nabosprog :: Blog

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.

I was interested to find out that a course is being run in Ning about Web 2.0 tools in business. I am curious as to how a course can be administered in Ning and so have joined up. Find it at http://workliteracy.ning.com/ What is also interesting is that participants have the opportunity of three levels of commitment.

1. Spectator

2. Joiner/collector

3. Creator

And so each level gets a different task. Now that's what I call differentiation! This is only good for life long learning activities unfortunately and could not be accommodated in a an exam-oriented course. There is another model though and that is George Siemens and Stephen Downes Connectivism course where there are two levels of involvement, one of which is the engaged and active level leading to certification.

Since being asked to teach a class called 'Communication and IT' I have been looking around for inspiring materials. Coincidentally I joined yet another Ning Community one of whose members was Dennis O'Connor who drew attention to an amazing array of materials, lesson plans and interactive games to make students more aware about effective internet searching, website evaluation and so on. Even though the materials are in English I intend trying some of them out with my Danish students. In fact there are far too many resources for me to make use of them all but I particularly liked the keyword challenges and the web evaluation tool. Then I discovered even more in this area while I was exploring what Flowgram could do and watched this web tour by  N Norris about information literacy which inlcudes 21st century Information Fluency and much more besides.

Actually it's not over yet. We started a couple of weeks ago with some online introductory exercises through the course website for which we use Moodle. Some of the participants wondered why there was an online introduction but as I explained to them during the two day face to face part of the course this was a way of giving them the experience of using online tools before we met. It seems that this needs to be emphasised more so that its purpose is clearer.

There were 12 participants in the end after a couple of cancellations. The face to face part of the course was an opportunity to see pedagogical examples of the main Web 2.0 tools in use and to try them out on a practical basis. So every participant had an opportunity to start a blog, produce a part of a podcast and edit a wiki. There was also a lightening introduction to social bookmarking, personal webpages and social networking using Ning as an example. It was especially the pedagogical examples which inspired participants to think in concrete terms how they could apply some of these tools in their own teaching.

It was interesting that a couple of them started thinking in terms of how to disseminate the ideas to colleagues rather than looking at the design of a specific teaching module. This is also a good result for the project because we are looking at having a multiplier effect.

We had used an adaptation of the LOTI lesson plan as inspiration for planning. This is a form to be filled in and our participants suggested that it should be a checklist rather than a form and being familiar with the pressure of full time teaching I can understand completely why this would be a more useful approach.

So now the participants have returned home to work on their teaching plans and try them out. We will be keeping in contact over the next five weeks or so and will meet one last time for a mini-online conference using one of the synchronous meeting tools we used to get in contact with Niels Damgaard in Oslo and Karin Høgh in Copenhagen,

I am really looking forward to finding out what this very mixed group of teachers come up with.

I am now testing Moonjee, that is fun. You can upload pictures and change the face in the picture. Change expression, hair and ethnic background.  Here is a picture of myself as an african.

 

 I have joined several Nings and generally get very little traffic in my email as a result. This is strange since some of them such as Classroom 2.0 have 11,000 members and are very active. Keeping up with what is going on here has been my main worry because otherwise I like the ease with which you can add all manner of multi-media and discuss it here. So after Helen and Cris took the initiative to organise a Ning exploration session I think I am a little wiser or at least can begin to see a way forward.

The key lies in using the RSS feeds. There is no RSS feed for the whole site but if you go to the main page you will notice RSS feeds available for all blog posts, latest activity and forum posts.When you click on the orange RSS icon you are directed to a strange looking page. You need to copy the URL and add it to one of the following

1. Outlook The latest version of Outlook (2007) now has RSS as one the available folders among the usual Inbox, Sent, Junk and so on.
2. Explorer and other browsers. The latest versions will have a feed collector button in the tool bar which you can use to collect feeds.
3. Bloglines is a program you can use to collect feeds. There are others such as Feedburner.
4. Aggregator/personalised webpages such as Pageflakes, Netvibes, iGoogle or Protopages. You can add the chosen RSS feeds to these pages and make that page your start page so that is the first thing you see every time you turn on the internet.

So I will be adding the Ning RSS feeds to my Netvibes page which is my start page and on which I have summaries of all the blogs I am interested in. I have already added two of the Ning RSS feeds to the VITAE Moodle entry page.

Today's session with Helen and Cris during which we discussed various aspects of Ning has also clarified for me how to administer course activity within Ning.

I have a group of participants who have started in Moodle and who I will be meeting face to face at the end of the month. The blog function in Ning is ideal as a way of introducing participants to blogs outside of the locked Moodle course but I think that our participants will feel safer if their blog postings have a restricted readership at least at first. How to achieve this? My proposed solution is that participants befriend each other and me and therefore everytime they post they can choose to make posts only available to their friends. This will make sure that they can have the safe restricted audience until they have the confidence to allow their blog posts to become more public.

Every summer just south of Aarhus there is a Viking Moot at the Mosegaard Museum. This means that people wanting to live as Vikings meet and camp for a week by the sea. At the closing weekend the public are invited in to eat Viking food buy Viking handicrafts, see a display of Viking horsemanship and watch as a battle unfolds. We don't go every year but I have been several times as we enjoy the charred pancakes, spit roasted meat and sometimes splash out on traditional hanidicraft items. We also enjoy spotting the anachronisms such as the watches, glasses and mobile phones which some of the Vikings wear.

I had always been intrigued by the English voices I heard especially among the warriors so this year I decided to speak with representatives from the different groups for the Absolutely Intercultural podcast.

When speaking to the museum representative I discovered that the Mosegaard Moot was the first in the world and from the British warrior I learned that it was the Brits who introduced the mock battles. From the wife of a horseman I learned that the Viking period was particularly attractive because that was the heyday of Denmark as a world power. And from a wandering minstrel I learned that the Vikings included many non-Scandinavian people as well.

In the end it seemed that the Viking identity connected with a far wider group than simply Scandinavians and that its manifestations were so wide that it attracted a wide range of people.

I love this illustration for the latest edition of Absolutely Intercultural mainly because I think it cannot possibly be authentic. My colleague in Germany, Laurent Borgmann has been examining email culture and there is lots of good advice for making sure that your emails are read and acted upon. The point is made that different cultures of accepted practice exist in different companies and that you don't have to cross national boundaries to meet this phenomenon.

This edition also looks at teacher and student exchanges and warns that you don't necessarily learn what you think you 're going to learn. You may have your preconceptions confounded for example about the conditions you will meet in Poland and the content of a business course may take second place to the leaps and bounds you will make in your English when that is the only common language in the mixed student group.

‘absolutely intercultural!’

Tags: absolutelyintercultural, email, Borgmann

At the kick-off meeting for the VITAE project, our visiting guest, Ewan McIntosh sowed the seed of an unconference and we decided that we should try it out in our next meeting. Before the second meeting in Remagen which was last week, we set up a wiki for people to add their names and topics. Our German hosts were meticulous in their planning and we held the unconference in a restaurant in Bonn one evening where we would have a room to ourselves.

We even decided to record the contributions. However the restaurant had misunderstood our request and a large group of noisy guests were shown into the room. So we had to change the format to deal with the new circumstances and instead of 7 minute contributions from each speaker, we settled on 2 minutes for each speaker and 10 minutes or so for follow up questions and discusssions so that it looked more like a natural conversation. Some participants felt that it was rather late in the day to be exercising the brain but overall I think we felt it was very stimulating.

Topics tackled included:
1. How I am going to tackle the 6 week course on Communication and IT so that students produce digital artifacts and connect with people outside of the classroom.
2. How I use FURL in my daily working life.
3. Are digital tools just a fad?
4.The indispensable tools in my working life.
5. How I organise my studies in a personal wiki
6. Potential for student exercises using mapping tools.

I have a feeling that the format we adopted in the end, short intro with discussion follow-up, will be incorporated into future project meetings and other events, but perhaps without the noisy neighbours!

Tags: Remagen, Bonn, unconference, euvitae, VITAE

With the Olympics in full swing it seemed obvious to turn my attention to China this time round for the podcast. Yaodong Chen, an English teacher at Guangxi University in Liuzhou and one of his students Justina, currently working as an intern, gave me an insider view of how the Chinese felt about the games when I asked them about whether they would be watching the games or not. As expected they saw the games as a tremendous opportunity for the world to learn more about China. Rightly or wrongly the Chinese feel misunderstood.

So what are the intercultural aspects of the Olympic Games? The list is long and could begin with the opening ceremony which was a lesson in world geography with the majority of the world’s countries represented, even those currently in conflict such as Afghanistan and Georgia as well as many small nations such as Andorra and Cape Verde.  Be honest, how many flags did you recognize? I was also struck by the number of parading athletes using their mobile phones mostly to take pictures but also in conversation. The formality of the occasion has obviously been very much reduced. I can feel a theme for a future show coming on! More inter-cultural aspects of the Olympic Games? Well how about, is it about individuals and teams or about countries? I know many people are simply looking at the medal tally for each country but in the Olympic Charter it does explicitly say, and I quote:

‘The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries.’

A recurring theme seems to be homework in China (children were too busy doing homework to spend time on sport). This reminded me of an interesting initiative happening in the USA at the moment called 2 million minutes.  That is the amount of time available to the typical teenager to qualify themselves for university in high school. The project is making a series of films documenting how teenagers in India, China and the USA are spending their time during this critical period and it will be no surprise to learn that the Chinese students spend a great deal of time doing homework compared to the Americans. Although you need to buy the main film there are many short clips available for free on the project website and on You Tube. One of them features Bob Compton, the executive producer, giving his answer to a typical question about how students in China feel when they get low marks. Rather than feeling that this means they are no good at the subject, the reaction is instead that they need to work harder in order to succeed.

I also talked at length with Ken Carroll, an Irish man who has been living in Shanghai for over 14 years. Ken was a contact because he is in charge of a growing number of language podcast sites including Chinese Pod, French pod, Spanish Pod, Italian Pod and soon also Arabic Pod. Under the banner of Praxis language the Pod approach is to produce short podcasts of the language being used in context so that Ken reckons that it shouldn't be difficult to pick a smattering of Chinese in this way. There is a lot more behind the Pod language sites and we will return to this topic in a later podcast.

The show, inevitably, is just an impressionistic view of one of the most international events in existence.

Tags: absolutelyintercultural, podcast, China, Beijing, Olympics, Praxis Language, two million minutes,