I attended another of the Language Lab events in Second Life recently which was a conversation with Jessie Dunford Wood, one of a growing number of British celebrity chefs. This phenomenon is in inverse relationship with the reputation of British cuisine. Have you been to a British restaurant lately or do you still prefer the Italian, French, Chinese or Thai? During the conversation Jessie mentioned that he thought that the athletes participating in the 1948 Olympics in London had been asked to bring their own food. This was not so much because the British did not expect any of the athletes to take to British cuisine but more because Britain was still in the throes of rationing after the war. After making the recording I did a bit of research which led me to the National Archives where you can see photographs of actual memos written at the time and read extracts from a number of concerned officials. It seems that the athletes were not required to bring their own food but more that they were invited to bring supplies with the promise that these would not be subject to import duty. So the Argentinians brought beef while the Mexicans went out to local restaurants instead of eating their British rations.  It seems from the memos that ’the habit of regarding food as a precious commodity was foreign’ to the Mexican. I found the story intriguing enough to include it in the latest edition of the podcast.

Also in the podcast is a recording of part of the closing event of a European project using sound in vocational education. The recording is of a Skype video link between the project participants in Aarhus, Denmark and a partner instution in Turkey. The conversation was not planned. There was no agenda. So the topics which were raised were rather general but even so careful listening reveals some cultural misunderstandings. The Turks were asked about student support for university study and it took a long time for them to understand that what the Danes were asking about was a student grant for living expenses rather than just tuition fees. I think that Denmark is one of the few European countries to retain  such generous support to university students. Another example was when the Turks were asking about a potential exchange of skills in the carpentry field. The person who fielded that question had obviously been to Turkey with carpentry students already and you can hear him struggling to explain that the styles favoured in Turkey probably wouldn't go down well with the minimalist preferences of Scandinavian customers. The project was called Brydlydmuren in Danish which means 'Break the sound wall'. On the project website you can find a great deal of documentation to help teachers wanting to introduce sound work in their classrooms.

I have acquired what could turn out to be a very interesting teaching activity. It seems that there is a part of the high school curriculum here in Denmark called IT in communication which is an interesting mixture of learning about good design principles, search strategies, online identity, ethics as well as a general familiarisation with online tools such as blogs and podcasts. The strategy of the Technical School is to tackle this within an overall theme which links in with the Danish and sociology subjects as well. I attended a meeting last week at which we decided that the overall theme should be climate change. Not only that but there is also an international week included in the 6 week period which starts at the end of September. My reputation travels before me and they are obviously hoping that I can inject an international angle into the module as well.

As I have been writing a VITAE-related text this week I have been browsing materials about the Flat Classroom project and it occurred to me that this would be an ideal format to follow. Therefore I shall soon be looking for a partner classroom, ideally in India, but anywhere outside Denmark would be interesting so that we can do some joint work on global climate change. I have also thought that this would be an ideal testbed for piloting the lesson plan template which is part of Module 5 in our VITAE course. The final product of the project would be a video to illustrate some aspect of climate change and I would like to try and find an angle which is directly related to the students' lives. Possible avenues inlcude The Nag which is a UK website on which people report on their sustainable activities and the website collates these together to show the cumulative benefit. A similar website is The Carbon Account also mainly for the UK. I even had the idea of seeing if we could invite the most credible climate change naysayer or rather sceptic Bjørn Lomborg to speak with the students since he is based here in Denmark. The Flat Classroom project is incredibly complicated and involves judges and evaluators and now includes up to 5 schools at a time so I would aim for a more manageable two institution link up. A big unknown in all of this is how the students will react since I have not yet met them as they will be new first year students. I can be fairly certain that it will be a mainly male group but more than that I cannot say.

I want to get started in mid-August when my colleagues are back and available for consultation. I do hope for example that they don't change the theme we have decided! But in the meantime, does anyone have any good contacts in India?

An interesting question and when I think about it, I am surprised that it took us this long (show 61) to get round to making a whole show of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast about it. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that most people instinctively feel or have learned that stereotypes are wrong, both factually and morally, so that it is difficult to get people to talk openly about them and especially about any stereotypes they may hold. So this latest show is refreshingly honest and contains some very politically incorrect views. Congratulations to Laurent Borgmann for grasping the nettle.

He begins with a very barbed paragraph from Bill Brysons 'Neither here nor there' about the French not understanding the purpose of queues and continues by talking to a Spanish student who very nearly did not come to Germany based on the stereotypes she and her entourage held about that country.

There is also a an interesting perspective from a Mexican American who seems only to know about the negative stereotypes of both parts of her identity. And the show ends with a conversation about whether there is any value in stereotypes with Austrian educator, Nicole Slupetsky.

If you think that your stock of stereotypes is rather low then this is definitely the show for you!

In June 2007 I was blogging about watching Wimbledon on Live UK TV courtesy of their free week offer. Of course that could not last and this year I found that the free week trial specifically excluded BBC1 and BBC2, the channels which carry live Wimbledon matches. So I decided that the best bet would be to buy the $25 deal from Mediazone, especially given the tumbling value of the US dollar these days.

At first everything went well and I was very impressed by the quality of the picture but as the tournament wore on and interest in the deciding matches rose I suddenly found that my access to the stream was impossible. Taking advantage of the live help I was guided through a myriad of adjustments to make sure that my Digital Rights Management were in order, my media player and so on. However I began to suspect that the stream simply could not cope with demand. Why otherwise had it worked so well before? Nothing was helping and so we watched the Women's single final on a grainy Argentinian channel which managed to insert adverts in places which one had never before dreamed that adverts could be placed. Therefore we watched the Mediazone archive later in the day. The next day was the Men's single finals and by that time I had discovered that the Danish satellite channel was streaming that free of charge so we watched that as it was better than the blurred Argentinian channel. I don't know if the whole tournament was available from the Danish channel online or whether this was just a teaser to get new customers for the paying satellite channel.

So once again, I don't know what I will be doing to watch Wimbledon next year. The Mediazone stream was great while the early matches were being played but I suspect that they simply tried to distract me with suggestions that my DRM were not in order or that I had not updated the media player because everything worked fine for the first one and a half weeks. I am also rather irritated that I have been asked to alter a whole range of settings on my daughters' laptops which may now cause problems in the future. I was even asked to turn off my firewall at one point.

Tags: Wimbledon, streaming, Mediazone

I was in the UK last week for a brief visit and one essential activity is always to take a browse in the nearest bookshop. I had no particular goal in mind and good as Amazon and its ilk are at locating and sending you books which you have decided  you want, they still remain rather bad for browsing and for making serendipitous discoveries.

Therefore I was very pleased last week to find a book entitled 'The Creative Teaching and Learning Kit' by Brin Best and Will Thomas. I like it for many reasons.

I like it because, although written with the UK school system in mind it is sufficiently general to be widely applicable beyond school and beyond UK borders. Often wide appeal means that the advice is too general to be of use but I would say that the book is chock full of ideas which can be used immediately in many settings.

I liked also the very first chapter on visions and values because I have been looking for inspiration about teacher values for several weeks now in connection with the VITAE project. The section manages to convey the theory while at the same time presenting some very clear and concrete actions to allow one to find out which value clusters you and other stakeholders most closely identify with.

I also like its multi-facetted approach employing visualisation techniques, aspects of multiple intelligences and NLP in a healthily sceptical manner. You don't have to buy into these theories to see the value of employing some of their techniques.

When I got the book home I discovered that there should have been a CD-Rom with it. I have since acquired the CD-ROM but am not convinced how much this adds to the overall value of the book since it only contains electronic versions of some of the forms in the book.

Not surprisingly the book is in the running for the 2008 Education Resources Award.

Finally there is a website to accompany the book at http://www.creativityforlearning.co.uk/ so that you can get a flavour of the approach.

In May I attended the SLanguages conference in Second Life where one of the most interesting sessions was given by Canadian, Mark Karstad, until recently instructional designer at Dubai Women's College in the United Arab Emirates. The session could only take place through text messaging because the telephone monopoly in the UAE precludes the use of audio communication via the Internet.

The challenge faced by Mark and his colleagues is that they are training female students to become business graduates and Dubai is becoming more and more cosmopolitan as tourists and business people flock in ever larger numbers to the country but there is a tradition of fairly strict gender separation. The DWC offer field trips for their students for example to a Chinese trade fair but out of a cohort nearing 300 only about 13 chose to go. The solution which Mark and his colleagues came up with was to organise virtual field trips and exchanges in second life.

This is not a straightforward solution since there is much in Second Life to shock but there is also a great deal which is highly educational in the form of recreations of various real places in the world and there is also the opportunity to meet people virtually and exchange experiences and opinions in a live dialogue.

So for example Mark and his students participated in a virtual exchange with colleges in South Korea and the USA. He also found a range of 'safe' destinations such as Islam Online and Darfur which are rich in intercultural experience.

In Second Life you need an online representation of yourself called an avatar and it is your avatar which moves around this virtual world. You choose what your avatar looks like, which clothes to wear and how your avatar behaves. (Some people choose their avatars to be fantasy creatures eschewing the human form altogether). So the first intriguing question was how would the women of Dubai chose to represent themselves? Would it be their public persona dressed oin the long, dark abaya and shayla headdress or would it be the fashionable clothes underneath these garments? According to Mark there was no doubt among the students that they should appear as they do in private (ie in all-female company). But this led them to a major intercultural incident when they visited Islam Online and were told off by a concerned Saudi visitor for not being appropriately dressed in this virtual representation of Mecca.

Back in real life there were also many standards which Mark had to adhere to as a non-family male person in a female institution. For example no matter what their status in the institution, all males have to pause and knock before entering a classroom in case some of the students did not have their abayas on. Another potentially fraught issue was that of jostling students as you move around the college and Mark is able to claim that he never once made physical contact with any student in the five years that he worked at the college. Only this morning I bumped into someone while shopping so I can imagine what self-awareness that must have taken.

The Second Life session which Mark led was text only so I was eager to speak live with him. The results of our conversation form the whole of the latest Absolutely Intercultural podcast. Mark has also been involved in other interesting projects and I hope to be able to speak with him again soon about these.

In Denmark children have a class teacher who follows them throughout their school career from 6-15 years old. Our local village school only goes up to 12 years old but even so my children could expect to have the same class teacher throughout that time. The class teacher of my younger daughter has just taken leave to do further studies and so the class will have a new teacher when they return in a couple of weeks.

Before she left, my daughter's former class teacher gave each of the children a CD on which were hundreds of photographs which she had taken of them since they started school. I suspect that this would not be allowed in the UK school system. However I must say that I appreciated this collection for many reasons. It is nice to get a glimpse into a large part of my daughter's life which I otherwise don't have much access to. I guess that she will appreciate the archive when she is older (assuming that technology does not leave the CD behind as a storage medium). It has also changed my view of my daughter's schooling a little. I have the impression that the Danish schooling system swings too much in favour of analysing the social climate to the detriment of actual learning but being confronted by over 1000 photos I can be reminded that my daughter has had a multitude of experiential learning opportunities over and above the more organised trips such as to a Viking museum in May.

The pictures show them visiting a local pig farm (unpleasant but educational), the local tractor shop, trips to the homes of various classmates where for example there were horses, trampolines, ponds and other attractions to explore, the making of stone age tools (suitably masked with plastic goggles of course) and a myriad of other more mundane activities such as counting tree rings and hatching some chicks in the classroom, which they have undertaken over the five years 2003-2008.

Many of the pictures come from their outdoor lessons which were a part of the school timetable until they were about nine years old and so there is a preponderance of pictures of food preparation over the bonfire such as the one I have included in this post featuring my own daughter.