I participated in the Barnga session featured on the latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural. Barnga is a great game to play for a couple of hours to really understand what cultural differences, culture shock and how to overcome it is really about. Even though I had read about the simulation before I still got a lot out of it. One of the amazing results is that people get deeply emotional about the whole experience. That of course is what makes the learning meaningful but it can be pretty overpowerig when it is a question of anger. Thankfully, often there are gales of laughter as people struggle to make sense of what is going on. Well I'm going round the houses and not being too explicit here but if you have the chance to experience the game/simulation then I should not really reveal anymore. But if you are curious then much is revealed in the podcast.

Well for my sins I have signed up to a teacher training course to learn all about the potential of Second Life for language teaching and the mechanics of giving texts to students and getting them to respond orally and so on. The course is courtesy of Language Lab who to my mind are making impressive efforts to use the potential of Second Life rather than simply replicate the classroom online. They have built an amazing island with loads of facilities such as a bank, hotels and a church where students can really be in the situations where they need the language.

But although I was born in SL last October 2006, I am still not very proficient so it was a real challenge to be required last week to plan a 15 minute teaching session. My biggest worry was that SL would crash on me. The only computer in the house which will run SL is still not very happy about it and so I do seem to crash quite easily. And that's OK if you are a student but it seems to me to be the height of bad manners to be the teacher and crash. However our own teacher was having problems with her audio and managed to log in and out unobtrusively several times while we carried on dutifully so I guess that this is just one of the things you have to live with like rain in Northern Europe!

The challenge we were given was to take one specific teaching approach and try to apply it in our 15 minute session. I took NeuroLinguistic Programming since I have never tried it before. But when I consulted the two books which had been gathering dust on my shelves for the last few years I discovered to my horror that NLP was all about mirroring, matching and pacing through body language as well as targetting all the different senses. And me with my limited ability in SL techniques and all! In the end I lighted on a word appreciation exercise and even managed through a Heath Robinson approach to play some soothing music while they were thinking. After thinking my 'students' had a really good discussion about what the words in question meant to them and my 15 minutes was over so I hadn't had time to consider words they didn't like and a visualisation method for learning spelling. Relief is the best word to describe what I felt afterwards.

But of course once is not enough and next week we have to do another session, this time making use of one of the many locations thoughtfully built by Language Lab. This time I am not tied to NLP but I think I may try to teach French instead of English.

My main conclusion so far is that SL has loads of potential but the teacher at least needs to be confident in the technicalities of moving around and operating in the environment.

I think that I experienced what it is like being unable to access a website because of blocking software for the first time last week. The reason I am unsure, is that it wasn't obvious to me for a long time that the reason I couldn't go any further was that the site was being blocked. Eventually I noticed a tiny little warning icon at the bottom of the screen and when I clicked on it discovered the reason for our problems. Which was a shame, as the occasion was a blogging workshop at CVU Lillebælt teacher training and youthwork training organisation in Jelling where I had my most enthusiastic audience to date in the Experience-based learning project. The funny thing was that I had given my group a choice between three different blogging hosts, Blogger, Eduspaces and Easyblog (a Danish host) and the only one we had problems with was Blogger. The other strange thing was that we could go through the whole signing up process, configuring of the page appearance and even as far as uploading the first post. The stage at which it started to go wrong was when the participants wanted to go in and administer their blog. I think that was why it took me so long to realise what the problem was. Those who had opted for the Danish host had no problems. I thought it was ironic that I was hindered in delivering the blog workshop after I had just heard that the institution wanted to adopt a Web 2.0 approach. However I have the feeling that they will come to an amicable and more nuanced version of the blocking software as a result, rather than abandoning at the first hurdle.

The latest edition of our podcast is out featuring what amounts to a critical incident when my colleagues here in Denmark took part in a project to help a business in Ghana. The inner teacher in me wanted to highlight the clues in the interview that point to issues of different perceptions of time as well as issues of status and hierarchy which contributed to the project not being as successful as it could have been. I have invited anyone with a knowledge of Ghana to contribute with what might be the other side of the story as that will surely have more impact than a dry diagnosis from me.

However sometimes the inner teacher needs to be more visible. One of our listeners commented that he could not see the connection between personality tests and intercultural communication which featured in the last podcast. So I dug deeper on the Myers Briggs questionnaire and discovered that intercultural issues had been comprehensively adressed in its design. The personality types revealed by the test seem to be universal and the distribution pattern of the types is also similar across cultures although the absolute proportions vary. What was interesting was that the way in which you can express your personality (presumably without having your sanity questioned) are different in different cultures. An intriguing example was given that more introvert entrepreneurs are found in the UK than in the USA because the way in which introversion is allowed to be expressed in the UK is different than the USA. I haven't yet discovered what these differences could be.

The show also features a novel use of blogs in language learning. Carla Arena, a Brazilian living in Florida, was a mystery guest on a blog for my students who had to ask questions to find out all about her. Carla believes that this type of activity increases motivation to use the language as well as increasing inter-cultural understanding.

I shall be speaking at Online Educa Berlin next Friday. In the meantime I was interviewed for their online newsletter and the article can be found here

In Danish you say half a year but in English you say six months. Half a year is not wrong in English but it is not a common collocation. There are now tools freely available on the internet to help identify collocations such as at the Compleat Lexical Tutor at http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/text_concord/ I am teaching short courses for employees at SCA Packaging so my students’ needs are very specific. I wondered if there were any collocations specific to their industry which they should know. So I took a text about EPS from http://www.eps.co.uk/pdfs/eps_a_buyers_guide.pdf and put it through the concordancer. The text comprised just under 4000 words but I was disappointed by the results. The best I could do was to extract the following list which seems so banal as not to be worth worrying about.

Amounts

Commonly

Cushioning

Safe

Fraction

Item

performance

properties

stability

stacked

thermal

vegetables

I have always thought that the Lexical Approach to language had merit as part of language learning but this exercise has not yielded the riches that I had hoped.

These courses take place far from my institution and far from my home so I have to be extremely well prepared. The hired location is very pleasant and there is free wireless internet but no computers or projectors in the room. So over and above course materials I also drive with a projector, cables, a couple of laptops and so on. I think some people imagine that I allocate participants to a computer with headphones and that they must work through some online materials but that is not the way it works at all. As mentioned above, my participants’ needs are very specific and technical and we therefore have to do a great deal of negotiating of meaning and here the internet helps in the same way that it might be advisable to have a dictionary to hand. One example occurred last week where we wondered if anilox impression was the right translation. A quick Google search brought up a very useful Wikipedia article which made plain the usage. And then it was back to the exercise we had been doing.

Back home I found the Wikipedia article again and made a cloze exercise from it using Hot Potatoes and that gave rise to a very valuable exercise the following week. That’s why I want internet-enabled computers in the classroom.

I am project coordinator for a new Leonardo supported EU project called VITAE which is about the transfer of innovation through a comprehensive pedagogic approach to integrating the use of ICT tools in vocational education. The comprehensive aspect is to emphasise that we are not just planning yet another course on how to blog or use podcasts but are aiming to include aspects of sharing your skills, nurturing a personal learning environment, inter-facing with management on key issues such as access to tools and security policies and mentoring colleagues to use these tools also.

We are a small project group with partners in Lithuania, Germany and the UK and although we are not meeting for our kick-off meeting until January 2008 much has already been achieved. There have already been contributions from each partner such as the logo which emerged after online discussion and a flyer which I will take with me to Berlin this week. The website is looking really good, if a little predictably light on content at this stage of the project. We have even managed to hold a mini-course on mentoring so that when we meet in January we are all aware of the concepts involved in that part of the project.

On the Danish side we will be trialling short courses which will be open to any practising teacher in Denmark and will probably take the form of a blended course with an online intro, a 2-day residential with online follow-up to mini-projects developed during the residential. The project will last two years at the end of which we should be in a position to recommend some best practices.

The pedagogic approach will be story-based since this has worked well in previous projects such as LIPS and Teaching Culture.