My latest assignment for the Experience-based learning project is to help the educational department of a local tourist attraction incorporate Web 2.0 tools in order to enhance and extend the experience for the visiting students (mainly school children). My first instinct with something like this is to try and find out what others in the field are doing. Danish attractions seem to be very good at coming up with innovative on-site experiences but the web experience tends to be rather dry, static and thin. Another local attraction even removed most of its web pages during the off-season which I thought was an extraordinary thing to do. Surely the off-season is a time for building the excitement and interest with a lot of online games, information, teasers about new rides and other stuff? The website doesn't seem so empty this winter.

Going abroad I find the British attractions tightly constrained within the National Curriculum with detailed, structured lesson plans some of them suggesting pre-visit work but none of them encouraging online contact with the attraction.

In the USA I find San Diego Zoo offering videos of their high school interns which is interesting but not really approaching what we discussed in our second meeting earlier this week. They do have a great deal of material with keeper blogs, live web cams and an interesting video archive.

It looks as though the field is wide open for innovation and we will have to feel our way. The idea is to create some initial pre-visit curiosity through the use of live web cams, document the visit mainly through video with the follow up work including editing and sharing of the video and stills on a web space belonging to the attraction. The hope is that a community will be built up around the most interesting videos which can then be featured on the attraction's main static website. One of the main conditions is that this should not be too time-consuming so what we are aiming for is a self-sustaining community which needs minimum intervention from the staff.

The ultimate objective is to get away from trying to convey too many facts during the visit itself so that the children can concentrate on the experience and have time for reflection later.

It's that time of year again! One of the best value professional developments available, especially for language teachers is the free series of online courses offered by TESOL in January. The programme has now been revealed for 2008 and as usual it is diffiult to restrain myself from signing up to all of them.

The organisers put a huge amount of work into the series so they are very professional even though no money changes hands. I also like the approach whereby you can benefit even if you are not a very good student in terms of attendance. The discussions and artefacts tend to be available long after the event which means that you can return, re-visit or even save parts of the course for later.

I first became aware of these course in 2002 and since then the series has just grown and grown and I would say that they are a major input in my PD each year.

The latest Absolutely Intercultural show from Germany is all about music and how it can work as a universal language. It features people who join multi-cultural choirs such as the Colors of Cologne in order to meet others, how the ability to play a musical instrument serves as an introduction almost everywhere and the Sziget Festival in Hungary.

This time last week I was in Remagen as a guest lecturer and participant in the annual Managing Cultural Diversity weekend. My session was about how we interpret pictures differently depending on our culture.

Part of my session included two examples, one showing how the rest of the world views the Danes or Scandinavia and the second showing how the Danes view themselves through an ad for a real estate company.

The ad allegedly explodes several housing market myths as follows:

1. The suburbs are simply a ghetto for silver wedding anniversary couples.

2. You can't live in Jutland (the rural mainland part of Denmark) without a trailer.

3. It is completely irresponsible to bring up children in the city.

5. There are fights every Friday night in the countryside. (The policeman is saying 'Right, that's the end of my shift then. I'm off!'

 The strange thing is that Danes often can't see the point of the 'Origins of Scandinavia' cartoon while many talk about the estate agent ad because they recognise something of themselves in the latter. This weekend was a little experiment to see how the two would go down. The multi-cultural audience could see the humour in the cartoon while the ad (even with translations) left them completely cold.

It is usually easier to spot the differences or what is 'wrong' with the other culture. It is much harder to recognise which aspects of your own beliefs are due to cultural inheritance.

It is a week since I attended the Online Educa Berlin conference for the first time. An important aspect of the conference is the trade exhibition but to see all these structured solutions crowded together gives the impression that learning is just a question of the right technical and organisational structure.

Regarding the sessions, you have to accept that you miss most of them because there are so many parallel sessions. Among the keynotes, Prof. Sugata Mitra stands out with his elegant experiements and revolutionary conclusions all delivered with wit and humility. The idea that children can organise their own learning is quite revolutionary especially in these surroundings but certainly deserves a chance to be explored much further. Andrew Keen thinks that Web 2.0 makes it impossible for professional communicators to earn a living and produces untrustworthy content. He may have a point but calling Wikipedia contributors monkeys goes too far. Donald Clark made a very robust and witty rebuttal of Keen as well as knocking the stuffing out of many cherished educational theories such as constructivism and learning styles. One theory which was not put through the mill by Clarke was experience based learning which was lucky as that was the name of the project which I came to Berlin to report on as well as introducing the new project VITAE which will try to incorporate mentoring elements into teacher training.

Second Life was quite a theme at Online Educa and indeed I met two people who I had formerly only known as SL avatars, Helen Keegan who will be a partner in the new VITAE project and who was part of a panel discussing Second Life and Paul Sweeney, Director of Studies at Language Lab there to give a talk about Language Lab's progress in developing language courses in Second Life. My own session went well but I had to race off shortly after as I had to get to Remagen for the Managing Cultural Diversity weekend.

If Second Life was one running theme then the slow acceptance of ICT in the classroom was another. We are all still feeling our way on that one it seems.

At last! An easy way to embed video here. Even my daughters of 10 and 13 years of age were shocked at the depth of ignorance shown here. Well this one feeds the stereotypes. 

As I go round trying to extend the palette of tools teachers use with ICT I am often met by objections such as 'It's alright for you with your extended network but we don't know who to ask to collaborate with us.' So I was very interested to read in my local paper about a teacher exchange which started with a bottle of wine. The story I heard was that one of the teachers  asked a local wine importer if he knew anybody in Chile. The truth was rather more complicated and involved a holiday trip to Chile, a meeting with a wine seller who knew someone, who knew someone who worked in a school. I still like the story because it shows that where there's a will there's a way. I talked with Vibeke Stenberg from Ryomgaard Realskole about how the exchange went and her enthusiasm to continue the relationship shone through.

So the major part of the new Absolutely Intercultural show is devoted to my conversation with Vibeke. It also includes a short conversation with Michael Coghlan in Australia about traditional symbolism and the extent to which it is or is not adapted to suit local conditions. It turns out that snow-covered scenes for Christmas are intact but that there is a campaign to adopt the indigenous bilby instead of the bunny as an Easter symbol.

As it is Yuletide there is also a competition. Name the third instrument played by Rivus, the Czech band, after violin and double bass and you have the chance to win the band's latest CD. There is also a plug for another podcast, Budacast, hosted by Drew Leitheif one of our faithful listeners. And finally there is a recommendation to visit the new website Palabea which promotes language learning using the tandem method by using social networking software and video chat software.

Just wanted to preserve this link http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=5512184 since it refers to an experiment which marked me greatly when I saw a TV programme about it in my teens in the early 70s.