project management

Partners from the SoRuraLL initiative which is testing the viability of various types of social networking tools met in Krakow, Poland on 3-4 June to discuss the progress of the pilot activities taking place in different parts of Europe. Part of their meeting was held in the Raba Wyzna Telecentre in the Rokiciny Podhalanskie region, a rural area about an hour from Krakow.  This area is currently suffering a lot from flooding in the region and the meeting served as a good opportunity to find out more about the needs of rural populations when it comes to ICT and the ways in which social networking tools can help to relieve isolation and provide useful community services to the region.

After a year of hard work, the EduTubePlus partners met for their first annual meeting in Rome on the 15/16 October to review progress and plan for the coming months. This meeting took place in the historical Sala 1 - the first radio studio used by RAI. It was a fitting location given the importance placed on educational content by RAI from the early days of the station during the reconstruction following World War II which continues to this day.

The first version of the EduTubePlus platform is almost ready and video content is being segmented and prepared for incluson. At the same time pedagogical scenarios utilising video material from the library are being prepared. Planning for the first user trials is now underway and will involve schools in Greece, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Belgium and the UK.

The ICL conference held in Villach 23-25 September provided a good opportunity to promote the Virtual Campuses wiki created by the Re.ViCa consortium. Re.ViCa team member Sally Reynolds gave a presentation about the extensive Virtual Campus inventory available in the wiki and invited conference participants to visit, use and update the wiki. She also described some of the analytical work carried out by the team supported by international experts which identified factors influencing the success or otherwise of virtual campus initiatives worldwide.
 

The DIVERSE Conference held this year in Aberystwyth University in Wales from 24 to 26 June brings together an active community of practitioners all engaged in developing innovative visual educational resources.

This year the sharing of educational video material was really high on the agenda with Obadiah Greenburg from YouTube describing YouTube EDU, Olaf Schulte from ETH Zurich presenting the Opencast community and the Matterhorn project and the team from the University of Amsterdam talking about ZOEP - this is the space to watch for how, and perhaps more importantly,  where educational videos in higher education will be found in the future.

Taking place in the lovely and surprisingly warm surroundings of coastal Wales, this community of practitioners provides a rich resource of know-how and expertise in the field of educational technology and multimedia production. You can follow the conference live here.

The MEDEA Secretariat now has A2 size posters as well as leaflets for promoting the 2009 Awards and can provide them to anyone interested in helping to spread information about MEDEA. These are available in French, German or English and are part of the current promotional work being undertaken by the MEDEA team.

The network of MEDEA National Contact Points is also growing and there are now partners active in 15 European countries, partners willing to promote MEDEA are still being recruited, so if you are interested, please contact the MEDEA Secretariat.

To find out more about the Awards and how to enter, visit the MEDEA web site. Participation in this competition is for free and the closing date is 30th September!

26 people took part in the final workshop organised by the Re.ViCa team in Maastricht this week. Participants included International Advisory Committee members, project partners and guests who provided valuable input and feedback on several project outputs. Guests included Uswege Minga
from the Open University Tanzania, Lutfor Rahman from the People's University of Bangladesh, Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal from Athabasca University, Canada, and Mohd Ismail Ramli from MARA University of Technology in Malaysia.

ATiT has recently joined a new project called Rural Social Networking for Lifelong Learning (SoRuraLL) which will investigate the potential offered by social networking tools and platforms to those living in geographically and socio-economically disadvantaged rural areas.

More specifically, SoRuraLL will develop and implement experimental learning approaches examining the potential offered by these new trends and tools for the alleviation of the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by rural populations in Europe, and in particular for the enhancement of rural citizens’ opportunities for effective and meaningful lifelong learning.

ATiT will be responsible for managing a trial involving schools in the East Clare region of Ireland. This is a Lifelong Learning Programme project (KA3) involving partners from Greece, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain and Belgium. The kick off meeting of the project took place in Patras, Greece on 29-30 of January 2009.

The first meeting for the MEDEA:EU project took place in Roosbeek on 2-3 February involving the three project partners, UNI-C in Denmark, IADT in Ireland and ATiT in Belgium. MEDEA:EU which is supported under the Lifelong Learning Programme is a dissemination activity aimed at making the MEDEA Awards available to a wider European audience.

The project will do this by making information about the MEDEA Awards available throughout Europe through a network of National Contact points as well as by making materials including the MEDEA web site available in French and German as well as in English.

MEDEA:EU will also support a European Collaboration Award, aimed at recognising excellence in the use of multimedia in Education realised through cooperation between organisations in 2 or more countries. More information about MEDEA:EU will be available from 28 February from the MEDEA web site.

The EduTubePlus consortium launched the project web site this week where you can get up to date news and information about this new eContent Plus project. EduTubePlus brings together 17 European organisations and companies including ATiT to create a European curriculum related video library and hybrid set of e-services for the pedagogical exploitation of video in schools.

At this stage of the project, the partners are engaged in building up the selection criteria to be used in selecting videos for inclusion in the new library, a pedagogical framework for the effective use of video in class as well as creating the design for the web portal architecture. A meeting for the partners involved in the pedagogical aspects of EduTubePlus took place 4/5 November in Brussels.

The date has now been set for the International Advisory Committee of the Re.ViCa project on Virtual Campus to meet again in Berlin on December 3rd, right before the annual Online Educa Berlin conference. This committee, bringing together experts from around the world on the topic of Virtual Campus is providing input to the partners in the Re.ViCa project who are busily creating an extensive wiki on the topic of Virtual Campus, highlighting various initiatives and experiences aimed at exploring the factors that influence the creation of a successful Virtual campus.