The last Absolutely Intercultural show of 2007 is about New Year celebrations which includes a 15 minute English play shown on German, Danish and some other European TV channels called 'Dinner for One' which while being thoroughly British is totally unknown in Britain.

I talked with my co-host Laurent Brogmann about what happens in Denmark on New Year's Eve which in brief is total mayhem in contrast to what happens the rest of the year and then I was encouraged to reveal my New Year's Resolution which is to teach my daughter French as she keeps pressing me to.

There are of course food traditions associated with New Year and some of these are discussed.

It seems that I am now a  fully fledged Second Life teacher ready to launch myself on the virtual classroom as soon as I can get myself a computer which doesn't seize up when there are more than six people in the vicinity. This was all courtesy of Language Lab who in my opinion are leading the way as far as learning in virtual worlds are concerned. It was a pleasure and a challenge to go through the training on offer and I hope that it won't be long before I can try out my new found skills. An important part of the training was meeting fellow participants from all over the world and with expertise in teaching other languages apart from English. I hope that that network can thrive.

Yesterday I was doing two workshops on blogs as part of a 2-day training session for a college which trains electricians, plumbers and other practical trades. The other workshops included podcasting, smartboards, maths programs and teambuilding. There are still a couple of months before the Experience Based Learning Social Fund project closes in March. They were very quick to come with some concrete suggestions which centred on extending the dialogue with previous students. Apparantly the tutors here are very good at encouraging contacts between former and current students. This is a two way dialogue in so far as the former students are often starting out on their own and appreciate continued 'shop talk' whilst of course current students benefit from dialogue with peers at a slightly higher level than them. To date this dialogue has been by email. The college has Fronter as its LMS but appreciated straight away the advantages of using blogs rather than going through a complicated registration process for participants who by definition are not likely to be very active.

In the first show of 2008 for Absolutely Intercultural I talked mainly with Cristina Costa who moved from Portugal to Salford in the UK to take up a post as Learning Technologies Development Officer. One of the factors which eased Cristina into her job was her membership of the online community Webheads in Action.

Since I had just received my papers to register as a voter in Britain that day I couldn't resist talking to Cristina also about whether she still had a right to vote in Portugal and if so whether she would do so. The rules are different in every country. The French and Americans for example retain the right to vote for life while for Britons the right to vote lasts for fifteen years after leaving the country while a Dane emigrating from Denmark loses completely the right to vote as soon as they leave.

Round about last October I realised that my children had never experienced a traditional British pantomime so during the Christmas break the whole family went to Britain so that they could experience it before they were too old to appreciate it as it is mainly for children. I asked my elder daughter what she thought of it for the show. In researching a little deeper I discovered that the word pantomime is understood differently in the USA where there it refers to what I would just call mime, a silent enacting of a story. This was obvious when I started looking for sound effects for the podcast and came across the same request in a news forum where someone had replied 'Doesn't that kind of negate the idea of pantomime?' In the end I made my own sound effects. Yes, they're cheesy but you should have heard those I could have paid for! I also discovered a few more conventions about the British form of pantomime over and above the obvious such as the leading man is usually played by a woman and that the old woman is usually played by a man, the so-called pantomime dame. These included that the good fairy usually enters from the left and the wicked witch (boo, hiss) from the right as seen by the audience.

I also thought it worth giving Pangea Day a mention. Make a film which speaks to the world and submit it before February 15th and you have a chance that it will be chosen for Pangea Day on May 10th when the winning films will be shown through various media all over the world. How to speak to the world? The organisers suggest that you centre your film around one of the 200 cultural universals such as pain, play, anger, conflict, shelter, shame and music. Even if you have no intention of making a film it might still be interesting to think what you might do with one of those cultural universals.

And finally this was the absolute last call to enter a competition in which you have to mail the podcast with the name of the third instrument, the Czech band Rivus plays in addition to violin and double bass as featured in the show last April. Hear some samples here.

So finally the time for the VITAE kick-off meeting in Manchester arrived last week. I knew I had a strong team but of course did not know how everyone was going to get on until it actually happened as I was the common link between most people. Helen Keegan made sure that everything ran smoothly and had a dedicated Flickr group up and running while I was still in the air returning home.

The only person I had not met before in the flesh was Cristina Costa, a fellow Webhead, which was a sort of guarantee that I would like her and that we could work together.  And so it proved to be.

The project is an attempt to embed ICT in adult learning where it is appropriate. And in classrooms where little ICT is used that means a lot more than at present. Unfortunately this means that it is too easy to see us, and people with similar agendas, as simply trying to recommend ICT every step of the way which is simply not the case. However in a world where the amount of information is exploding and cheaper to access, it would be odd to ignore ICT altogether and odd not to use more rather than less.

As project coordinator I saw one of my primary tasks during this meeting as presenting the vision of this project. The image I ended up with was a 3 layered cake with the top layer being the train the trainers course divided into 4 quarters:

1. Update yourself (personal learning environment)

2. Skill swap and upgrade (introduction to some useful Web 2.0 tools according to educational need)

3. Mentoring colleagues (sharing expertise both inside and outside your own institution.

4. Getting management support

We have decided to refer to our course participants as VITAE mentors and in fact the fourth quadrant will not be their responsibility but will be the responsibility of the course organiser to ensure that the support network the mentors will need on their return will in fact be in place.

The remaining layers of the cake will be our theoretical basis which is experiential learning and story telling and the final layer of the cake will be the wider community of practice including access to resources, VITAE conferences and a community of practice.

This last item is not easy to promote and we have decided that we will approach the task by creating dedicated spaces on existing communities as well as promoting a disaggregated community through blogging, such as this post for example.

My view is that it will not be that difficult to devise what most people would recognise as a course and as long as we put learning first and technology a close second we should be OK. The difficult part is management buy-in and dissemination and sharing with colleagues. For that reason it was great that we could get Ewan McIntosh to visit us so that he could explain how they have achieved widespread acceptance of such an approach in Scotland. One of Ewan's main contentions is that it is not a question of deciding whether or not to use ICT to meet certain learning needs but that advances in technology have changed learning needs themselves. One prime example is how to cope with the avalanche of information. Ewan's influence is already visible in the fact that we have decided that our face to face conference will take the form of an unconference.

The project task is a large one and some of the issues include:

1. The degree to which we should introduce participants to new tools. Should we go for depth in a few tools or give breadth by tackling more tools more superficially?

2. I wrestled with how much I should come with ready prepared and how much should be decided from scratch through discussion.

3. There was certainly much more to discuss than there was time available to discuss it in. Some topics will be held over until a future face to face, some topics will be dealt with in a series of monthly online meetings starting in February and some topics such as web design I will decide unilaterally with the guarantee that I am open to discussion if someone comes with a much better proposal.

Now that I am back home I feel that we made a good start and that is also borne out by the evaluation I carried out before everybody left. But the meeting has also brought into sharp perspective the enormity of what we have contracted to do. Now that we have had a chance to work together face to face I am confident that we can deliver something worthwhile within the lifetime of the project.

The latest Absolutely Intercultural show is a result of Laurent Borgmann's recent trip to Texas and features a pair of incredible coincidences. Laurent visited New Braunfels to which many Germans emigrated in the mid-nineteenth century and was present and had his recorder running when a family researching their roots in a local museum discovered that the family ancestral home, of which they had a photograph, was in fact where the Museum Director lived. If you want to find out about the second coincidence then you will just have to listen to find out.

The show also delves into how Servas works. Servas offers a way of visiting the world relatively cheaply by being a guest in Servas member's own homes and then reciprocating. The organisation has an illustrious history and I remember considering it as a way of visiting various places in my university days though I never did anything about it at the time. One aspect which comes out very clearly is how important trust is in this process. Our natural instincts are only to trust those we know or who are familiar to us. When you use Servas your hosts are displaying an enormous amount of trust in welcoming you to their home for a couple of days without first having met you.