Heike Philp

Myngle to partner with teacher training center LANCELOT School

Amsterdam, February 8, 2010

The world-class training center and the leading platform for live multi-language learning join forces to deliver the highest quality of live training available on the web. LANCELOT School and Myngle.com have agreed to begin collaboration to offer training to Myngle’s selected teachers and position the site as the best online destination for live language learning.

Since 2005, LANCELOT School has been one of the first institutions in the world to specialize in qualifying and certifying teachers in the use of virtual classroom technology. LANCELOT stands for ‘LANguage Learning with Certified Live Online Teachers’ and over a period of two years 23 partners in 8 countries joined EU funded LANCELOT. The project led to the development of the LANCELOT certificate which is basis for all of the courses which have helped language teaching professionals to work online. Heike Philp, Managing Director and co-initiator of two EU funded projects states “This training partnership is a milestone for us and the timing is excellent as we are in the process to launch the next phase of the LANCELOT online campus for language teachers who want to learn how to teach languages online. We are striving to continually improve our high quality offering of courses, workshops, resources and up-to-date information on internet-based tools and are looking forward to interacting with mynglers whose rich experience teaching more than 50 languages will provide invaluable feed-back. A great synergy on both sides”.

With the contribution of LANCELOT SchoolTM, Myngle expects to enable its teachers to bring their expertise to the next level. The experienced online teachers will discover the many nuances that will make their teaching through a virtual classroom even better than what it already is. For the new online language teacher, who has been approved to teach on Myngle because of his proven offline experience, will now have an opportunity to learn how to make full-use of the technology available at his fingertips. “Many language teachers that approach Myngle to teach online have excellent offline credential,” says Stefan Booy, Head of Education at the Amsterdam-based company, “however, without the proper training on the use of the virtual classroom and other internet tools, the technology can often become an impediment to the learning rather than an enhancement of that process. We have selected the best training available in the industry, to put our teachers and consequently our students in a position to excel.”

Myngle’s CEO, Marina Tognetti, confirms, “We truly believe that by combining the strengths of both Myngle and LANCELOT can really bring online language education to the next level.” The LANCELOT School will be able to offer Myngle’s teachers training workshops tailor-made to Myngle’s teachers needs. The school will also offer its ICC-accredited course that will prepare teachers to become LANCELOT-certified online teachers.

Myngle currently offers 1,235 language courses in 52 languages and has 284 private teachers from 104 countries. Lessons are given through Myngle’s virtual classroom where teacher and student meet online. Myngle also develops its own content called Myngle Programs, a set of original courses based on modern teaching methods and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). “We are looking forward to an extensive and long term partnership with the LANCELOT School–says Tognetti–Today is another step toward the affirmation of a segment of the language training industry that is transforming the way teaching is delivered. It’s a good day for professional teachers. It’s a good day for committed students around the world.”
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For more information about Myngle, here is 10 things you need to know about Myngle http://www.myngle.com/index/tenthingsaboutmyngle
Marina Tognetti /// tel: +31-620845656 /// Skype: marinatognetti
e-mail: egbert@myngle.com
For more information on LANCELOT SchoolTM, and 17 reasons why Skype is simply not enough 5
Heike Philp /// tel: +49-7665-809 9677 /// Skype: letstalkonline
e-mail: heike.philp@lancelotschool.com
Or go to: http://www.lancelotschool.com

17 Reasons why Skype is simply not enough

Truly speaking, Skype is unbeatable and it can do all that a virtual classroom also can do. Teachers can share links with their learners, screenshare, conference and the sound quality is unmatched. So why bother with virtual classrooms if Skype is so versatile, why trouble yourself with technology that is still unstable and even fragile as we have seen this evening during the ETCon conference?

Very appropriate therefore Kirsten Winkler’s provocative theme of the first ETCon “Lesson Slides and Virtual Classrooms - do we really need them?” and she really did play the devil’s advocate tonight sparking a great debate.

Despite Kirsten’s best efforts, those in favor of virtual classroom came up with a grand 17 good reasons of why Skype is simply not enough. Here they are…

1) Annotations help visualization
Images are great teaching aids and annotating them in real-time on a whiteboard can really drive the learning experience. (Comment by Harman of WizIQ)

2) More control
For better or for worse, in a virtual classroom the teacher has more control over what students look at and sees how they interact with their peers, the chat and with the learning material.
(Stephen Jones)

3) Professionalism
Using Skype seems to mix business with personal use, hence using a virtual classroom lifts the professional image.
(AmericanTeacher)

4) Greater availability
Some countries ban Skype (i.e. UAE), some learners prefer MSN or Yahoo and many companies do not allow Skype for security reasons.
(Giselle Santos, AmericanTeacher, Heike Philp)

5) Conferences
Conference like the ETCon would not have been possible on Skype.
(unknown)

6) Plan B as in ‘back-up’
Internet communication technology is fragile and it is advised to always have two of everything. So, it is good to use MSN AND Skype or Skype AND Virtual Classroom. If one fails, one can use the other.
(Heike Philp)

7) Skype is like using a hammer
‘If all you can use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ Many like Skype because they don’t know about virtual classrooms or do not know how to use it.
(MissShonah)

8′) Course structure
Slides communicate to the learners a course structure whereas Skype lessons may end up to be mere conversation lessons.
(Elisa Delaini of Myngle)

9) Multi-Modality
Speaking and listening, reading and writing and all of it all at once, this engages all of the learners’ senses. For example: some take notes of what others are discussing in a dialogue, this dialogue may be prompted by visuals or text which maybe annotated by others, and so on.
(Heike Philp)

10) Full contact rich media environment and it is sociable too
(Kevin of DimDim)

11) Teachers are leaders
If we do not master the technology, how will our students? Many of our learners use webconferencing on a regular basis and they are glad to learn this technology with us.
(Heike Philp)

12) Personal and professional development
Virtual classroom provide a challenge to grow professionally. We are advancing from one-to-one Skype lessons to group tuition in a virtual classroom. After virtual classroom, there will be virtual worlds, after virtual worlds ….
(Heike Philp)

13) Language teaching is by-an-large text-based
Language teaching requires a measure of text and the whiteboard is ideal for this.
Unfortunately most of the teaching material teachers have is in Word format. Word however uses the ‘old’ portrait format of books or pages in a folder. PowerPoint came about because of the typical shape of a computer screen. Why the Computer screens are in landscape format nobody knows but this happens to be the dominant format in a virtual classroom. This is the reason why we need slides. Many teachers have never used PowerPoint and now feel as if they have to redo all of their teaching material.
Did you know that you can convert a Word document into PowerPoint with a single click? Next time, in Word, look under the File menu and try ‘Send to MS PowerPoint’. It might look a little messy, but it is there.
(Heike Philp)

14) Virtual Classrooms will be with us a loooooong time
They already have been around for a long time (WebEx was founded in 1995) and they will be around for a long time to come. This is why it is worth investing time and effort into mastering them.
(Heike Philp)

15) A virtual classroom opens a world of learning
Just imagine virtual classrooms will become standard and from the comfort of your home you can now learn any course you wish. You as a teacher, what kind of course would you want to take? Would you perhaps take a Master program at a University? Would DELTA be your goal? Maybe a course in NLP, a programming language, a course at Harvard or a course in music or film production? Whatever your dream course looks like, the mere thought of these courses being conducted in a virtual classroom spells choice, right? Would we not also wish for this to be the case? Would we not wish for this University to be so ‘modern’ and offer their courses live online? Maybe this viewpoint helps us to understand the great potential of virtual classrooms for us and for our learners.
(Heike Philp)

16) Virtual classrooms are sociable
They can connect learners with learners and learners with experts across continents during rich learning conversations.

17) Virtual classrooms can enrich a local event
A simulcast can add richness to a local conference or a local classroom (in schools or universities).

What a fabulous collaborative effort. With the best of my intentions, I only ever came up with 10 reasons and this has literally blown me away. Thank you very much indeed for this fabulous list! Thanks to all for sharing.

Launching Live Online Pecha Kucha at the WIAOC Conference

How happy I was when a total of nine different presenters were ready to experiment with this new presentation format which we coined ‘Live Online Pecha Kucha’. Never having done it before but here it is, the fabulous result of nine diligent presenters whose goal was to stick to 20 slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds.

This fantastic example of an engaging, entertaining and beautifully colorful series of Pecha Kucha presentations, showcase this speedy presentation style for our language learners, a great way of practising language in a virtual classroom.

We proudly present….

Dennis Newson , born 1935, an English man living in the Germany with a very funny story about his experiences in Second Life with lifts flying off, wrecked houses, blocks melting into a singly bundle, bots multiplying without control and other funny oddities in Second Life.

Robert Squires, Instructional Designer at the University of Montana presents his vision of online learning as he perceives it today.

Buthaina Al Othman, EFL, ESP, EAP trainer at the Language center of Kuwait University, lists a number of showcases on the use of wiki in language learning.

Story chaser Raymond Romanos, English teacher in East Germany shares images of his secret passion ‘house diving’.

Heike Philp presents EU funded AVALON which is now in its 6th month of the development. AVALON is about language learning in Second Life.

Donal Thompson, actor, writer and director in theatre-in-education and community theatre projects recounts the story of knight LANCELOT, who is magically transported to Second Life and who tries to find his way home.

Erwin Zetz, independent IT professional who worked for many years as European IT Manager at a medical company presents a commercial product which he designed to provide an online back-up of data to prevent data loss in case of disasters, theft etc.

Holly Longstroth, English trainer in Finland who holds a Master in TESOL and a Master in Organisational Leadership, summarizes the China project when 18 Chinese teenagers met 28 German teenagers in a virtual classroom.

Not to be missed in this list is the presentation about Pecha Kucha and what it is and when this popular trend started in Japan.

Last but not least, I am adding a presentation which was recorded during an Ignite event in the States. Ignite is similar to Pecha Kucha in as much as it allows 20 slides but only 15 seconds per slide. In a mere 5min we learn here about a tube system around the beginning of the 20th century which transported mail, which I renamed to be the ‘Ancient twitter’. Enjoy.

Besides a great and quite challenging presentation technique, I believe that a Pecha Kucha event can be the ideal program for a simulcast because it can easily be conducted in a virtual classroom (with the whiteboard on full screen for the local audience) whilst hosting visitors at a distance.

During a ‘real’ Pecha Kucha night, one presentation follows the other and between 8 and 14 presentations take place during the evening. At the end of this interesting program, networking takes place in a relaxed manner. The same may happen live online with participants who may stay online for an informal chat with each others.

A great and fascinating way of adding an online component to a conference.

What do you think, will you join us trendsetting?

No fools, no horses at slanguages

What a high-profile conference with an excellent set of speakers the SLanguages conference proved to be. I truly learned a lot and am looking forward to sharing my learning highlights of this conference but also my frustration. My frustration about ’squeezing the second life blood’ out of this great event.

Yes, I strongly feel that to create a ‘replica of a real conference’ in Second Life is just as unimaginative as teaching a language in a 3D classroom and have the students sit on chairs whilst playing the sage on the stage - because truly what is different?

Yet, whilst the ‘mode of delivery’ fell short, the content nevertheless was great.

Certainly one of the presentation highlights was the report of the EVO VWLL session by Nick Noakes [Corwin Carillon], Nergiz Kern [Daffodil Nergis] and Graham Stanley [Baldric Commons] who illustrated with impressive statistics the great success of their EVO session. Electronic Village Online is a voluntary training camp run by the webheads which takes place every year in January and February for a period of 6 weeks. The ‘Virtual Worlds and Language Learning’ session consisted of a lively NING community and offered some 45+ synchronous sessions in Second Life for one of the best Second Life training sessions ever. Interestingly the activities of the community continued until long after the training camp and the contributions by its members was outstandingly active. Hats for this fabulous achievement.

The scripting workshop by Gavin Dudeney [Dudeney Ge] first thing in the morning after a rather short night for Gavin was worth the effort too. His mode of delivery is very nice indeed and with a good and gentle pace he led us through the basics of event handlers, triggers, states, curly brackets and other fascinating stuff.

Groundbraking was the demonstration of Sloodle by Paul Preibisch [Fire Centaur], a long awaited release, which has been under development of more than two years. Check out this great video which explains each of the features of this new interface between Second Life and Moodle.

Also of major significance was the presentation by languagelab’s ex-Director of Studies Paul Sweeney [Headteacher], who shared their challenges [together with Pete McKichan] and frustrations about facilitating highly engaging courses on one hand with gaming oriented tasks and learners glued to the machine, only to have to scale down to the demands of commercial interests which was directly linked to the expectations of students, students who did not feel like paying for a ‘guide on the side’.

Very interesting too to see dogme’s approach applied in Second Life because it is often misinterpreted as being contra technology. Yet, rightly so, Howard Vickers [Howie Yokishawa] related to the sociable and communicative theory formulated by Scott Thornbury as a totally reasonable approach in Second Life and to underpin this, he added real experiences of equally real learners. For an interesting blog post on Scott’s latest book, ‘Teaching unplugged’ by Karenne Sylvester is found here. She nicely explains dogmeclick here.

I enjoyed tremendously listening to many SL pioneers about their diligent efforts of finding the right mix and love to hear about hospitable learning spaces (even if some of them are called holodecks), the enjoyment of experimenting and building and of personal growth as an educator in Second Life, the excitement of growing acceptance in the ‘out-world’, sociable learning experiences like EVO VWLL, beauty, art, history and imagination like MacBeth and now the advancements of Sloodle.

I am deeply grateful of Gavin’s efforts to organize this conference, enjoyed the company, learned lots but hope - next year - to see more than powerpoints, powerpoints and even more powerpoints. No haka fools, no horses, no fun and above all no voices heard from the audience.

Where were the tours?

In the real world, isn’t this the greatest fun in learning a language to go on language travel? Sleep in an Scottish castle, learn English in the mornings and go on tour around Loch Ness in the afternoon? Or fly to Malta and spend the same afternoon on the beach?

So, why restrict the conference to three venues on EduNation?

And just to let my wildest imagination lose… Why not let the whole conference go on tour? In 24h once around the virtual globe with stop-over in the forbidden city, in Moscow, Zurich’ Opera House or the Hyde Park corner in virtual London.

Let me dream on. How about every virtual host designing a customary welcome to us virtual tourists, hospitably preparing the place. Welcome presents include traditional costumes, Mexican hats, Turkish headcovering, Hawaian t-shirts, whatever.

Ask yourself, would you enjoy a conference half as much if it was always at the same place?. Travel and learn, the greatest fun there is.

What do you think?

Speedy presentations: Pecha Kucha, Ignite and its educational value

What it happening at these immensely popular Pecha Kucha nights when crowds of people flock to cinemas, empty factory buildings and other large venues, where people stand in the aisles because all the seats on the floor are taken?

These shows are filled with presenters showing PowerPoint Slides and images. PowerPoint? What seems to have taken the death out of powerpoint is a simple rule: 20 slides auto-advancing every 20sec. This is the secret formula of trend-setters architects Klein-Dytham, who were able to even patent this formula in 2003, calling it Pecha Kucha which is pronounced ‘pay–chukchar’ meaning ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese.

A similar approach, non-patented and sponsored by O’Reilly Media, is the Ignite format promoted by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis which puts the formula to 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds. Ignite events have been running since 2006 and this equally successful events series are mainly conducted in the States.

Whatever approach you wish to choose your presentations in, this concept is liberating. Liberating for the listeners and liberating for the presenters.

Listen for yourself to a speedy presentation about speedy presentations.

Very excited and with great hopes for mankind that this could become the presentation format of the future, I created the AVALON presentation in the same format.

I also tried the same presentation in slideshare to create what is known to be a slidecast. Slideshare does not offer the service of recording one’s voice nor of hosting the mp3 file. Suprise, suprise. So, I recorded my voice in Audacity and uploaded it on my own server. The instructions provided by slideshare mentioned to upload it on the Internet archive, fair enough.

Slideshare does provide a rather clever presentation timer and I guess it is only a matter of time until they have enough server space to provide this as a service to their clients.

Can you understand why I am so excited about this new presentation format? And why do I think this is of educational value?

Well, to be honest, I do not know whether this has great educational value because it is new.

However, I tried it myself and can say, that even as a very comfortable presenter at numerous conferences myself, this format has been challenging to say the least.

Yet, another suprise was in store. I was totally suprised myself, how much one can actually say in 5min!

This indeed requires a clear message, clear focus on the target group, concise English, pitch, poise, pace - yes, back to the basics. It also should not sound read from a piece of paper but delivered natural. Well, I can say that this took a while to produce.

But it’s all worth the effort and the feedback has been tremendous.

I am so much looking forward to listening to yours!

If you succeed, may I invite you to present at the Live Online Pecha Kucha which I am staging at the Webheads in Action Online unConvergence WIAOC 2009 conference? The Central European Times dates are Friday, the 22nd of May 2009, 10pm and Saturday the 23rd of May, midnight. Click on the dates for a list of world times.

Virtual Round Table on Demand

The Round Table is King Arthur’s famed table in the Arthurian legend, around which he and his Knights congregated. As its name suggests, it has no head, implying that everyone who sits there has equal status (end of quote, Wikipedia, Round Table)

The Virtual Round Table on Demand is a new free of charge teacher training program using virtual classroom technology in order to meet an expert for a learning conversation. This program provides an "innovative, inspiring and sociable learning" experience for language teaching professionals in an environment which affords open and free and ‘equal’ conversation.

So, how does it work and above all, why do we do this? Allow me briefly to jump back in time and tell you, how this was developed.

A market research campaign

In January this year, I started a market research campaign interviewing language teaching professionals in many different countries. I conducted approx. 120h of interviews, filled two A5 notebooks full of notes and journeyed virtually 3 times around the globe and listened to teachers in Germany, Hungary, France, Bulgaria, Russia, Estland, Canada, Korea, Japan, US, Australia, Brazil and other places. In fact this market research is still going on because it is soooo interesting.

The questions I asked centered around what motivates teachers to engage in further education such as what kind of conference do you attend, what journals/ blogs do you read, are you interested in certificates and if so, which ones, what courses, what kind of events (often publisher events) do you attend, what books do you read, informal/formal learning, intrinsic/ extrinsic motivation, PR/ press coverage, higher salary, academic recognitions etc. What actually motivates teachers to engage in further education?

There are many interesting findings, above all the big difference in motivation (and funds of course) between public school and private school teachers. In general, for school teachers a state-run continuous education program is in place but is badly attended because of the teachers being overqualified, overworked and underpaid. In contrast many of the free-lancing language teachers are motivated by higher salaries, securer jobs or simply because of their demanding students. Here you also find lots of intrinsic motivation, readiness to read, watch videos, search for resources on the web etc.

The result of this market research will be published in separate blogs and will also be part of the book I am writing right now, so I will not be dwelling here. What I do want to mention though is one comment by a teacher at a university in Korea, which led to the first step in the right diretion.

The first step in the right diretion

This teacher happens to be one of the chairing members of the KOTESOL organisation and he teaches English at a university in Korea. Equipped with a great sense of humor, rather cynical but sharp. Although I actually didn’t ask this very question, he mentioned that he would like to meet the very author of the textbook he is forced to use in class. In Korea the schooling system is much stricter even in the Universities. When he said he would like to meet the author, he actually was implying that he wished he could talk to this author in private, so as to ‘tell him off’ because he felt that this author probably had never taught English before and has created this book as an academic exercise. *woosh*. What a thought! Whilst this was a rather cynical remark, I just thought, what a nice idea: "Meet the author".

I threw this thought into our 24h running group chat and asked our LANCELOTTERs, that if ever they could meet the author, whom would they like to meet? Would it be the author of the textbook they used in class? Or any other author? The response in our network was amazing, great discussions ensued and lots of book tips were exchanged.

The next ‘aha and wow’ effect

The next ‘aha’ effect on the road to developing this Virtual Round Table on Demand concept was meeting a group of Germanistic students at a university in Germany. We essentially talked about the affordances of a virtual classroom, talked about job opportunities such as working from Germany as a German teacher in Japan and in the last minute or so, I asked the students, what they are reading at the moment and whether they would want to meet this author in a virtual classroom. They mentioned a name: Noam Chomsky. I emailed Noam Chomsky that very evening and invited him to a learning conversation in a virtual classroom. To my great amazement, he said yes. At the age of 80! He still lectures at MIT.

Then, however, I started sweating. What if Professor Chomsky joins a virtual classroom and only a few turn up? After all this is free of charge. Then what about poor and superficial questions. I already started getting nightmares. This is why I imposed a condition to those students, that unless they enroll 50 of their colleagues/ peers/ teachers at that University, I will not fix an appointment with Noam Chomsky. This is a rule of thump in live online event management, enroll 50 and then 15 will turn up. And I wanted 15 participants for Prof Chomsky and I wanted them to deeply think about what to ask him this great mind.

Well, it seemed that these conditions were easily met and we are all looking forward to meeting Prof Chomsky on the 17th of Feb (which by the way ’sold out’ within 10 days of passing the word of mouth).

The rules

The following rules are the essence of the program…

We will invite your favorite author, teacher, professor or public speaker to a virtual round table learning conversation if you can answer any of the following questions with an affirmative yes….

1. Is the author, teacher, professor or public speaker still alive?
2. Is the author, teacher, professor or public speaker online (does he have Internet connection)?
3. Is the author, teacher, professor or public speaker willing to speak free of charge (you may not know this)?
4. Are you able to sign up at least 50 colleagues, peers or others to listen to the author, teacher, professor or public speaker?
5. Can you prepare 5 questions for a learning conversation with the author, teacher, professor or public speaker?

For a list of FAQs (Frequently asked questions), please check-out the following website: FAQs Virtual Round Table.

Innovative, inspiring and sociable

Whilst still relatively new, the first reactions to this program have been phenominal. It certainly is" innovative, inspiring and sociable".

It is innovative because teachers will meet their author, teacher, professor or public speaker in an interactive virtual classroom. During this learning conversation, they will use voice and text chat, webcam and the whiteboard. This memorable learning experience will lead to more confidence and joy in using new media.

It is inspiring because of the potential ways this approach could be used as a model for the very learners. Imagine inviting politicians to a politics lesson, historians to a history class, management coaches to a business english lesson or researchers to a medical course.

It is sociable because language teachers tend to be single fighter and here they need to network to find 50 like-minded. They communicate, group and brainstorm to develop 5 questions. A learning conversation using new media is in essence inspired by the learning theory of "Connectivism" coined by George Siemens. Today’s learner in the digital age learns ‘informal, networked in a technology-enabled arena’.

If you wish to donate or sponsor this program, please navigate to the following website: Virtual Round Table on Demand

My learning highlights at the LEARNTEC 2008

There have been many learning highlight and many great conversations on Wednesday at the LEARNTEC in Karlsruhe. The following is a list of my personal learning highlight about the power of a simulcast, a learning conversation, the power of learning through images and last but not least my experience with motion sickness in Second Life.

After landing in Rome just prior to our simulcast, Robin Good picked Jay up from the airport. Little while later, Jay joined our conversation online and mentioned that his contribution to this event was highly informal. He recited this amazing discovery about learning patterns of the aboriginies in Australia and eventually switched on his webcam. He was talking about this discovery whilst sitting on the back seat of Robin’s BMW. A big thanks to Robin for making this WLAN connection possible.

The power of a simulcast

This simulcast we did at the LEARNTEC was so awesome. The finest guest speakers, a great international audience and additional benefits through using Elluminate. This mix of a local presence in a conference room in Karlsruhe at the LEARNTEC and a virtual room full of visitors from around the world, what a powerful simulcast.

1. Simulcasts can be recorded. Think of the Online Educa, which is the world’s largest elearning conference and takes place beginning of December in Berlin. A complete 6 weeks program cramped into 2 days with up to 16 parallel sessions, none of which is recorded. What a waste of knowledge! 2000 partcipants from 91 countries are to listen to about 600 presentations to share their insight on learning with technology and only a few key-note sessions are recorded. This is a crime. Our simulcasts has been recorded and please come back to this post where you will find the link for it soon.
2. Simulcasts are free. In the beginning of December 2008, I watched the UStream of LeWeb2008 and it was free. Regular entrance fee at LeWeb costs 1500 EUR and they had no internet and it was cold. I sat at home, enjoyed close-up camera angles, hopped between rooms and networked on twitter. Yay.
3. Simulcasts are flexible. Last minute change of plans when 3 out of 4 panelists seemed to drop out do not turn out desastrous. We would have even been able to even hear George Siemens or Jonathan Finkelstein if it wasn’t such short notice. Both unable to make the timing, but ready to do it. We also changed our theme in the last minute from "Virtual Collaboration" to "Informal Learning" since Chris, Nancy, Jennifer and Jay are informal learning experts.
4. Simulcasts are glocal. We were able to connect to Ecuador and Kenya, how wonderful to hear their work. Sadly the LEARNTEC management did not promote our efforts, did not send us any journalists nor featured our program, but I think this was due to ignorance. They said, that if people hear that we offer the same program live online, then people will not bother to come to Karlsruhe and will not pay entrance fee. Interesting thinking but once they hear about our global participants, I am sure they will revise this thinking.

The power of a learning conversation live online

Yes, I am a fervent worshipper at the altar of conversation (check out Nancy’s blog on the LEARNTEC event) and I am an evanglist for doing such conversations at a distance.

And I think it is time that we let this water freely flow to our offices, to your homes or to a conference room. It is time that we stop going to the well.

But, hang on, haven’t we been enjoying the waters of knowledge flowing freely through the pipelines called Internet for a long, long time? Why do you say that it is about time to turn on the tabs? It is because we are still going to the well! Yes, we are. We go to the Online Educa to listen to presentations and great keynote speakers, we go to the University to listen to professors, we go to the school to learn a language. It is high time to change this through learning conversations, lectures or presentations live online.

The power of visuals

Having bought the book ‘Informal Learning’ by Jay Cross when it came out, I must admit that I have not actually read it until now. So, glad about the motivation to read it for the simulcast, I came across this paragraph.

"We learn almost twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visual lanague engages both hemispheres of the brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, age group. Yet the majority of the content of corporate learning is text. Schools spend years on verbal literacy but only hours on visual literacy…"

end of quote (page 238, Appendix A Informal Learning by Jay Cross, (Pfeiffer).

Sorry to say Jay, but this is wrong. It is not twice as fast but ‘guestimates’ of study results in Second Life actually suggest it to be 10 times as much and even faster than that. This idea of picture translations across cultures is beautiful and echos Nancy’s story on how farmers in India were able to learn from far afield by watching videos on dry seed storage from an African country.

How important the eye is in learning becomes so apparent when you listen to Dr. Thomas Simoncini, author of the book "Cancer is a fungus". In his interview with Doug Kaufman in the TV show ‘Know the Cause’ he shows that decades of cancer research and untold written information about this subject, which Simoncini studied as oncologist, were superseded or outweight when he was actually able to look at a cancer tumour with a miniatur camera.

Prior to that he had seen many cat scans of cancer and they show cancer up as being black and when he went into the body with a microscopic camera he was suprised to see that cancer was indeed white. His insight into this subject finally was triggered by looking at dermatitis on a hand which equally was white and then he put two and two together to formulate his theory that cancer is a fungus. His huge success in treating cancer with anti-funghi drugs (bicarbonate soda) seems to suggest that his theory holds true.

Motion sickness in Second Life

I was due to present our new EU funded project AVALON a second time in a day and this time and finally we had internet. So, I decided to show the audience the island of Moya in Second Life. Patrick Moya who is a contemporary pop-artist in France has turned an island in Second Life into the most wonderful thing I have come across. A whole island full of inspirtion and creation. Moya himself is such a character with his colorful suit, the wings and the little children. Last time he took us in the car around the island showing us all the great pictures and replica of real life art pieces. This was truly magic and please read up again on the blog I wrote about the car joy ride.

This time, he offered to take me around the island in a hellicopter. How cool is that? So preparing this trip, recording it and checking whether the screensharing would work, I met Moya the day before and he took me in his hellicopter, then made me walk down a 250m tall tower (going round and round and round), took me in his car (a very wobbly car ride) then the flight and a few loopings with his private jet and finally the boat, a small and wobbly rubber boat. When we finished this tour of about 20min and after I pocketed the recording, I felt sooooo sick. Mind you, even in real life I have problems with cars and boats. My tummy just does not seem to like it. But in a 3D world????? Sitting at my computer. Wow, I had no idea that this is even possible that one can feel sick. What a learning experience.

A learning conversation with Jay Cross, Nancy White and Dave Cormier

What a great privilege to moderate a learning conversation with Jay Cross, Nancy White, Dave Cormier and Jennifer Jones all of whom are leading figures in the ongoing discussion about the value of informal learning. It was fascinating to listen to their conversation as to how they share knowledge and where they agree and disagree on things. It is just as fascinating as listening to a talkshow with famous people with the beautiful difference that we had participants from all over the world, including Kenya and Ecuador and that this might just be a great timing for them as InWent GmbH is facilitating a greater learning center autonomy by motivating these individual ‘learning hubs’ to engage in course and content production. I believe though, that the expression ‘informal learning’ was entirely new to them.

Allow me here on this blog to catch up on properly introducing the panelists of yesterday’s learning conversation and apologies for doing this so late.

Special guest Jay Cross recently published a book called Informal Learning - Rediscovering The Natural Pathways That Inspire and I was long puzzled at the title until I heard Jay talking about his study on learning cultures in for example the aborigineses in Australia or by studying the cave paintings in Spain and by "reading eighty books and interviewing more than a hundred people and visiting heaven knows how many Web sites" (end of quote from page XV of his book). He shared his fascinating insights on a wall painting which he saw in a museum in Brisbane and ‘accidentally’ meeting the person who spent years studying the very same painting and who even wrote a book about it. Jay really stated his point on how informal his informal contribution to the informal learning conversation was by switching his webcam on as he was connecting from the back of the seat of Robin’s BMW who picked Jay up from Rome airport. Thanks to Robin’s wireless LAN, he was able to speak to us and thanks to Jay’s spontanuity, he actually did in amid a situation that nobody else would have joined and if you had asked a businessman to connect to a webcast when travelling, the message would have been, ’sorry on business trip’.

Then there was Nancy White . I could have hugged her to death that she actually switched on her webcam and I know she did this only for me, because I begged her to do it. But to actually leave the webcam running all the time and to make funny faces this was heartwarming. What has always impressed me greatly is that Nancy is the master of a ‘two-channel’ conversation. When listening to others, she takes note of what the other person has said (what a great affirmation that is to the speaker), she diligently reads others’ chat messages responding to individuals by adressing them personally, she expresses feelings and thoughts by putting them into brackets and she raises chat messages to the level of the spoken word by adressing it verbally and all of this without missing the opportunity to speak. This is so impressive! Thanks Nancy for role modeling this to us and forgive me for being sentimental about this but I have to recite the poem I wrote about you when we first met at Robin’s first webcast and where he asked us to introduce each other.

Poem for Nancy

May I introduce to you
Nancy White a mother of two
who just finished her breakfast in Seattle
and now starts her work without having to travel, nice!

A ‘facilitator’ she calls herself
- I took the dictionary off the shelf
I facilitate communities online, she acclaims
- "to make easy, promote" the dictionary explains, aha!

She travels the world for charity
and communicates with clarity
if you cannot talk face to face
you cannot talk in cyberspace

An amazing experience this was for me
her text lines speak warmth and humility
mistakes are needed to get it right
to learn from the students is her delight

She happily shares the fruit of her labour
from chocolate recipes to ROI calculator
just enter the gardenlike website and eat
its offer is plenty, beneficial and sweet

enjoy Nancy White!

Dave Cormier, the co-founder and co-host of EdTechTalk together with ‘webhead’ Jeff Lebow, which is THE podcasts for educators who work with technology. I checked their website and have been there many a times. FASCINATING recorded learning conversations. FASCINATING and a must listen to. What a privilege to have Dave join us and spontaneous too because he did not know about this the day before yesterday. Nancy’s prompted me to invite Dave when it seemed that out of 4 panelists, 3 were offline. Lutz who originally planned on being in Karlsruhe, because of a nasty flu, which must have been a real bad slasher because he would have at least joined live online. By the way, Lutz Berger is the ‘informal learning guru’ in Germany. At the forefront of every educamp or unconference, a binaural beats experts and ‘learning through teaching (LDL)’ evangelizer in Germany’s schooling system debate. Then Ken Thompson, who I know is always very keen on promoting his ’swarm teams’ idea, could not join because his wife had an emergency and was in hospital. Ken implemented his research on the organisational patterns of organic and distributed bioteams (as observed in group habits of various animals) in a unique mobile phone SMS - Web messaging interface, which currently is being field tested by some fan clubs in the music scene or in hospitals with a mobile nursing and sales force. Basically everywhere where timely sms can benefit from these messages being distributed centrally by a web server plus stored for later viewing by the users. Ken has invested lots of time and a large part of his private funds into this and todate has not been able to actually see a return on investment. I hope Ken forgives me for openly stating this here, but it only speaks for him that he forgoes a chance to promote his product in such a highly publicised setting to attend to his wife in hospital. With this background, this is almost as heroic as Obama when he left an important campaign to attend to his sick grandmother.

So, having been left with three out of four panelists offline (so we thought), including Jay who flew via London yesterday and London having been ’snowed under’ and the likelyhood of Jay not making it in time, we tried to find the kind of replacement that would fit into Jay’s footprints. Nancy suggested to contact Dave Cormier and Jennifer Jones to join us and both spontaneously agreed. Also Jonathan Finkelstein of LearningTimes offered spontaneously but then noticed that the timing would conflict with his 1800 participants live online conference he was moderating that day. Jennifer was present but without a mic due to her 2-year old being around. This was actually very sad, that she could not speak up and to be honest, some baby sounds in the background would not have disturbed anybody. In fact, several of my teachers in Austria and Switzerland have their little ones sit on the lap and these watch with great fascination the show! Whilst having to keep their hands of the keyboard or hiding the cable of the headset, and keeping a towel nearby just in case, to us this greatly contributes to us getting to know each other and according to me, adds to the fun we have online. Alpo, Holly’s dog (Holly has become Director of Studies at LANCELOT School this year) always has to say hello to everybody online. Next time we hope Jennifer will show us her little one.

So, these was a short blog on our fabulous panelists for our fabulous learning conversation. Credits to Cristina Costa who mentioned this expression ‘learning conversation’ to me for the first time. I am not sure how common it already is. Btw Cristina also joined live online thanks to twitter. We were all really impressed how many different people at different times we saw joining us and the online participants actively chatted all the time. In fact they ‘talked’ a lot more than the participants in the real room. But more about my learning highlights of this simulcast in a separate blog. (waiting for images to add to this blog)

EU funded AVALON is ready start in January 2009

AVALON is the name of the new European funded project which explores the potential of Second Life for language learning. AVALON stands for Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline. 26 European partners (11 of which are Universities) will spend 2 years in development. These partners are as follows….

Project Coordinator
University of Manchester, UK

Project Partners
University of Vienna, Austria
ICC Europe, Germany
The British Council, Spain
Mid Sweden University, Sweden
Universita di Pisa, Italy
Molde University, Norway
Talkademy, Austria (Co-initiator)
Verein Grenzenlos, Austria
LANCELOT School, Germany (Co-initiator)

Associate Partners
Západočeská univerzita, Plzeň
SEED, Stockholm University, Sweden
HUMlab, Umea University, Sweden
University of Tübingen, Germany
University of Siena, Italy
Universität Kassel, Germany
IH World Organisation Ltd
Cambridge University Press
Learning Technologies SIG of IATEFL
MONDIALE Testing Systems
IBM Virtual Universe Community
Languagelab.com
myngle.com
European Telecoaching Institute
SKYLIGHT GmbH
Tunnicliff and Kollegen Gbr

Wonderful consortium indeed.

So, what exactly will we do? AVALON is about scenario based learning and when asked what this has to do with LANCELOT learning, I keep saying: we learn a language in a virtual classroom (LANCELOT) and we practise it in Second Life. So, it is all about scenarion based learning, action based learning, action research and similar expressions that denote learning by doing.

What an exciting project indeed. Stay tuned, I will keep you posted.

Sir LANCELOT and the mists of AVALON, the virtual saga continues..

Two and three dimensional worlds offer great platforms for language acquisitions due to their characteristics to simulate total immersion. Increased bandwidth and powerful computers have enabled these virtual worlds to become multi-player environments and this means that one can literally meet people from around the world from the comfort of the office or from home.

Language learning in virtual classrooms (2D) benefits learners by offering access to native speakers, specialised language trainers and the opportunity to group same level language learners even across continents. An interactive whiteboard is used for text, presentations and images, web touring and screen sharing facilitate learner input of the material used in class.

Language learning in Second Life, there.com etc. (3D) offer a fantastic variety of scenarios, re-enactment of real life situations and an easy means of media production. Role play (job interviews etc.), quests (enquire based activities, treasure hunt, murder mystery etc.), full-blown social organizational simulations (run a company, organize a conference etc.), virtual tourism (sightseeing, museums, shopping etc.), media production (newspapers, films/ machinimas, theater) or building processes involving whole teams (a house, a space labs, underwater worlds, a boat etc.), the list is endless so it seems.

Al in the target language, all live online.

‘Sir LANCELOT and the mists of AVALON’ denote two European funded projects, both development projects aimed at exploring language learning with state-of-the-art synchronous Internet Communication technology.

LANCELOT (LANguage learning with CErtified Live Online Teachers) focused on teaching in virtual classrooms and successfully completed in 2007. During the 2-year project 23 Partners joined to develop a 3-month course for language trainers. This course is certified and accredited by ICC Europe and immerse language teachers into a virtual world, that is second to none. LANCELOT successfully finished in 2007 and currently a community of 80 teachers are offering 14 languages and meet and share best practise on www.lancelotschool.com.

AVALON, which stands for ‘Access to Virtual and Action Learning live ONline’, is about language learning in Second Life and is just about to begin its 2-year development with 26 partners in 8 European countries, 11 of whom are Universities. In AVALON scenarios are going to be developed to facilitate communication. A certified and accredited teacher training course too will be developed. There is no URL as of yet.

AVALON invites the learners to enter a virtual journey and lists the benefits of language learning in the 21st century. Learning in real-time, effective and fun. It also outlines the learning curve for language trainers to utilise these new environments for a great learning experience.

This project is about to begin in November 2008 and whilst the last go ahead of the European Commission is still pending, the project partners are really excited about this new and still misty virtual world.

Will LANCELOT learning and AVALON learning shape the landscape of language learning? May we invite you to comment on this change to come? When and how and how much of an impact will this have?