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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,

When I was at university there was no question of an internship, never mind a foreign one, unless one was a modern language student. But with increasing globalisation students are increasingly encouraged and sometimes compelled to experience at least one internship. In Europe this is facilitated by the European Union in the form of formal schemes and grants under Erasmus.

Although we have touched on internships several times in the Absolutely Intercultural podcast before, the latest show is devoted completely to the topic and looks at it from many different angles. There is an interview with the person who facilitates incoming students at the Remagen campus of Fachhochschule, Koblenz as well as an interview with the person who arranges outgoing students. There is also a chat with one of the students at Remagen, Carsten Ritterath,  to examine his reasons for trying an internship. Language learning is not top of the list of priorities and I was interested to learn that for Germans, learning Danish is not such a challenge. Another surprise was to hear Carsten say that he had not until now been away from home for more than two or three weeks and that he was looking forward to the experience of living in a metropolis as a change from the small towns he has lived in to date. 

There is no guarantee however that if I were starting my degree studies in Britain right now that I would be touched by much of this since British students remain those least likely to take up these internship offers.

http://knowmansland.com/learningpath/?p=126

Leigh, this is a very hard question to answer…!!!!!
I thought this was going to be a easy, relaxing course…after all it’s summer time! Just kidding. Although this was my immediate inner-response.
Defining online communities is not as easy as it may seem. Despite all the theoretical background, how do you define, [...]

http://knowmansland.com/learningpath/?p=125

Today Michael Coghlan shared this great video - a presentation by Michael Wesch on Youtube - An anthropological introduction to YouTube.
I just Loved it. As Micheal Coghlan said, it is bloody Brilliant. What an inspiring and true report about how media are changing the way we connect to people!



I especially like Wesch’s  idea that [...]

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.

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.

http://knowmansland.com/learningpath/?p=124

This is indeed an assumption many tend  to make when they are introduced to it. Is it because at the first sight it doesn’t seem to comply with the traditional ways of teaching? Is it because learning technologists sometimes may sound like geeks - when getting involved with social media in a rather overwhelming way? [...]

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 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

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!