As I had not first planned to participate and joined late, the beginning was chaotic. Fortunately the course allows for plenty of time for people to digest the concepts and react .  I was enjoying the freedom of my sabbatical year to go to conferences, museums, exhibitions and get together with people from different walks of life and professional areas. More and more, I have been trying to engage with non-homogeneous groups of people. After having spent 35 years enclosed inside a classroom, interacting with the same crowd and doing the same things, I have an imperious urge to know what is happening out there and learning from the world around me.

Acknowledging and interacting with this diversity of cultural, linguistic and professional personal backgrounds, assumptions and motivations is IMHO a key competency not only f2f  but even more so when one is online, where physical cues are almost nonexistent.

Leigh says:

facilitation is a rare and valuable skill to have. It is a service that is often used in conferences, debates, panels and tutorials, or simply where groups of people are meeting and need someone to help negotiate meaning and understanding, and to keep everyone engaged and on task.

* Good facilitation depends on good communication skills.

* Good online facilitation depends on good online communication skills.

* Facilitating online communities… what does that involve?

Courses like this one, however, rely mostly on written text, so the language used / the educational perspective and jargon may be an important barrier for expression of those from a non-Anglo-Saxon culture, non- academic background or different literacy practices.

Non-native speakers have the double trouble of negotiating meaning  and weaving their tacit knowledge of another background with the explicit learning of the technical knowledge and skills about the nature and practice of the particular skill or competency being acquired in a language different from their own - English (Beyond Communities of Practice - Language, Power and Social Context”, Cambridge University Press, 2005, page 151).

I am in ELT (secondary school) but, in spite of all my practice and exposure on the web, I am finding increasing difficulty in communicating my thoughts in different contexts where a particular language/jargon is used (same for the other languages I speak - French , Polish and Portuguese) if I am not constantly exposed to them and do not practice it. I am permanently chasing for the different meanings of words and collocations so as to negotiate their impact and try not sound inarticulate or inappropriate. Also, are the online facilitation skills that come from an Anglo-Saxon culture the same for the French, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish cultures or do we accept them as being so because they have not been developed in our online contexts?

I am a self-directed learner -most of what I know comes from observing, experiencing and putting myself in situations where the skills I wish to acquire are required. I also test my possibilities, watch for reactions and try to learn from my mistakes. So although I have already facilitated/moderated/taught online courses and belong to different online communities this time, I decided I would record the process from an intercultural angle.

Next topic: First Steps

Guesswho has already given its support by investing in it? Any vested interest there, you think?

What else will you be asked to share so it can monetized and commodified…your soul?

Please bear with me, although I love Amazon and their service, I am somewhat not comfortable with the idea and not in a happy satisfied customer/consumer perspective today. Is there any argument you can forward to change my mind?

emerging, harnessing, retrieving
disruptive
cogs
nodes
codes
playing with words

My classes are blogging openly using Wordpress.com as the main tool to which a number of sattelites are connected (Flickr, 43Things, Places and People, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Community Walk, Wikispaces) constituting a portfolio. The students have linked all their personal accounts to their main space and have also configured the tools so as to be able to post directly to their blog from them (Flickr, 43Trio) However, not all of them can be integrated that smoothly.

In an earlier post on Dekita.org, I explain how we worked last year.

Back from my two-week tour in Europe, which encompassed Barcelona (+some parts of Catalunya), Paris and London. It was a much needed break , a cyclical journey retracing the steps of those who got their inspiration long before me, positioning myself in different spaces, with different people at different times, reflecting on concepts, relationships, connections, interaction and learning, perceiving motions, gestures, looks, weighing the said and the unsaid, bringing the emerging fragments together, trying to fold the circles to reach for new understandings, recognize my rituals and personal mythology inside a larger pattern.

After a week in Catalunya (Barcelona, coast and countryside) with my son and fiancee, I came to spend the weekend in Paris. This present journey has taken me to the past and to the future.

The first and last time I was in Paris in spring was in May 1968 so it was a double pleasure to be here again for best friend’s daughter’s wedding: many memories, scents and colours from way back then and the occasion to meet all those who, although living in Europe now, spent an important period of their lives in Brazil.

This afternoon I am heading to London to meet virtual friends and edubloggers f2f for the first time. Follow photos on Flickr.

Cover of our handout:

Poster: