Coaching connected learning across borders

I just completed the Coursera MOOC on the History and Future of HE with the wonderful Cathy Davidson. All MOOCs have to have an identifiable front persona even though it’s impossible that any of these courses could be the work of only one person and to be fair, in this course Davidson often showed us who…

Since I am a partner in two projects planning to design short online courses I was interested to try out a new tool last week, the Learning Designer.  This was introduced through a short sharp MOOC, the International Learning Design Challenge, which was over in a week! The Learning Design tool makes the planning of…

When I started tutoring the online version of the Certificate for Teaching Languages with Technology for The Consultants-E in 2010, it was fairly simple in terms of tool choice. For each digital task there were two or three mainstream tools to choose from and they were PC-based. Wiki/ Wikispaces, Pbwiki, WetPaint Blog/ Blogger, WordPress, Edublogs…

The title sounds grand but this is about how you can make global collaboration an everyday part of the life of a classroom as and when it is appropriate. I was asked to do a 5-minute talk (via Skype as it happens) to a group of about 200 trainee teachers in Israel. Since their first…

(Click on images to enlarge) In the dCCDFLITE project, our aim is to develop a course that promotes entrepreneurial skills by bringing together IT students and technical employees to work together on identifying an innovative idea as a business plan. We will develop the course using dCCD. We will also introduce participants to CCD as…

Are you in the middle of an IT degree? Or working in a technical department with a feeling that something could be done more efficiently? Would you like to learn how to build a business plan around your idea? The new Erasmus project, code-named dCCD FLITE, will be offering a free 8-week online course in…

Have you ever wondered whether podcasting might help your freelance business? Welcome to this special 30 minute edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast recorded in September 2013 in Tallinn, Estonia at the SIETAR Congress. SIETAR is the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research and this is an edited version of the workshop led by…

My main takeaway from the recent SIETAR Congress in the wonderful city of Tallinn in Estonia: Society is a human construct which needs active intervention and facilitation (orchestration) to survive. Multiculturalism goes against ancient instincts based on tribalism, suspicion of the other etc in order to survive. So far, governments and other agencies have facilitated multiculturalism…

After over 15 years of working with the potential of various digital tools for learning in general, and language learning in particular, I am now much more interested in the bigger picture of solving learning challenges rather than focusing on individual tools. This change of focus was brought into sharp relief when I received the…