind? You'll have to listen to find out.

Just been watching a video from Teachers TV about small scale education, a topic close to my heart. The UK charity of the same name is one of the few subscriptions I continued when I left the UK 14 years ago. The title of this post is a quote from close to the end of the programme where one of the leaders of a small school acknowledges that the administrative burdens don't go away but stresses how important it is to recognise what common values could hold a small learning community together. I have been a little perplexed by research which seems to suggest that large classes are effective. These are gleefully seized upon by education paymasters. But refreshing my memory about golden numbers (8 and 80 are particularly effective) in human organisations from Ewan McIntosh's report of the Reboot conference I suddenly realised that both the advocates of small classes and larger classes could be right. Perhaps the skill is in knowing when each is appropriate.

Today I felt as though I were attending a staff meeting of the future (though I am well aware that for some of you this would be the present and for yet others, the past) at a training college for pedagogues today. This is a particularly Scandinavian profession and probably equates with nursery nurse or pre-school teacher training. However graduates can not only work in kindergartens but also with older children in the widespread network of after-school clubs and other youth activities here in Denmark.

The students start their courses with a couple of months of college based study and then go out on work placement at kindergartens and so on for about six months before returning to college for a longer period of study. Their teachers had identified that the work experience placement could be quite isolating for the students since they go out after only a very short period at college and so they decided that they would try to foster both heightened learning awareness and maintain the fragile social bonds by suggesting their students keep blogs. They were also experimenting with electronic portfolios.

I found the meeting very positive because these were not ICT evangelists but a group of thoughtful professionals who had agreed to try a strategy in a fairly low risk manner and were willing to discuss how to improve the experience for current and future cohorts.

Instead of me arriving as an outsider and telling them that they might experience this or should think about doing that, the way the meeting went was that they were discussing what they had observed and I noticed that many of the big issues arose spontaneously. These included:

1. Was it right to encourage the mixing of the social and work-related posts in one blog?

2. Had the student who had included pictures of the children on a trip got permission to upload those photographs?

3. How much should the lecturers feel obliged to read and respond to?

4. Do we need both a blog and a portfolio?

5. Should the portfolios continue to be private as some of them contained really useful reflective observations that did not then transfer to the blog?

6. The teaching team was open enough to consider uploading teaching materials into a shared materials bank.

7. Uploading teaching materials prior to a teaching session had meant that the students were noticably better prepared and arrived with relevant questions and additional references.

8. Negative posts are a problem so should there be posting rules? The consensus here was that promoting a discussion among the students should be enough to raise awareness and would also preserve the integrity of the idea that the students have control over their own blogs.

9. Should the e-portfolio replace exams? The consensus was that a first step could be that it counted for a percentage of the grade for the work experience.

10. Videos are potentially a very powerful tool for example in analysing how a physical education activity went but who would do the editing to find the key moments?

The session ended with a couple of the teachers setting up their own blogs and then everyone setting up a bloglines account so that they could gather all their student blog links in one place.

I was there as just another meeting participant listening and chipping in when asked. I will report back on where I think they may want further support in my role as project worker in the experience-based learning project but I really felt that they had the process under control and were willing enough to experiment at their own pace.

For me, it was great to see the next step in action rather than once again visiting an institution to explain what a blog is and how it may have some relevant application in teaching.

The unifying theme for the latest Absolutely Intercultural show is immersion. In the first piece a Danish scientist is asked what it is like being on a scientific expedition with a group of native English speakers.

I feel a bit guilty about the second piece featuring two young men from our 3D college who went to stay for a month in Seattle to learn more about animation techniques because they didn't choose the agenda. Perhaps they would rather not have ended up talking about urinals and American beers but I was using the very unofficial blog kept by one of their accompanying tutors as a guide as to what they had particularly noticed while in the States.

The final piece is about a scheme which on the face of it doesn't seem to have high chances of success but I witnessed for myself how well two eleven year old Belarusian boys could adapt to staying in a Scottish household with no common language to aid communication. The scheme is run by Chernobyl Children's Lifeline and is aimed at giving Belarusian children a short period of life without radioactive contamination. Incredibly, the month-long stay is believed to extend their lifespan by two years. The internet did help in this situation as the Scottish hosts used Babelfish to prepare an overview of the activities for each day.

Finally I just found a couple of really interesting surveys people can take on Stephen Pinker's page. They are not explicitly about intercultural communication but having taken both surveys myself I could see that they raised all sorts of potentially interesting questions about how people respond to awkward/morally challenging situations so I decided to recommend that our subscribers take a look.

As part of the experience-based learning project, I went to visit a local tourism development organisation who had a very specific desire to hold discussions within their very small dispersed group of 4 people, share their Outlook contact list and other documents as well as occasionally hold live text chat meetings. When I went to visit, I found that they were willing to experiment, willing to pay for the service if necessary but that it did not have to look good as this was just for internal consumption.

I did not consider Yahoo groups as a solution even though this has been the mainstay mode of communication for many of my international projects. Many people have difficulty getting their email accepted by Yahoo and I don't like the way that the Messenger chat software now comes bundled with a huge amount of other programs which simply take over your machine, not to consider all the stuff going on behind the scenes which we can't see.

Neither did I suggest Moodle which is what my projects tend to use now. That was mainly because while Moodle is a wonderful discussion medium, it does need installing by a technical person and takes server space.

So what I investigated included: