But you are the determined type so you persist and with the help of the university placements office you finally get an internship with a small company which is, say, at the leading edge of mobile app development for the disabled. Now one of the reasons you wanted to target an SME in the first place was so that you could get a real taste of what it is to be an entrepreneur. Now you have your chance because the two founders of the company are always at the weekly development meeting unless they’re attending trade exhibitions or meeting clients. So… what do you do now? Of course they give you tasks to do and these are quite interesting but how do you get more out of the experience and really find out what the entrepreneurial spirit is all about?

Maybe one way of really adding value to the organisation is to come with something in your pocket? How about visiting the university technology transfer department before you leave and see if there is anything there which might be of interest to your hosting company. But aren’t those patents pending all confidential? Can you really start discussing them with your host internship company?

It is this type of situation which the newly started Uni-Key project would like to address by encouraging responsible technology transfer through interns and by developing some short targeted online training which will highlight to the intern opportunities for learning more about entrepreneurial skills. The training will be built around key situations such as the one described above. The project partners have come up with the list below of possible key situations which could be turned into training activities.

• planning situations turned into a strategic (career) planning exercise
• financial shortage situations turned into a financial planning exercise (including forms of micro-financing, crowdfunding)
• (intercultural) conflict situations turned into an innovation and creativity management exercise
• boundary crossing situations turned into a strategic self-development exercise
• confidentiality situations turned into IPR management exercises
• underchallenge situations turned into exercises of opportunity seizing (e.g. concerning knowledge transfer)
• situations requiring self-organisation turned into exercises of self- and project management
• ethically challenging situations turned into exercises of reflection on good governance

But we would like to know if there are any other key situations which would be good candidates for inclusion in the training. Although I am the partner in the project responsible for quality assurance, we are all involved in these preliminary discussions which will determine how relevant our final version of the training is.

We would be very interested to hear from interested parties whether they could add to the list. So have you hosted interns before in your organisation? Were there any issues which tended to surface time and time again? Could we use them as one of the key situations in our training? We’d love to know what you think of the list.

In this session you will find out why coaching is an effective professional development tool and how the VITAE course (as adapted by the UnderstandIT project) could help you become an ICT integration coach. You will do this by using six Web 2.0 tools to access and review the material of this session and decide on your first SMART goal. It is learning by doing and in order to access the necessary links you should have the following ScoopIt page open at the same time: http://www.scoop.it/t/vitae-course

 

You will find several other media possibilities for accessing the presentation on the K12 Online webpage. You will also find a wealth of other interesting sessions this week and next on the theme of Purposeful Play.

The next speaker was Dr Abdulhamied Almoraithy about using multimedia in the Arab World for intercultural learning which starts at 27 minutes into the recording after an unscheduled break in recording and ends at the 40 minute mark.

SIETAR is the Society for Intercultural Education and Research.



My thesis is that the most common social media tools are by and large of western origin and reflect the western belief in agency and individualism. In my session I wondered what type of status updates different cultures might prefer and in this I was helped by the kind people who filled in a survey I carried out earlier in the month.  In particular I asked about people’s policy on which name to use, how to represent themselves with an avatar and what type of status updates they made to their walls. I got a nice spread of ages, though a preponderance of people in education either as students or teachers so this may skew the results somewhat.

Name Policy
Facebook and Google + both insist on real names while Twitter doesn’t mind what you call yourself. Nicknames are great for hiding your identity and this can be used for good or ill. You tend to find the most vitriolic and intolerant comments made by people not using their own names on YouTube for example but on the other hand news from the Arab Spring and other politically sensitive events tends to come out by proxy and from people using pseudonyms. In my sample, 70% preferred to use their own name with 30% opting for  a nickname. So there seems a clear preference for openess in identity. In the Chinese sub-group the preference was more 50-50 but this may have something to do with the habit of Chinese students being known by a western name to help their fellow classmates and teachers. In the Indian sub-group there was a clear preference for openess in identity.

Avatar Policy
When it came to profile images or avatars, in the Chinese sub-group the results were again equally divided between those who would use a photo of themselves and those who would use something else such as a landscape photo or a cartoon. For the group as a whole 75% chose to use a photo of themselves while in the Indian sub-group, not only was the preference not to use a photo but to avoid any kind of representation whatsoever. So these results confirm my suspicion that Asian cultures are less comfortable with the idea of uploading photos of themselves. And I wonder if they are being made to feel even more uncomfortable as social media tools become more and more insistent that you upload something. Skype at the moment for example is being extremely aggressive in nudging me to take a photo of myself with my webcam for my profile even though I have a carefully chosen profile photo in place already!

Status updates
The third major area I wanted to investigate was what type of status updates would people prefer to add to their favourite social medium? I divided status updates into nine different types:

I think the above average presence of teachers and students in the sample is the reason for the knowledge sharing type of status update coming up with such a high percentage in the survey. (The question wasn’t compulsory hence the percentages don’t add up to 100). But again if we look at the Chinese and Indian sub-groups, it is only in the Chinese group that anybody chose the corporate honour type of update while in the Indian sub-group wise words were the overwhelming choice. So again I think that this supports my suspicion that pushing yourself as an individual does not fit comfortably in some cultures. In fact to be honest, it does not fit comfortably with many people in the western world either but the proportions seem to be significantly different in each of the groups; overall results, Chinese and Indian.

Practical implications

In my session at the Managing Cultural Diversity seminar I tried to get the participants to think about how differing attitudes to social media and how to behave in them might affect the reactions of different groups of people. As a starting point I showed the KLM Surprise campaign and straight away there were doubts in the room about how comfortable you would feel being suddenly confronted by an airline employee wanting to give you a gift based on what you had posted on social media. So next I divided the participants into small groups and got them discussing different scenarios such as the following:

You are a group of Chinese students doing a semester at Fachhochschule Koblenz.
You notice that many of your fellow students are on Facebook and often agree on social activities through Facebook.

• How do you feel about this?
• Will you join Facebook? If not what happens socially?
• Will you join one or more Facebook groups?
• What types of status updates will you post? Give examples

It was very interesting to get the feedback on these discussions so thanks to everyone who participated in the survey and everyone who participated in the Managing Cultural Diversity Seminar. Thanks also to those who discussed the survey at Linked In in the SIETAR Europa Competence in intercultural professions group where there was a great deal of discussion around the idea of personal branding on Facebook and how acceptable that was.

Earlier in the year I was speculating about how to implement a mobile exercise using one of the many augmented reality apps that have appeared in the last couple of years. Before I could implement I wanted a smartphone so that I could experiment and this finally happened in June. Although I bought myself a fairly top of the range model, a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc, I should point out that most new phones these days are smart enough to implement this idea. The other significant factor is that mobile device plans are getting cheaper and often include some data as part of the basic plan so it is no longer so unacceptable to ask people to use data while on the move. In fact this idea requires very little online time.

Experimental group

The next challenge was to find a group to experiment with. So I went to the local village school which my daughters had attended and where I still knew some people. The school was closed down by the local authority two years ago because it was too small and has since gone independent as a Scandinavian free school. Although it gets funding from central government, as well as parents paying fees, money is very tight and so the digital equipment base is very low. But what I was suggesting was that we should use the children’s own devices. I also knew from my time as a parent that the school was very keen on promoting the idea of the outdoors as an extension of the classroom and that was one reason why I thought they might like the idea.

When I finally approached the school I was incredibly lucky because it just so happened that they were facing a challenge which my suggestion could help. As a small school, the classes are mixed age and in their oldest class, the very oldest 7thh grade pupils needed to go out every two weeks or so for an age related exercise which left the younger sixth grade pupils in the class and the teachers did not want the younger pupils to get ‘ahead’ of the older pupils during this time. Luckily for me this was the history class.

The activity

Research: So my proposal was that the younger pupils could find out more about the history of our small village by going out and noticing buildings and so on, by making use of the local history archive which is partly on the web and partly in a building housed by willing volunteers who would be prepared to find photos and other documents for the children as well as in classroom sessions. And in the end, the class teacher also gave her class homework to interview their elderly relatives over the autumn break to give them additional information about the past of the village.

Although the focus in this case was history, it could be on any number of other topics, such as biology (field observations, identification and so on), geology, archeology, transport, culture and so on.

Game planning: Once the class had done their research guided by the teacher, the next stage was to work out how to make this into a game. At this point, it is very useful to know which AR tool you are going to be using so that you know what is possible and what is not. After a great deal of research over the summer I had chosen SCVNGR as the most promising tool and so I knew that in SCVNGR you could add short texts, images, audio files, video files and web links. So although in theory the pedagogy comes first at all times, in practice you have to be prepared to adapt the pedagogy to fit the tools available. I had for example tested other AR tools which promised that you could add all these different media but in practice allowed very little or did not allow the media to be easily presented in the form of a chain of activities.

What is mobile?

So in what way are mobile devices used in this activity? In fact most of the time is spent in learning the background facts and planning the mobile treasure hunt. During the research phase pupils can use their mobile phones to take pictures of possible way posts in the treasure hunt or to make notes either in text or audio format. Back at school they plan the route, the number of questions and the content of the questions. Then they need to actually produce the question material which could be short texts, images, audio or video files or any combination of these. The question materials are then uploaded to SCVNGR using their simple input webpage. This is probably best done on a computer. It is not until the treasure hunt needs to be tested that there is any need to be online via our mobile device. Click on the image below to get a larger image of the SCVNGR input page.

Initial pupil reaction

The pupils were very keen on the idea and couldn’t wait to get started. When I presented the idea to the class teacher she was immediately very keen mainly because it solved a problem for her and she recognised that her pupils probably would be too. During my presentation of this to the Polish Moodle Moot someone commented that the teacher was brave to take on the idea but I think that the reality is that she recognised the power of the machines in her pupils pockets and was glad to be able to make use of them in a targeted and pedagogically sound manner. This was a very pragmatic decision.

The pupils have done their initial research and are now finalising the questions. Here is an example of one of the questions they have devised which I have translated into English and which shows how it appears on my phone:

Objections

Not every pupil has a smart phone. That is true but almost every pupil has either a smart phone or a smart mp3 player. The activity is deal for group work and all the teacher needs to do is to ensure that there is at least one device able to take photos, videos and make audio recordings in each group. In a Danish school there is no danger of this being a problem.

Data costs: Most mobile phone plans now include some free data transfer in the monthly fee. The data transfer is only needed when playing or testing the game after all the question material has been uploaded through a computer so this is not a problem. This is certainly true in Denmark as well as the UK, Poland and Spain and I guess in many other countries too.

Mobile devices are banned: In this activity the devices are used mainly outside the school. The only use inside the school would be to transfer files to a computer or pendrive for later editing and upload to SCVNGR. One suggestion is to change the rules so that mobile devices may be used with the teacher’s permission.

Timing

I think that this activity can be very elastic in the amount of time it takes. It is up to the teacher how much research they think their pupils need to establish the basic facts needed for the game and then how much planning time is needed to work out a route and question content. When preparing the multimedia content the general rule is that the more you plan, the less you will have to edit afterwards. For language teachers practicing a piece to camera several times before making the final recording is probably a very valuable exercise in itself. In the end, as with many pedagogical activities, it is the process which is more important than the end result. But in my case, the end result will be a history treasure hunt game around the village which the absent pupils will try out. In most other situations, it would probably be the goal that at least two games are produced by different groups so that the groups can try out each other’s game.

Why did I choose SCVNGR?

In SCVNGR a question is called a challenge and several challenges can be put together to make a trek. In my activity the treasure hunt would be a trek. My reasons for choosing SCVNGR included the following:

• because they seemed to have a simpler interface than the others I tried.
• they have a built in treasure hunt feature which they call treks.
• uploading and playing multimedia on your phone works
• you can include more open-ended questions such as taking and submitting of a photo of what you see when you are in the correct place
• they are sympathetic to educators (you can ask for more than the initial free 5 challenges for example)
• their app works in Android and iOS, the two most common mobile interfaces

Part 3

In Part 3 we will find out how the game went.

My Polish Moodle Moot presentation

There are loads of interesting sessions (click on your time zone at the bottom of this page to find the schedule in your time) over the 5 days and it’s all free and online.

But for online chats I use Skype together with Pamela. When I have all the recordings then I get to work editing with Audacity. What I am aiming for are segments which are about 5 minutes long.

What I normally do is to edit the pieces I have and when I see what I have got, I plan a linking script which I then record and slot around the pieces I have. So in this podcast I have two interviews with TCE participants, one interview with an Irish political commentator and a recording of a talk given in a recent webinar to which I also contributed but I don’t want to focus on my session so I chose a snippet from one of the other speakers.

So editing the individual chats, what happens? If the recording is more than about 5 minutes long then it helps to select portions and label them otherwise you waste a lot of time just finding the right section again. See below how I have labelled Janice’s recording. (Click on image to see full size).

I delete the polite intros and ‘Can you hear me?”s. Sometimes people will lose their way and start a point again so I delete the losing their way bit too. But in actual fact I do delete much more than that as I want to end up with sections which are only about 5 minutes long (though I frequently break my own guideline). Why 5 minutes? Well we are in the sound bite culture but also I do worry a lot about sound quality which is not always good on Skype so I don’t want to subject listeners to poor sound quality for too long at atime. Of course there comes a point when I say this is just too bad and we either have to abandon it completely or start again and re-record.

Then there is the awkward question of speech tics.  I do edit them out if I think they are distracting attention from the content of what is being said. Having said that I can’t edit them all out as they often run into other words which need to be kept in and also there is an argument for saying that that is part of that person’s personality and they might be unrecognisable without the ums and you knows. But I strive to make it comfortable for listeners.

You should know that this is way too much manipulation for a class podcast. I am not recommending that you adopt this approach in your class projects but maybe it is food for thought.

So the next step for me is to write and record my links.

What I did after editing the individual conversations as you saw above in Janice’s case was to put together all the individual snippets in Audacity. I try to move all the individual segments into one track otherwise it becomes unwieldy. Then I have one track for the two jingles and a third track which is my recorded linking commentary. You’ll notice that the jingle and commentary tracks are in stereo while the segments are in mono. That is a quirk of recording Skype on Vista. (Click on image to see full size).

Then I export the whole lot as an mp3 file which then has to be uploaded to our server. I do this through an ftp uploading program called Filezilla and you can see when the file was almost finished uploading in the image below. (click on image to see full size).

The next step is to prepare the blog post on www.absolutely-intercultural.com We use a WordPress blog for that and the show notes are basically the linking commentary. It is not compulsory to have a webpage/blog for the podcast but it makes it easier to have a visible webspace for people to refer to instead of a fairly abstract server address where all you can do is listen to the audio. In theory it would be possible to do without the webpage and just have the podcast listed in iTunes. Recently I have been also taking a short extract from the podcast and using it to make a dictation exercise which then goes up on Listen and Write.

I also usually send out a mail telling the people featured in the show that it has been published. Sometimes the recording has been done a long time ago so people are not necessarily up to date about when it comes out. I feel it is a courtesy to let people know.

• based on WordPress
• uses the established UNI-C log-in used for many other Danish educational services
• backed up by a suite of how-to videos
• common user interface
• in Danish

I have been using WordPress not just as a blog but as a website hosting service for several years so I appreciate how flexible it is fulfilling these different roles. The fact that teachers and pupils don’t have to create and remember a suite of new usernames and log-ins is a huge plus. So is the library of how-to videos prepared and structured as a coherent whole instead of searching YouTube for how to videos which match your needs. And finally, the fact that the whole thing is in Danish means that teachers here can avoid the absurdity of using English interface tools in Denmark to teach German for example. I tend to think that the language issue is often overlooked and that when show-casing Web 2.0 tools outside of the English speaking world we too often fall into the easy example of using Web 2.0 tools when teaching English when the foreign interface is an advantage rather than a drawback.

The Danish educational service has previously tried producing its own tailor-made products, called Tavle, but as far as I can gather these never gained much traction and were in any case not open to the outside world. Using an established tool such as WordPress with its established and expert user base seems a much better bet to me.

But I would say that this is a necessary foundation from which to explore the wealth of new Web 2.0 tools which have emerged since, rather than an end point. The tools are also backed up by an attractive and growing library of publications by Peter Leth showing how to use these additional Web 2.0 possibilities such as wordclouds in the classroom.  So this means that Danish treachers now have a natural home in which to embed YouTube videos, Wordle images, cartoons, movies, live conferencing, back channels and all that Web 2.0 entails.

How will visitors know the game exists?
Posters and brochures with a QR code which leads players to a mobile webpage which
• Asks them to download the free Wikitude app and
• Go to a specific location in the village to pick up their first clue on Wikitude

How does the game proceed?
At the start location, players will find the first Point Of Interest (POI) which will present them with a
• short text explanation,
• an image,
• perhaps an embedded YouTube video and
• three hotlinks (they must click one to make a decision and be led to the next POI)

How will the game finish?
The aim of the game will be to find the location of a specific functional building (eg a railway station, a school, a bakery) which used to exist but no longer does so. The payoff for winning will be a sense of completion but could also include a small sponsored prize by a local business. This prize can be claimed by the winner showing a specific webpage on their Smartphone which they could only have accessed by completing the game.

Possible player challenges
1. The POI markers are not very accurate so players may be led up to 50 metres off track. I need to do more testing of this. Perhaps the solution lies in placing the markers at a very high scale on the map?
2. Data charges for downloading Wikitude, for accessing related game websites and for streaming YouTube videos. In fact data is now included in most subscription plans in Denmark so this should not be an issue. However it may be possible to turn the related game website into an app so that it can be downloaded as a one-off. This does not address the YouTube problem so maybe the clues and information contained in the YouTube videos should be optional extras.
3. Incompatible technology: Wikitude works on Android, Nokia, Samsung and Apple phones so this should cover a good proportion of phone users.A good alternative to Wikitude is Layar
4. Language: Many visitors to the village do not speak Danish. The game could be produced in English and German as well as Danish.

The backend
How is the game built up technically? As noted above, the game is a branching scenario built on location based points of interest which include text, images, maybe videos and hyperlinks to act as decision points. This means that a player needs a Smartphone, viewer and access to a website and maybe the ability to watch short streaming YouTube videos. At this point I am unsure whether the hyperlinks could point to other Points of Interest instead of webpages. If this is possible this would remove a layer of complexity as the website would not be needed.

The proposed tools include:
Smartphone: So far this needs to be an Android, Nokia, Samsung or iPhone to be able to use Wikitude. The user needs to have cheap or free data as part of their subscription. This latter requirement is not demanding for Danes but may be more of a challenge for foreign tourists on roaming plans.
Wikitude: a location based viewer which shows you added information at specific locations (Layar is a good alternative to Wikitude).

Google Earth: This is a free tool used by the game developers to create a series of multi-media POIs which can be collated into a KMZ file and uploaded to Wikitude.
Website: If it is not possible to link POIs directly on Wikitude (ie in the KMZ file created on Google Earth) then the intermediary of a website will be needed to point players to their next POI depending on which decision they have made. There are many possibilities for making Smartphone compatible websites free of charge. Eg Winksite

The spiel ide
The idea would be to present the game in the guise of a young boy from about 1900 sent on a mission to find a specific location in the village. He would ‘meet’ various residents who may be able to help him through their reminisces about where things used to be. They may be able to show him photos and so on.

Game Resources
Local Archive: There is an interesting local archive with images, articles of interviews with elderly residents and other artefacts which can be used to build up a game to lead visitors around some of the most interesting parts of the village.
School children: The local school may be interested in getting their pupils to prepare the text, images and videos needed for the different POIs in the game. Videos may need to consist of cartoon characters with audio commentary in order to protect the identity of the children.

Unresolved issues
My main concern with this idea is whether I have made it overly complicated? Do I really need Wikitude? Is there a way of including the YouTube videos in a pre-downloadable app? Can I do without the intervening webpages?