Over the summer I have been revamping and updating my French website http://anne_fox.homestead.com and the two themes emerging from that process have been audio and mobility.

I was surprised to work out that the website is at least six years old. It started as an aid for my neice who had a difficult French teacher. But as time has gone on and I have changed from temporary to permanent and from part-time to half-time to full time it has become increasingly difficult to maintain it to a reasonable standard. I was considering deleting it altogether or finding some collaborators but it still serves a purpose as a testing ground for various ideas and some people seem to find it useful so instead of deleting I tried to update.

The mission of the website is to help people on their way rather than giving them self-study lessons. And so I duplicated as much as I could to a mobile website at http://winksite.com/engelsk/learnfrench

I have replaced the WIMBA Voiceboard (which our small institution had difficulty to continue funding) with a free Springdoo tool so that visitors can continue to have asynchronous audio conversations with the added advantage that people can post and listen from their mobile phones.

Just for fun I have also added a speaking Voki character to the front page which will probably delight and infuriate in equal measure and to which people can also add audio comments. My policy is to delete all audio contributions in English by the way.

And on the exercise front, I have abandoned Quia for which my institution had to pay in favour of Word Champ which is not only free but which, once again, can be accessed, at least in part, on a mobile phone.

Finally I have started a Flickr Learn French group where I have placed a few pictures annotated with French vocabulary and to which I hope others will contribute their own annotated French pictures. The pictures are accessible on a mobile phone but not, unfortunately, the notes.

Oh, I nearly forgot. I have also created a couple of Voice Threads which are pictures with audio commentary to which other people can add comments.

I fought and fought to get an interesting background since I have never liked the scheme I started off with but have discovered that it is not simple even though I have prepared a wonderfully pale picture of the Eiffel Tower as taken by my daughter last year. So I've gone completely neutral on that one.

On Monday I returned from the final meeting of the EU Leonardo LIPS project. http://www.eu-lips.de LIPS stands for Linguistic and Intercultural Preparation for Students and the project set out to train university students about to go on their first internship abroad. The situation is high risk in that mistakes made then are diffiult to recover. The great strength of the course which was developed is that it included participants from all over Europe as well as a similar spread of cultures among the trainers. This would be a logistical nightmare if it had not happened 100% online.  

The course content was designed after the project group had investigated what the key situations in such a placement are. By common consent these included first contact by either email or telephone, your first day and what happens when you make a mistake or something else goes wrong. In all, 8 key communicative situations were identified and included in the course. A danger with online courses is that they are too text-based but the LIPS course managed to include live chat exercises, two exercises involving pictures and the course materials included video clips for each unit and audio clips for a couple of them.  The podcast, Absolutely Intercultural http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com was used in two specific units and particpants encouraged to subscribe anyway. There were two rounds of the pilot course, the second one being adjusted to take account of lessons learned in the first round. These improvements were reflected in the improved feedback from both the trainers and the participants. The icing on the cake is that the course has been adopted in adapted form as a standard course for outgoing students in the Hessen region. I can also see other potential applications for example for multi-national companies which expect their employees to collaborate. 

I was not a partner in this project. I was the external evaluator and have therefore been following it at somewhat of a distance. However one of the strengths of the project was that they attempted to keep in touch between project meetings by organising monthly online meetings of the project partners. My institution hosted these and I was the moderator of these meetings in the Horizon meeting rooms. http://www.wimba.com The conclusion was that these meetings really helped to maintain the momentum of the project work. 

It was great to return to Belgium after an absence of nine years. My association with Belgium began about 18 years ago when I went on a three week teacher exchange in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. This was followed the next year by a full blown student exchange LINGUA project with a different institution. This led to a firm friendship with one of the teachers who I was really pleased to be able to meet up again in Belgium this last week. He is now a headmaster himself and showed me round his new school and so I have been re-acquainted with the Belgian education system. Unfortunately my plane was late arriving to Brussels and therefore late leaving for Copenhagen. So I missed my connection home but thank goodness this was SAS so I spent a short night in a hotel before finally getting home on Monday morning.

I can't remember how I came across this video but it's brilliant.  Ken Robinson makes some very serious points about education and creativity in stand-up fashion and completely without the use of Powerpoint. It had me rolling about. This is one in the TED talk series http://www.ted.com/talks and it seems to me that almost every one of them is worth watching.

I have just had my proposal for a talk at Online Educa Berlin http://www.online-educa.com/ accepted and they want me to send them my Powerpoint. Powerpoint has had a lot of bad press recently but on the other hand I have been running sessions for teachers on how to make Powerpoints more interactive. However I'm not sure how interactive I can be in a fifteen minute slot. So it looks as though I can't go the Ken Robinson route and do without a Powerpoint.

Questions: Some of these questions have become obsolete (Dec 12, 2007)

Where did the video embed tool disappear to from eduspaces?

Why can Chris Sessums still embed video such as here http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/193485.html and I can't? (Have tried the {{}} option and the html option).

Why does my blog look strange on some computers and not on others?

Why does the insert link pop-up sometimes come up with gobbledy gook which means I have no dialogue box to insert the link in?

Where can I find out what's going on in eduspaces (such as the disappearing video embed widget)?

The latter refers to people with parents from different cultures who haven't learned the two parental languages and is one of the topics for the latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural. Bilingualism is something which monoglots have difficulty in believing. I experience this often in regard to our two daughters who are equally at home in English and Danish but still people are incredulous. An immigrant Dane even told me off one day for 'confusing' my daughters by having them speak English as well as Danish. In our case we were in danger of cutting off the whole family rather than just half the family if the girls had not been able to speak English so for us there was never any question of avoiding English. The combinations explored in the show are Austrian-English, German-Italian and German-Brazilian.

The Grenaa Global Music Festival started last year so this year I decided to find out more about it for the latest show in our podcast. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the press conference just prior to the festival which meant that I could speak to one of the prime movers behind the festival, Moussa Diallo together with Butch Lacy who was MC for much of the festival.

The idea behind the festival is not just to play good music and offer it for free but also to try and foster some intercultural understanding through many other aspects such as food, dance and theatre. One group very much involved in these other aspects of the festival was the International Baccalaureate stream of students at Grenaa Gymnasium. The IB is an international education taught through the medium of English giving access to university. It therefore attracts a very multi-cultural group of students and I talked with students from Poland, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia as well as some very well travelled Danes.

I wondered what such an event can achieve and that was the question I put to most of my guests. I also became very curious about the International Baccalaureate and will try to follow that up in a future show.

I am just back from the final meeting of the Leonardo EU project VOCA2 which sought to develop a mentor training course so that mentors could support disabled adults back into the labour market. Part of the final meeting was a conference in conjunction with two other projects which was a chance to learn more about technology supported learning.

The weather was warm, dry and sunny, the food delicious and it was particularly moving to visit the TV tower in Vilnius where protestors were killed by Russian tanks 16 years ago when Lithuania became independent again. It turned out that our tour guide had joined the Singing Revolution immediately afterwards.

It seemed that everybody was getting married in Lithuania. Everywhere we went and no matter which day, there were always bridal parties getting out of stretch limousines.