• absolutely intercultural!

‘absolutely intercultural!’ is a joint venture of Anne Fox in Denmark and Dr. Laurent Borgmann in Germany who have worked together in several inter-cultural activities and projects.

A new episode is released every second Friday evening, looking at all intercultural aspects of human intercultural communication. For example, we’ll be hearing from students on foreign work placements, asking how teachers can make use of intercultural exercises and simulations in their classroom and sharing with you any intercultural gossip we come across. ‘absolutely intercultural!’ isn’t so much about passing on information but more about starting an intercultural dialogue between the makers, and you, the contributors and listeners.

Anne Fox works at CV2, the adult training arm of Grenaa Business College, a public sector college for young people preparing to go to university or start their first job. CV2 offers vocational training in team building, financial management, IT and languages to both those in jobs and those seeking jobs. She is based on mainland Denmark. Dr. Laurent Borgmann works at the University of Applied Science Koblenz, where he is the head of the international office at the RheinAhrCampus in Remagen. RheinAhrCampus offers Bachelor and Master degree programmes in Business and Social Management and in Mathematics and Technology.

• Classroom Displays

Linda Hartley: I am delighted that the blog has been nominated for this award. I work in a primary (ages5-11) school in the UK and I am interested in how displays (bulletin boards) can be used to enhance children’s learning. I realised that original and interesting displays were constantly being created and vanishing unrecorded so I set up the a Flickr group to create a visual archive of ideas. The blog helps to widen the audience for the Flickr group and to promote discussion about displays. My final year research for my on-line degree was a distributed action research ( DAR) project based around creating and improving the blog. The blog has continued to flourish since the degree finished, steadily gaining more traffic and attracting links (technorati). My research journal blog is at Acting to Improve .

If you work in a school it only takes a few minutes to take a photo, upload it to the Flickr group, or to the blog wikispace, and join the conversation.

• iHistory Podcast Project

Dave Fagg: I don’t own a mobile phone, and mp3 player and grew up without a TV. How did I end up doing an educational podcast project? I’m an Australian History teacher, and earlier this year I was frustrated by the widespread use of mobiles and mp3-players in class, and wanted to find a way to integrate them into learning – there’s only so much confiscation a teacher can do before the students turn on you!

Eaglehawk Secondary College is a state Year 7-10 college in a fairly disadvantaged area of Bendigo, a regional city of 95,000 in Australia. There aren’t too many students with video iPods – an $AUD50 version is more likely. We were luck enough to get some funding for several mp3 players from Knowledge Bank, a government body committed to innovation in education, as well as the local “Innovations and Excellence” network. A big thankyou to both of these organisations!

I started out making podcasts to introduce Australian History topics to the class of 14-15 year olds, and they loved them! Even though it was my voice on the podcast, they preferred hearing it through earphones. This quickly morphed into a historical field-trip using podcasts at various locations in Bendigo. Students competed in teams to win prizes, listening to stories about the sites they visited, and recording their observations on the mp3 players and taking photos on mobile phone cameras.

But the best was yet to come. Through the marvel of the web, I hooked up with a teacher in Missouri, USA, who is doing a similar project (and more!). Our students are now exchanging podcasts with each other. They research and record local histories and details about life as a young person in Australia and the USA.

My students have loved using technology to learn. Little do they know I have covertly co-opted their means of driving teachers to distraction…ha ha ha! (evil laugh). Seriously, though, it has made me realise that if we creatively and critically use technology that students prefer, they are more likely to engage in learning.

• Talking VTE

is an endeavour to capture and share the wealth of knowledge imparted at face-to-face events in the VTE sector. The busy working lives of those working in the educational sector means that many are unable to attend a given conference, workshop or presentation. Podcasting is a simple and cost effective means to capture and share the learning throughout our networked community. Most of the recordings are made with small portable mp3 recorders by someone who attended the event. The long term vision is to create something akin to the IT Conversations podcast for the Australian VTE sector where people submit audio they feel would be of interest to the community.