Language Lab :: Blog

When I told my husband on the eve of leaving for Oslo that I was going to give a talk without Powerpoint, he told me I was very brave, which is enough to shatter the self-confidence of any forthcoming speaker! I had been invited to speak at the NFF-NADE conference on Lifelong Learning on the topic of what every teacher should know about using Web 2.0 and had decided that I should use a Web 2.0 tool to deliver a session about Web 2.0. So I made a netvibes page and opened the internet pages I wanted to talk about because they don't show up that well in Netvibes and used that as the backbone of my session. The 6 main points I wanted to make were that using Web 2.0 tools is about

1. Low threshold applications

2. Collaborating

3. Joining (in order to preserve artefacts)

4. Sharing

5. Remixing

6. Being careful about privacy, spam avoidance, copyright

I gave the talk in Danish because Danish and Norwegian are mutually understandable but as a non-native speaker I had difficulty in understanding spoken Norwegian (though reading is easy). There was a very important question about the legitemacy of the Mixwit site where you can make tailored digital 'cassette' tapes which made me look more closely at the TOS when I got home. They certainly seem to think that what they are doing is not breaking any copyright law.

NFF-NADE are partners in the VITAE project and so this was also an opportunity to report on how we are doing in our pilots of courses to enable teachers to mentor their colleagues in the use of such tools.

The Netvibes idea worked quite well although some of the lettering was too small even on a big screen. And of course I had a Powerpoint in my back pocket ready in case the Internet did not work! Unfortunately I did not pay as much attention to the Powerpoint knowing that it was a back-up and now it has ended up on the NFF_NADE website as a record of my session which was not the intention.

I was not the only one to eschew Powerpoint with one presenter opting for a mind map as the main resource for his session. But even he had a very short Powerpoint with a complicated diagram as part of the message he wanted to get across so it looks as though Powerpoint is not redundant yet.

When I first got into correspondance with Zohre Ovezlieva from Turkmenistan I am afraid that I had to look it up in a new atlas to find out where the country was. I was interested to find out that Zohre had been working as a local organiser for the American Peace Corps for the last 13 years especially since I think that the Peace Corps has produced some of the best educational materials for learning about intercultural communication that are currently available.

I learned from Zohre that roles in Turkmenistan are divided according to gender and to age and devised the following intercultural conundrum from Zohre's account of how some of the American Peace Corps volunteers react to the situation they meet in their homestay families.

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You go to stay at the home of a family in Turkmenistan and you notice that you never see the older daughter. She is always in the kitchen cooking or doing housework and she does not eat together with the family. Why is this? Is it because

a) the family do not want their precious first born daughter to mix with foreigners

b) the first daughter is always the least favoured in Turkmen families or

c) it is traditional for the eldest daughter to do all the household chores

The next question is would it be possible for you to get to know her better?

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The answer can be heard in the latest edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast. What was also interesting was that Zohre decided to put herself to the test by traveling to America for a month to find out what it is like being a foreigner in a country which is very different from your own. There she had to get used to speaking with strangers such as bus drivers and shop assistants but also had to learn to remember that Americans would not automatically feed her when she arrived but would instead expect an honest answer to the enquiry 'Are you hungry?', a question she was not at all used to being asked.

Closer to home I was able to meet with the Fun Fearless Female of 2008, Signe Møller. The award was given to her by the Danish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine for her work in setting up a charity to help disadvantaged chidren in Kenya. Signe's charity is called 100percent2the children because she wants to give donors the choice of supporting her projects directly or indirectly by designating funds for administration. Signe found herself in Kenya as a result of a career break. Kenya was the place which spoke to her most strongly after volunteering in projects there, in South Africa and in India. Her training as a Chaos Pilot gave her the tools and drive to decide to set up her own charity when she realised that existing charities were not helping in the way she thought best. Inevitably the question of corruption arose and Signe has experienced this both in the western donor organisations and in the recipient countries. As a result of the tumult in Kenyan politics she has noticed that the problem has worsened compared to last year.

I am intrigued by the Chaos Pilots course and intend to follow that up in more depth in a later podcast. A course which a rightwing Danish politician has tried to ban has to be worth investigating.

My final contact in this podcast was the Nicaraguan ambassador to Denmark, HE Ricardo José Alvarado Noguera, who visited our school to speak with the students. Coming from a country dependent on aid and remittances for 33% of its GNP he was very aware of the connectedness of the countries of the world. He put things very concretely when he said that if you make the world safe outside of Denmark, you make Denmark safer.

I was invited to be one of the speakers at this purely online conference and used the opportunity to present some preliminary results of the VITAE project. This was under the theme of E-learning for trainers.

You can hear the audio here and see the slides below or see the presentation as it appeared in Elluminate here.

Although I have given several online talks before this one was more nerve-wracking than usual because I arrived in the conference 5 minutes after finishing my teaching session and had only worked out a couple of hours previously where I could go where I would have both Internet access and relative peace. So I hope that I did not sound too harassed.

The 2-day event included 3 other webheads and a colleague in Denmark who I have only recently met face to face so I felt I was amongst friends. I was reporting preliminary results of our mentor training pilot under the VITAE project and I guess the main message I conveyed to the audience from my participants was their lack of confidence in their own Web 2.0 skills.

The conference was organised by the Network of Trainers in Europe who are very active in connecting the many different activities going on under the heading of trainingin Europe.

MUVenation

We all explore new technologies, some grab our attention more than others, some seem revolutionary, others simply bore us. Tell us about that new tool, or set of tools, you have just discovered that really excites you, talk about the potential it has to change your work. What do you want to do with it?

These days I seem to see a reason to make online presentations through Slideshare, Slideboom or Slide Rocket at every turn. I especially like Slideboom because it can retain animations present in the original Powerpoint. This means that you can make games or presentations which really show you how to do things step by step by highlighting a different part of the picture in turn. I have used it to make free samples of a course we are marketing right now. I have used it to make explanatory videos. I have also just used it to make a virtual presentation in absentia by adding a voice over to the slides.

But I am sometimes alone in my enthusiasm for these tools. 'Why don't you just post a Powerpoint?' was one person's reaction. I obviously could not convey how much neater I thought this option was without seeing the presentation in edit format before it starts.

I see the greatest potential of these tools in being able to quickly make some short tutoring videos to explain all manner of things both technical and philosophical. On the technical side, a similar sort of set of tools are the screencast tools which seem to be mushrooming at the moment. I have just been introduced to UTIPu by Vance Stevens, a webhead, (see below about informal learning) which seems to do a fantastic job of recording what is going on on your screen.

MUVENation

I am your friend. I don’t work in education. You are talking to me about the idea that we all learn from each other, in all kinds of contexts, and that this can often be richer than more formal classroom based learning. I am sceptical. Tell me about an informal learning experience you have had online in which collaboration was involved, show me a concrete example to help me to see what you mean.

I am interested in the idea of informal learning but the concept seems a very slippery one. The reason that you get lots of hits when you google 'informal learning' is because people are trying to institutionalise informal learning especially in business. This seems rather contradictory.

I suppose that one of the areas in which I have learned the most informally is in the use of blogs and wikis in education. The initial motivation was the low start-up barriers but the additional motivation came from other educators sharing their examples of blog and wiki use especially through groups such as Webheads in Action. When somebody talks about their latest project in that group I have to be extremely busy not to click on the link to take at least a peek at what they have done. It is more than the constant stream of posts about neat new gadgets because I guess that you could get that in a great many other places such as Tech Crunch. What is really valuable is the chat about how to use these tools and learning from others' experiences. But trying to replicate the Webheads effect elsewhere is well nigh impossible. The key factor must be the people in the group.

This is learning even though there is no set syllabus. I follow up thse ideas which resonate with me and ignore those which don't fit my current situation. It sounds rather haphazard and it is but I have the option to steer the conversation by bringing up specific topics myself.

Could you live without email? How about your mobile/cell phone for a week? Do you feel a need to be constantly checking your Facebook account? Laurent Borgmann explores the 'always on' culture and finds out that even the most hardened users need time out on a regular basis in the latest absolutely Intercultural podcast show. It was good to catch up with news of Assja Tietz who was a key member of the Travelogue group I worked with on Achill in February and who has since studied in Australia and worked in Hungary.

In addition to preparing to moderate one of the EVOnline sessions in January and helping to finalise the tasks for the new Trinity College validated Cert ICT with The Consultants-E I have also signed up as a participant of the MUVEnation course to explore virtual worlds in education. The first task is to write a blog entry on three possible topics. I have chosen to start with the pioneer topic. The wording is as follows:

Do you see yourself as a pioneer? Do you think you are more innovative than others in your organisation? Do you think your organisation is lagging behind? Tell us how you feel about this?

I do not see myself as a pioneer but I know that others in my organisation do. I see myself simply as someone who is willing to take advantage of the new possibilities made available by the technology. I am not a great risk taker and yet I know that others see me in that light. A very banal example was about four years ago when I was exploring with an adult student the possibility of buying a book on Amazon rather than her ordering it in a Danish book shop. I wanted to know what the final price would be to her including all taxes and postage so I clicked on 'Buy' and she just shrieked in fright because she had not understood that this was not a firm commitment to buy yet.

My organisation consists of a constellation of smaller organisations and we are not used to thinking of ourselves as an entity although that view is being promoted by the management as a survival mechanism. I am therefore used to thinking of my own small part of the organisation as my sphere of influence and we are so diverse here that it is difficult to transfer the way I use ICT in language learning to the other disciplines in my small centre. We have for example a small team of management trainers who take people out in the woods for experiential exercises and they see very little potential in ICT to support their courses even though I can see potential for pre and post course activity.

I have not been very good at dissemination and this may contribute to my image as a pioneer! However whenever anybody shows an interest I help willingly so there are some blog users in the centre and other teachers have used online meetings for example.

In some ways I do feel that our organisation is falling behind but then again I do feel that the role of language is overlooked. Most of the ICT tools we get excited about originate in English speaking countries or are presented in English first. Translations are always low on the list of priorities and I notice that these days translation is the user's responsibility anyway using the power of collective voluntary activity. It may be surprising to find language mentioned as a barrier in a Scandinavian country where 'everybody speaks English' anyway but in fact I have noted many times irritation that an extra layer of complexity to adoption of these tools is that you have to use a language which is not your mother tongue. So that may be a big part of why I am the pioneer in this area in my organisation, because English sources of information are my first port of call.

I am actually tired of being called a pioneer because I don't think that I am one at all. What I mainly do is copy other people's ideas and adapt them to my own situation. I would love to be able to work with colleagues on better and more effective implementation of ICT because I am sure that with more people on the case we could come up with some stunningly effective learning activities instead of just relying on my own resources. Therefore I do not think that I more innovative than my colleagues.

There is a great deal of professional development for teachers available in blended format and an increasing number of online only Masters courses which could help language teachers get to grips with introducing technology into their teaching. There is also a great deal of purely online development available online for free, the best of these being the EVOnline raft of courses available for start every January. One can learn a great deal from these but they do not give certification or recognition. So if the latter are important then the new Cert ICT validated by Trinity College in London could be the perfect compromise between a long and expensive Masters and the short and free but uncertificated EVOnline courses. In the interests of disclosure I should mention that I have a foot in both camps being both an EVOnline moderator for the first time in January 2009 and having been taken on to finalise the course tasks of the CERT ICT.

I am very pleased to be on the materials team putting together the course tasks in readiness for a first run starting January. The course will last six months, be 100% online and is scheduled to take 120 hours of study time. It was devised by The Consultants-E, a pioneering international company specialising in language teacher training. The Cert ICT has been developed at the same time as another Trinity validated course Cert IBET, Certificate in International Business English Training which will also be offered through the Consultants-E. The approach will be very hands-on and participants should have a wide range of usable materials by the end of the course.

I am always reluctant to devote a whole podcast to just one person but that is almost what I have done in the last Absolutely Intercultural show devoted to the 2 Million Minutes project. I gave it a brief mention in show 66 and was delighted when the instigator of the project, Bob Compton agreed to talk with me about it. His approach is not primarily intercultural. He sees a gap between the American and Indian and Chinese educational systems and is concerned for the economic future of Americans as a result of what he sees. He has chosen to convey that concern through the making of films following the lives of 6 typical high school students in America, India and China which highlight the differences in each system. But his diagnosis of the problem is 100% intercultural and that was what interested me. One of the differences was in parental aspirations with American parents expressing that their child's happiness was the main concern while the Indian and Chinese parents have high career and academic aspirations for their children. The difference which first caught my attention was in the reaction to low marks. In America this means that you're no good at that subject and better try something else while in China, it is an indication to try harder. Another stark difference was in the applications to university which in India and China relied solely on school examination results whereas in the States many other factors are taken into account including the current needs of the university sports teams!

A recurring theme in my conversations with Bob Compton was about how Europe compared and since I am not really familiar with the American system I could not really say. Therefore I was glad to have the opportunity of speaking with High School student Brittany Alcorn from New Mexico who is on a year long Rotary Youth exchange year in Denmark. She certainly seemed to indicate that the Danish students were ahead in the technical and science subjects but not as far ahead as the Indian and Chinese students seemed to be. (You can check for yourself by trying to answer some questions from the Indian High School exam on the 2 Million Minutes website).

A frequently voiced objection is that concentration on academic subjects makes for a very one-dimensional person but Bob's experience seemed to show that this was not the case. He describes meeting programmers who knew more about Shakespearean literature than he did and the podcast also features the accordian playing of the Chinese translator.

I guess that there is a sizable majority who will argue that there is more to life than physics and chemistry ten hours a day but Bob makes a very powerful case with his film which should at least make people stop and think about our current educational system.

The culture of teaching and learning is a rich topic to explore. Not only are there the stereotypical differences between learning by memorising and learning by doing but there are also differences across generations and this is particularly noticeable when you work in adult education. In this case your participants have clear expectations about what is going to happen in the classroom based on their prior experience. For these people it can be just as big a culture shock to come into the participative and experiential classroom as visiting another country.

Teaching Culture was the name of a project I participated in a couple of years ago when we developed an international training course to encourage teachers in adult education to include more cultural awareness and cultural competency aspects in their courses. The coordinating partner for that project was the German Volkshochschule Rhein-Sieg and I was delighted to be invited to take part in their workshop day on September 7th which was just after the VITAE project meeting ended nearby in Remagen.

Knowing how keen VHS in general and VHS Rhein-Sieg in particular are on training I was surprised to discover that the idea of a teacher workshop/conference day was new. In fact it was the closing event of the Teaching Culture project 2 years ago which had given them the idea. In addition to the workshop I gave with Laurent Borgmann about using digital tools in learning there was a wide variety of topics explored that day including Suggestopedia, learning styles and using songs in French teaching.

Inevitably Laurent and I could not let this opportunity go and we were both armed with our recorders. The first results of our conversations are the topic of the latest Absolutely Intercultural show in which we find out about the generation differences in attitudes to learning, the gender bias in adult education and the need to include fun in learning. In the case of the workshop day this included a wonderfully multi-cultural lunch and to round off the day a musical performance by Mauricio Virgens from Brazil and Andres Villamil from Colombia who played for us and 'bossanovarised' our lives a little. Included in the podcast are extracts of the music we heard and an explanation of how Mauricio sees himself as a cultural ambassador for his country through his music and acerbic observations about life in Germany as a Brazilian.