SSwID :: Blog

I find myself teaching AS ICT to a few of the senior school's pupils this year. Quite a difference from the running the prep school stuff that makes up the majority of my day, but none the worse for that. We're following the new WJEC specification, although we've held off switching to Welsh as the medium of instruction for the time being. The coursework side includes quite an emphasis on 'presenting information', which, given my students are also studying art or photography, is allowing them to produce some impressive work.
Now our new media suite is up and running, today was the first chance we had to get started with InDesign, and a very good start it was too. We have our sixth form open evening coming up tomorrow, so we spent the lesson modifying one of the InDesign templates to produce some rather nice posters illustrating various ICT related concepts, using Flickr as a source for photos. Herre's one on Web 2.0, the main image c/o Will Lion:

 

My students were quite overwhelmed by Flickr. A great treat for me seeing it, as if for the first time, through their eyes - it's so easy to take sites like Flickr and Wikipedia for granted, but occasions like this do give one pause for thought as to how amazing it is the way that this technology lets us share our creativty and appreciate that of others.

 

Well, I know I'm really late coming to this particular party, but for the last week I've been spending time with Twitter, a micro-blogging, social networking tool. There's a really vibrant ed-tech community there, which it's pretty easy to link up with by just following the people followed by others (if you see what I mean), with a wonderfully rapid exchange of ideas: there's been much over the last week that I wouldn't have noticed or thought of without this twittering. It's also a great way of staying in touch with friends that I've been far too out of touch with of late. It's still early days for me at this, but it's been interesting exploring a few of the interfaces: I like twitterific, both on the desktop and the iphone, although the web interface isn't bad either. Also on the iphone, I have locly - which, as well as finding nearby flickr images, wikipedia articles, restaurants and the like, also displays geo-tagged tweets.
I'd love to try twitter at a conference. It would be really interesting to see this working in class or out on a school trip too; although I suspect a walled garden version would be a good idea for this.

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.

A really interesting day on Thursday as part of the 'Expert Reference Group' for Nottingham University's Becta sponsored CAPITAL project. The day was a Delphi style horizon gazing one, chatting about what we thought the trends and potential disruptions might be affecting technology assisted learning over the next five years. The process itself was a fascinating one as a degree of consesus gradually emerged, but it's probably not my place to pre-empt Nottingham's report.

Nevertheless, I see no reason not to record a few of my own hunches for where we might be heading, and where the biggest differences might come from. Five years are not that far ahead: the things that will be mainstream in primary education in 2013 are likely to be happening already on a small scale, perhaps overseas, perhaps in another sector or perhaps in a different field entirely.

I think, and indeed hope, that there's something of a swing back from the instrumentalist focussing on core skills that we've seen, with greater opportunity being made for creativity, independent learning, play and a child-centred approach, feeding in perhaps from the bottom up, with this sort of approach being given some prominence in the legally mandated EYFS.

Again, after the ring-binder years of national strategy schemes of work, I do hope we'll see a re-professionalizing of the, er, profession. The signs are encouraging: the plethora of Masters offered by universities and taken up by teachers, some of NCSL's work, the renewal of the subject associations and the opportunities for informal, networked professional development which technology like the TES forums and Web 2 make possible, to name just a few. Collaboratively content creation tools across all media bring at least the opportunities for teachers and students to take charge of the resources they use: moodle courses are proof that this can work, and work jolly well.

Following Jim Knight's announcement at BETT and the more recent one from the prime minister, I think the relationship between home and school is likely to strengthen, but I'd like to see this as a two way street: yes extending learning from the school into the home (perhaps even by VPN access to the school network), but also the other way, being more willing to acknowledge informal, home based learning in schools, and perhaps opening up the experience of ICT in schools to resemble more closely the richness, variety and interconnectedness of (some) students' use of technology at home.

I suspect there'll remain a place for institutional VLEs over the next five years, at least as a place for drawing together the resources and activities selected by the teachers or the institution. The really interesting stuff is likely to happen outside of the VLE, in best of breed tools fit for particular purposes: think Google Docs, blogs, diagram, graphics, photo, video editing and sharing; cloud computing. Gluing this together will be the PLE in one form or another, with seemless transition to an e-portfolio that's actually useful for end users. Doing this using existing tools might get tricky if the risk-aversion surrounding e-safety gets worse than it already is

The home access thing though might be a bit of a sideline, as the connectivity and tools present on high-end mobiles, like my treasured iphone, become the standard - each child having access to the semi-infinite resources of the net and their network of friends and family from their desk is going to be technically possible by 2013, less clear is whether it would be allowed. There's a convergence or collision point approaching (perhaps it's here already) between the school-provided tech (class sets of laptops, PDAs etc, often quite locked down), and the unrestricted access to the net which they (could) bring into school with them - smartphones and 3G dongles. The challenge is going to be finding ways of using this individual and possibly independent access to the net in ways that are genuinely educational - how to move the conversation, searches and content creation on from the trivial to the significant; much as it goes against the grain to say so, I suspect there's a role for syllabuses and qualifications here as some form of motivator, but then rich, formal+informal, multimedia e-portfolios (or just searching for a person on Google) will offer a different sort of motivation to contribute something that matters.

I think there's quite a creative tension is that between personalisation and community. The model of personalisation which appears to be advocated by the DCSF and Becta is based around that of tailored resources and activities a kind of educational longtail, which makes it difficult to preserve the social dimension of learning that's worked well these last 5000 years. On the other hand, where young people do exercise the choice and voice that I would see as integral to any true understanding of personalised learning, we see communities emerge - the net, and especially web 2.0, acting as a way of connecting learners together in a way that had previously been prohibitively difficult. The smart tech that web 3.0 should bring will perhaps provide the means to bridge this gap, and I'd expect to see increasing use made of datamining techniques as more and more assessment and pupil profile data moves online.

BSF will, I'd expect, continue over the medium term. I remain pessimistic about how this is going to leave schools in terms of the control and choice they have over their technology, but the above points relating to personal access to technology and resources for teachers and students might yet make that an irrelevance. In the longer term, one returns to the question of should we be Building Schools for the Future, given that so much that now characterizes the best of education can be mediated by technology in the home and in the real world. As with open content in HE (eg MIT, ITunesU, the OU, etc...), perhaps the institution does continue to offer value added: tutorial support (how's that for personalised), a face-to-face community and, obviously, accreditation.

A change of government might well happen between now and 2013: greater independence for schools (eg academies, Swedish style schools) would, probably, accelerate some of the above; a Daily-Mail inspired back-lash against technology assisted education and/or an e-safety panic might set some of this back quite significantly. Concern over climate change might well bring the possibilities of home-based learning higher up the agenda. Outsourcing and off-shoring of teaching in shortage subjects becomes more possible as technology improves, although their may be fewer (if any) shortage subjects if significant numbers move into teaching as the credit crunch leads people to seek more secure employment.

Five years, an eightfold increase in Moore's Law terms, isn't that long. Back in 2003, how much of today's mainstream ed-tech could have been predicted? Whiteboards, certainly, as there were already lots in use; VLEs, certainly, working from groupware applications in the real world and their use in HE; personalisation, perhaps, by looking at the way businesses were dealing with customers, and indeed Demos were doing leading work on this from a public sector perspective five years ago; m-learning, again yes, by analogy with PDAs in business; web 2.0's enthusiastic adoption by teachers, perhaps not so much. I wonder whether five years is enough for some of the above, and what the unexpected things will be...

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.

After a splendid summer holiday touring a number of north European cities, with visits to galleries, concert halls and churches, and the opening of our new performing and creative arts building, the arts have been much on my mind. They are set to form something of a focus to our work as a staff over the year ahead. I'm keen though to go beyond merely building on the work done in our music, art, drama and dance lessons; the opportunities afforded by making closer links between the arts and the rest of the curriculum are certainly to be seized, and I'm very excited about some of the ideas we've had: symmetry and pattern in maths, role play and other drama in the humanities, use of paintings as source material for history and geography lessons, cool digital arts stuff, etc. It promises to be an exciting year.

More exciting still though is the the notion of looking at our teaching as an art in itself; approaching our work in the classroom in a not dissimilar way to the way in which musicians, artists, actors and dancers approach their work. Three aspects of such an approach immediately come to mind.

Creativity. I'm eager to re-emphasize the essentially creative process of good teaching. A good lesson has, I think, at least something in common with the notion of a performance, with the uniqueness which that implies. The long tradition of teachers making their own resources in the primary sector is certainly one I'm keen to maintain, and of course digital technology should make it easier to adapt and refine resources from elsewhere - assuming they come with an open, creative commons licence that is. The notion of following lesson plans prepared in advance by the standards unit is, I'm afraid, anathema to me, although there's something to be said for using these as a starting point or inspiration: the MEP plans being a case in point. Working exclusively, or perhaps even mainly, from a published scheme, textbook or plans is, to my mind at least, hugely de-professionalising. What I'm really looking for though is a willingness to innovate, to push the boundaries, to try teaching things in a different way this time round, perhaps in a way that's entirely original. This is  going to be harder work, I know, but it's surely much more fun, and keeps the lessons fresh for teacher and student alike.

One can go further still, opening up the creativity to include the what as well as the how one teaches. I fear national curricula and exam specifications make this difficult, but surely not impossible, as these documents are minimal rather than maximal. I have fond memories of going way off syllabus to do stuff like Victorian mathematics (£.s.d, log tables etc) and cryptography back in my teaching days, creating resources from scratch myself, and providing a far richer mathematical diet for my pupils in the process.

Individuality. Not, of course, unrelated to the above, but I think if we are to see teaching as an art, then we have to allow a place for the individuality of the teacher - I think here about personalised teaching to sit alongside the personalised learning on which the DCFS places its emphasis. The system of  bringing a near random group of children of similar age and postcode together with a single adult places a heavy responsibility on that adult: there's far more to education than the skills, understanding and knowledge that we list in our curricula; the process of the formation of character is something that happens by example rather than instruction. I suspect that if most of us think back to the great teachers we had in our youth, then they will be the ones who brought something of themselves into the classroom; obviously a certain professional distance is expected, but we can contribute much to the all-round education of our pupils through sharing something of our all-round enthusiasms, rather than merely our subject expertise: something which extra-curricular activities, residential programmes, sports coaching and the house system perhaps still preserve. Given the choice, I think one looks for gifted eccentrics rather than team players - staff as jazz band rather than symphony orchestra, hard as that may be to manage.

The pursuit of excellence. I'm a great fan of opera: this summer was the first since moving down here that we didn't make it to Gyndebourne, but I remember reading that John Christie, who founded the thing, had this vision of a company that was relentless in the pursuit of perfection - something that remains a fond memory too of the choral singing back in my choir school days. I'm certain that this is something which there should be in artistic teaching too. I guess the notion of reflective practice comes close to this, as does our own school motto, "Be the best you can be". The pursuit of excellence is difficult though, because one so rarely has the time to do things perfectly - the time pressures and variety of commitments are the things that get in the way of truly artistic teaching; unlike the archetypal artist we just don't have the time to make every lesson a perfect one; that said, we do have the chance to edit, to review, to revise, to iterate towards that ideal, if not this year then for next: important as good planning is, its the critical evaluation of the lesson which allows the improvements to be made. I know that excellence such as that which characterizes great art is a high standard for this line of work, but perhaps for most of us it isn't the excellence that matters in the end, but the eagerness to aim for it. But then again, why settle for second best?

The other side of this is equally exciting - the way that artistic teaching, reflecting these qualities, leads to artistic learning, with just the same emphasis on creativity, individuality and the pursuit of excellence.

My speech to parents at this year's curriculum evening, with a focus on personalised learning...

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great pleasure to welcome all of you to this, our third prep school curriculum evening. The partnership between you and the school is so important to the education of your children,  and so it’s a great joy to see so many of you here this evening. I do hope you’ve found this opportunity to meet the teachers and view these wonderful displays a helpful one, and I’d like to say a big thank you to my colleagues for their contribution to this evening. Tonight though is just the beginning of this year’s dialogue about your son or daughter – please do stay in touch, don’t feel you have to wait for parents’ evenings!

In exploring our curriculum this year, I want to take the theme of personalisation – a concept much in vogue at the moment over in the maintained sector but, I think, something that has been at the heart of our approach to education for a long time now, and something which remains a touch stone to much of what we do.

Put simply, personalisation mean that the curriculum, understood as the whole of our planned provision, is tailored to the needs, the enthusiasms, the aspirations of each individual child. As Mrs Kirkham puts it, we count in ones here.

I don’t think this is anywhere more evident than with our very youngest children. I’m continually struck by the brilliant way that each child in our outstanding Early Years department is nurtured and challenged through the wonderful programme of activities and experiences that Mrs Corlett, Mrs Spooner, Mrs Davis and Mrs Love and the rest of the EY team provide. It’s such a joy to see how each child is given the space, the time to be themselves, to be the unique person they are called to be – and we’re placing more emphasis than ever on letting the children take a lead in their learning: their natural inquisitiveness and fascination in the world and the people around them is, I’m sure, the foundation of what we hope becomes a life long love of learning. Education isn’t simply about being, it’s about becoming, and it’s in becoming who they are that the love and attention the children receive in Early Years here really matters – it is one of the great joys of teaching to see how the children develop as an individual and as a learner through the finely crafted programme, through our teaching.

Any attempt to personalise learning must be grounded on a thorugh knowledge of who the children are. This comes naturally to us – small class sizes help of course, but so does a culture of openness in the classroom: our classes are genuinely learning communities in which our pupils feel confident, they know they’re amongst friends, and thus happy to talk about their feelings, their work, their experiences. It’s the natural conversations that happen here in class through which so much learning takes place – yes, resources and experiences are important, but it’s when children step back and reflect in conversation with one another and their teacher that learning really moves on. These conversations provide a far richer data set for adapting and planning than any number of standardized tests or objective assessments.

Of course, more formal assessment is important too, and our programme in the Upper Prep, and particularly Year 6, ensures that children are able to take entrance exams well in their stride, with consistently positive outcomes. But marking isn’t about measuring – marks and comments in books are about moving forward with learning, and I’d ask you to encourage your child to look through the feedback they get from their teachers to see how they can improve. It’s through the excellent knowledge, so difficult to codify as tick lists and grades, that my colleagues have about your sons and daughters that we can meet each child where he or she is and take them on to a new place, planning their route, guiding their journey.
Good teaching is a bit like a Sat Nav – there is that thorough knowledge of the learning landscape, that understanding of the best route to the destination, but perhaps more importantly, the knowledge of where the learner is now, and the willingness to adapt the planned route according to how the learning journey works out in practice. The Sat Nav analogy also captures something of the idea that the final destination is something which the learner his or her self gets to choose – the aspirations, the enthusiasms and the talents of each matter in thinking about our curriculum – of course all have an entitlement to the curriculum, but none is heading to quite the same destination as another.

Each child is wonderfully unique – something one sees so clearly when it comes to ways in which they express their creativity. The arts are, of course, a real strength of the school – we are all delighted with our wonderful new creative and performing arts building – it’s so good at last to have the facilities that come close to matching my colleagues skills in these areas as well as the children’s talents. The opening of the new building has given fresh impetus to music, art and drama throughout the prep school, and I think there will be a number of really exciting initiatives in the terms ahead this year, starting on Thursday with a trip for some of Year 6 to Verdi’s Falstaff at Grange Park Opera, and taking in gallery visits, in both London and Paris, drama and dance workshops, a whole school creative arts week and our first house music festival, in addition to our own concerts and plays, which remain an important part of the school’s year. More exciting still is the enthusiasm amongst my colleagues for exploring links between the arts and the rest of the curriculum – language work is, of course, often a natural vehicle for creativity, but the year ahead also promises some interesting explorations of mathematical and digital art, drama and role play in English and the humanities, paintings as source material in history, and an approach to learning across the curriculum which places an emphasis on individuality, creativity and a striving for excellence, as teaching in music, art and drama long has.

Individuality, creativity and the pursuit of excellence in learning is linked closely with individuality, creativity and the pursuit of excellence in teaching. We have, as you know, a brilliant team of teachers here, but one of our greatest strengths as a team is that we can be ourselves. Just as there’s no Alton Convent mould into which your children are expected to conform, so it’s important to me that my colleagues bring something of themselves into their teaching – of course collaborative planning and the sharing of good practice are vital, but I see it as a real plus that, for example, Mrs Bothwell and Mrs Matthews teach differently. They teach their own way. Alongside our commitment to personalised learning sits one to personalised teaching.

One area in which our provision is most obviously personalised is through the carefully focussed support, which many of our children receive to help them in their learning. With brilliant teachers and small classes, much of this goes unnoticed in the classrooms, with teachers getting alongside children, asking the right question, giving just the right bit of advice, spending time talking through ideas from a different point of view. Mrs Beard’s focussed support groups provide, as their name suggests, that bit more support for those who’d most benefit from extra help with spelling, handwriting, reading or maths, whilst maintaining the social dimension of learning, and of course, we value highly Mrs Spence’s expertise in providing specialist individual support.

There’s much to challenge individuals too, and the outstanding achievements of last year’s leavers in fields as diverse as mathematics, Egyptology and rock are testament to how all talents flourish here. I think much of this sense of challenge comes through the many and varied opportunities we provide for independent learning: something really important to me personally, as well as professionally. I was overwhelmed by the care and enthusiasm Upper Prep children lavished on their science week projects and diaries last year; by the number of hands that shot up in assembly a week ago when I asked who’d kept a diary or scrap book over the holiday, and by the outstanding quality of ESB work, once again. Please, please encourage your son or daughter to make the most of any and all opportunities for them to learn things for themselves – musical instruments, sports, craft, poetry whatever. Do make the most of your local library, and encourage them to make the most of our excellent library here too: I can’t emphasise enough the importance of reading, for a purpose and for pleasure, to their education, here and beyond.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many here to learn that I see Information Technology as a great bonus for independent learning – we continue to make ever increasing use of our dedicated ‘thin client’ network for enhancing and enriching learning across the curriculum, with children learning about finding information, taking notes, assimilating information from multiple sources and effective presentation. It’s been lovely observing children in the IT room, and at home via Moodle, explaining things to one another and learning together in a very social way, that some uses of technology don’t always support. Last year’s Moodle pilot was a great success and we’re gradually adding to the parts of our curriculum supported this way. I’m delighted to say that our network now extends to the Early Years computers, at last connecting these classrooms, via our filtered and monitored connection, to the vast range of educational resources out on the Web.

The independence we hope to see from the children in their learning, mirrors the independence that we as a school enjoy. Of course we are keen to take our place within the national educational community, but we also take seriously the right and responsibility to think things through for ourselves, to put the best interests of the children over and above the latest initiatives from the DCSF.

We’re keen to encourage our pupils to take on moral responsibility at as early an age as they can: to be the best they can be and uphold the highest, and perhaps a bit old fashioned, standards of integrity, courtesy and honour; your support here, as in so many areas makes all the difference. Opportunities for moral responsibility are to be found through our charity fundraising, like last year’s Good Shepherd Bazaar, our house system, with more House Meetings planned for the year ahead, as well as the usual inter-house competitions, and, for our Year 6 pupils, their posts of special responsibility – our oldest pupils do much to maintain the school’s essential ethos through the way they look after the younger children and the examples that they set.

How else can we expect them to make moral decisions than by giving them the chance to make decisions for themselves, in a safe and nurturing environment, even if sometimes they don’t always get things right first time. There are more and more opportunities across the formal and extended curriculum for the children to choose: this can be as simple as their next reading book, but also takes in the wonderful ESB topics, extension or enrichment tasks, both online and in the real world, and, of course, our wonderful programme of extracurricular clubs and activities. Many old favourites remain on the programme including Latin, Fun Run and Sewing, but this term new additions include Discovery Science, Photography and all being well, Swimming. It is my hope that within the broad canvas of the school’s extended curriculum all find something they enjoy and at which they can excel.

I continue to be impressed by just how talented our pupils are, and surely a part of personalised learning mean letting our pupils’ talents really flourish, through the advice and encouragement of one another and their teachers. This is evident in so many aspects of school life. Music, certainly, with close on half the school receiving instrument tuition, and many playing at a very impressive standard for their age: I do hope that through their instruments, joining the orchestra or choir, our pupils develop a love of music that will last them well beyond this school and their next. I think also of our sport: some super individual achievements in national competitions last year, and I’m sure more to come this year, and a very extensive fixture programme for both boys and girls in the terms ahead. The importance of teamwork and of individual effort in sport plays such an important role in the formation of children’s character that we’ve been exploring ways of extending our PE provision for the top of the prep school, and I hope to be able to write soon about this.

My worry about the government’s approach to personalisation is that it places too much emphasis on the individual, and that we lose sight of the fact that personalised learning has to be about learning to be a person, to be a human being, and this has to mean being in relationship with others. The friendships our pupils develop over their time in the prep school will, I hope, last them life long, as will the skills they develop in making friends, in patching up friendships, in getting along with the diverse collection of other people in their class, year and school. Our splendid residential programme is, I suspect, often the place where these friendships become the lifelong ones which will make such a difference to the children. Last year’s trips to France, the Isle of Wight and Marchant’s Hill were great successes, and the Year 3 sleepover was a lovely introduction to the programme. This year, we take Year 6 to Paris, which should provide even more opportunities for culture and a deeper understanding of the French way of life.

I know one of the strongest features of our school is the palpable sense of community that pervades all we do: that we all, pupils, staff and parents are interrelated. Thursday sees our first Mass of the year, and the sense of fellowship on these occasions with all coming together for worship is incredibly moving – I am, we are, your children are, so privileged to be part of such a wonderful group of people – I know they love being here, and I suspect that’s as much to do with being with their friends as it is down to the brilliant lessons that pack the timetable.

They, of course, wouldn’t be the people they are without you. Thank you so much for your continued trust in us for this crucial part of your child’s education. Thank you also for listening so patiently this evening.

 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.