The title of this post is also the title of an article I have just had published in the TESL-EJ as part of the proceedings of the last Webheads in Action Online Convergence conference last May during which I gave a talk of the same name. Its main purpose is to encourage language teachers to use talk-radio tye podcasts like Absolutely Intercultural more widely in their classes. There is a great deal of audio material available now in many languages although the article is adressed to English teachers. I have the impression that these are seen as only suitable for advanced learners but in my article I try to set out various ways in which teachers of lower level students can also benefit from such podcasts. As part of my article I did list several podcasts which are overtly pedagogical in order to contrast these to talk-radio type podcasts which concentrate more on the content than on the form. I have already had one email alerting me to two very useful pedagogical podcasts which I failed to mention. These were

1. Successful English Online Reading and Listening page at
http://www.successfulenglish.com/Successful_English/Online_Reading_%26_Listening_for_English_Learners.html and

2. ESL podcast www.eslpod.com.

I was unaware of these two podcasts (one of them perhaps because it started relatively recently whereas I drafted my article several months ago) and having looked at what is available I would say they are definitely to be recommended. Thank you to Warren Ediger for alerting me to them.

However I would argue that I was only giving examples of pedagogical sites in my article and was not trying to review or make a recommended selection of such sites.

Roundabout now is when I usually post a summary of the latest episode of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast and indeed the sound file and show notes are ready to go but disaster has struck and we are unable to post the episode. They are working hard in Germany to rectify and rescue as much as possible but a solution won't be found before Monday at the earliest. The problem is very mysterious and difficult to diagnose but seems to be due to a malicious link posted somehow but which does not reveal itself when you look at the code.

In a way it is an opportunity to re-assess why we do the podcast and whether we want to continue since a solution may involve substantial expense.

On the other hand we just got nominated for a Danish podcast prize which is a great honour and kind of encouragement to continue through adversity. I don't think we qualify though because I am not Danish.

Just in case you were wondering the show notes for show number 54 are below and we expect that somehow or other the show will be accessible at the usual place sometime next week.

We were very honoured to be asked to cover this year's Intercultural Management Institute conference on the theme of intercultural relations. The Institute is part of the American University in Washington DC and holds an annual conference.

absolutely huggable Dr Gary Weaver explains how vice-president Nixon in 1957 was over-zealous in applying the intercultural advice his aides gave him to the effect that in Latin America you should hug people you meet. The sight of so many totalitarian rulers being hugged by Richard Nixon enraged many and made the case for the establishment of the Institute.

absolutely diplomatic Sherry Mueller, President of the National Council for International Visitors explained the concept of citizen diplomacy as something which happens 'one handshake at a time' and expresses her delight at seeing an old film of Elvis Presley as a GI arriving in Germany and being acutely aware of the effect of his actions on the image of the US.

absolutely educational Harriet Fulbright, President of the J. William & Harriet Fulbright Center describes the making of a DVD about William Fulbright's life, best known for setting up the Fulbright scholarships enabling Americans to study abroad. The centre is also well known for its role in producing the Global Peace Index.

absolutely stereotypical Roger Rosenthal of the Migrant Legal Action Program surprised the audience by dispelling the stereotype of the typical illegal immigrant. What picture does the phrase illegal immigrant bring to your mind? Listen to find out if you are just carrying stereotypes in your head. The show ends with some comments from delegates and speakers about how the conference felt to them.

Many thanks to Laura Hash for recording and editing and thanks to the IMI for inviting us along.

We are still working on the development of learning objectives for the VITAE course. As a starting point I imagined what the ideal course would look like and extracted learning objectives from that vision but that gave a set of learning objectives which were too tied to the structure of the course that I had envisaged. It needed to be more flexible. So the next step was recognising that what we want our participants to learn consists of some technical mastery, some pedagogical insights and the need to apply lifelong learning through on-going professional development and mentoring.

The pedagogical objectives however were very woolly and imprecise. Meanwhile on the technical mastery side we wanted to get away from a prescribed list of tools which had to be mastered. The key in the end was linking tools to learning by starting with learning. In this way one can do away with the technical mastery section altogether and simply phrase the pedagogical objectives in terms of the benefits which may be derived from using digital/online tools. An example would be:

Pedagogical aim: Would the learning activity benefit from access to external persons? (eg students in another location, experts, eye witnesses):

This is then open for course participants to learn how blogs, wikis, IP telephony, newsgroups or virtual meeting rooms can help to meet this need and which would be best for the given learning activity.

I still feel the need for some sort of model or procedure to guide teachers in choosing resources. In searching for this new holy grail what I have found, such as this from British Colombia,  seems to take the tool as a starting point and seems to be far too detailed. So I conclude that these guidelines are written from the perspective of making a large investment in software licences when they go down into the detail of looking at the gender balance, the design and so on. Is there something, I wonder, which takes the learning first and helps a teacher assess which tool might be the most appropriate?

I have recently started a new series of technical English classes, this time on Sjælland near Copenhagen. There is an advantage to repeating sessions but I cannot exploit it to the full because the equipment level of the classroom I find myself in is the lowest I have experienced so far. There is a blackboard which means I have to either handcopy or take bad photographs of what we note down. There is a very slow computer with no speakers which means that showing streamed videos is out of the question. There is a projector/beamer but with no apparent means to switch it on.

I have in the past collected interesting videos such as the HP customer service call on You Tube or the intercultural differences in email on video jug. I have also recorded previous groups doing telephone exercises which I used at the time but which I like to recycle in the form of different exercises for future groups (eg write the follow up email to this telephone call). I also collate all our materials into a single online location to give some sort of permanent location to the class (in the past I have had a group where we had to use a different physical classroom each week).

In the present situation I have studiously avoided using IT but next week we are looking at telephone technique and I would like to do some recordings and show some videos or play some existing recordings. The only solution is to become completely independent by downloading all necessary videos and audio files onto my laptop and making sure that I don't leave the house without a pair of speakers as well. It's very time-consuming to do it all myself like this. And I thought things were moving forwards. Thank goodness I don't have to bring the electricity generator as well!

In addition to a low tech working environment I have also been concerned about the low tech school environment experienced by my daughter recently. At last she was given a project task to do. She and 2 others chose to find out the history of the Beatles. Their immediate reaction, encouraged by the teacher, was to get some books on the topic. Unfortunately the school library is not very big and doubles as the community library. So they needed to order relevant books through the inter-library service which would take 2 or 3 weeks.

Never mind. The Internet must be a rich source of information. So last Friday my daughter and one of her team mates spent an hour and a half trying to access a school computer. They trailed from one machine to another before finally deciding that perhaps it would be better to start a joint document about their project. But they didn't manage to find a single machine which could open the word processing program. I am flabbergasted that in this day and age in a country which regularly tops the IT use league, that this should happen.

The only reason that the group got anything done in the end was because I had gone into my own school library and borrowed three books for them to work from in the meantime. I also talked with a colleague who is the author of two books about the history of rock music in Denmark whether he would be willing to talk with the project group and of course he was. However my daughter is not used to thinking about research methods and thought this sounded a bit whacky as a source of information. Finally I posted on two Danish blogs asking if there was anybody out there who was a screaming Beatles fan and why they did it! No response so far.

I may have interfered far too much already. However I think that this is an unacceptable situation and I have contacted 4 key people in the school to ask them what is going to be done. The answer I got is that they replace machines as the budget allows and that they will soon have wireless internet access in the building. This doesn't address the book issue, nor the issue of students being able to produce electronic documents with relative ease. There is also an issue about research methods which is not being addressed but I didn't even mention that. One step at a time.

I think that it is deeply ironic that I am worrying about the fine detail of a Web 2.0 training course for teachers while my own daughter is not being offered even the basics in the standard state school.

Having just spent the best part of an hour removing spam comments from my comment wall and various old blog posts here, I have had to lock the door once again and only allow comments by logged in users.

I do this most reluctantly because for me the whole point is to enable dialogue here. I wonder if anything has changed from a technical point of view which made me vulnerable to spam comments. Perhaps the snazzy anti-spam widget on eduspaces was re-set after all the TIG brou-ha-ha and I have to go somewhere and switch it on again.

This is a refreshingly angry song hankering after the 'good old Denmark' of the hippy town of Christiana and beyond. WARNING: Contains some strong Anglo Saxon language among the Danish. The singer, Natasja, was killed in a car crash last June but the song has been in the charts for weeks since the beginning of this year. She also recorded a traditional Danish song, 'i Danmark er jeg født' (in Denmark was I born) about how lovely Denmark is, set against a reggae beat, refreshingly multi-cultural in a country where conformity is the tradition. She may be better known outside Denmark for her hit Calabria.

Another surprise was to turn on the car radio last week only to hear the dulcet tones of Alice Cooper. No, this was not an interview. He was hosting a music program and apparantly does this 5 nights a week. Yes, it's syndicated but still it was a bit of a shock amongst the usual Danish and occasional German that I usually pick up. And it makes me wonder what I'm doing going round teaching English here if people can listen to an English language show 5 times a week.

The latest episode of Absolutely Intercultural focuses on the Arab world as perceived through European eyes and features experiences in Egypt, the Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as experienced by an American, a Latvian and three Spanish sisters. Recurring themes are about the importance, or lack of it, of time and the segragation of the sexes. The show also emphasises the benefits of learning even a little Arabic.

What is not immediately apparent is the amount of work which has gone into producing this particular show after our original blog was somehow infected by a virus which meant that we were no longer able to edit the content. With a new host with helpful staff we feel that we have are now on a surer footing. Those who were subscribing with iTunes may have missed show 54 but this show, number 55, seems to be registring with existing subscribers as normal so our fingers are crossed that there won't be any problems in that direction.

And of course all our troubles started almost to the day that our podcast was nominated for a Danish podcasting prize. Only now that things seem back to normal do I feel confident enough to ask for more nominations if you have been enjoying what you have been hearing on the podcast to date. What it says on the podcast blog: