TV and radio talk all the time about the giant typhoon that hit the Philippines. Such unimaginable winds. The climate change calls for these monsters more and more often it seems. I wonder how things are in Sarawak where our Webskills colleague Diana lives and works.

 

As with me and Webskills, the learning process has certainly started (should have by now of course!). I am trying to constantly trace elements in my daily doings that would have a bearing on my studies. Also I managed to squeeze out two (for me) rather voluminous posts on Nicenet about the tasks on Alternative Assessment and Rubrics.

However, this past week  I was unable to study focused, being really busy with a business trip to Jyväskylä (300km from Helsinki) which took a day and a half, and even if I spent altogether 6 hrs on the train, VR, our national railway, failed me this time: the net connection just did not work. Every evening of the week, I was busy preparing Powerpoint presentations, including an hour’s webinar to Joensuu on Thursday, another city some 400 km away from Helsinki. The webinar went great, I am learning! I had my first webinar some two years ago and I am close to knowing already how to be interactive in an Adobe Connect event. The simple thing is, your audience and you have to have access to a camera and the audio contact has to be good. In Joensuu, when my audience wanted to pose me questions, they came right in front of the laptop camera, presented themselves and then we discussed the question they had in mind. Of course you have to be even more careful with what slides you show than if you are in a classroom or an auditorium as you cannot really hop on and off a set of slides and you cannot necessarily use animations as such in a webinar (I cannot, of course a skilled person can).  Do you know that you can also record your webinars, edit them a little and later share them in any way you find meaningful. This reminds me of flipped classrooms which we haven’t discussed as yet in Webskills. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_teaching. I wonder if I could do a flipped webinar in my role as an education administrator – why not!

By the way, I was talking to Joensuu about our curriculum process with focus on language education. What language education is in Europe pls see for example http://www.ecml.at/Resources/ECMLPublications/tabid/277/language/en-GB/Default.aspx (and check this excellent Centre’s website anyway!). Now language education means a major paradigm shift in learning and teaching languages as it introduces serious student-centeredness, plurilingualism, intercultural communication for cultural diversity, and an outlook on languages as something you can play with, including making mistakes in order to test your skills and to learn more.

As the next step this week in my microscopic share of Finland’s efforts towards better language education, Thursday night, I was drawing up a presentation for our Chinese and Japanese languages projects who had a joint seminar on Friday. As a Webskiller, I reminded them of how important it is to build a solid and versatile presence on the net to serve their audiences. Anyways, with these projects, we are in small steps preparing our foreign languages curricula to observe the needs of these major non-European languages, or rather, their learners and teachers! (Next project: Arabic?)  You might care to have a look at these projects’ websites, the ones who can read Chinese or Japanese may find something digestible there http://yanzu.fi/ and http://www.rajamaenlukio.fi/ippo-hanke/in+english/. (I don't know how to insert images so the following looks a bit tilted. The red bird at the bottom may look familiar; it is the logo of Yanzu they have a famous sponsor.)

This is IPPO’s logo and motto, good for all learning too, aren’t they?

千里の道も一歩から。

Senri no michi mo ippo kara.

Even a long journey is begun by taking one step.