European project

The closing date for the MEDEA awards is coming up soon and so we invite all producers of media resources to submit their entries by 31 July. Entry to the MEDEA Awards is free!

This year there are two main MEDEA Awards, the MEDEA Overall Award and the European Collaboration Award. The European Collaboration Award recognizes excellent media-based productions and projects that come about as a result of European cross-border collaboration. This year the organisers are making a distinction between professional and non-professional producers, awarding the best entry in each category.

You can submit your entry in French, English or German and once your entry is completed, you can then follow its progress online. Find out more from the MEDEA Awards website.

About 60 broadcasters and others interested in the re-use of video resources met in Mykonos, Greece on 23-24 June. The objective of this workshop was to discuss various metadata schema and initiatives against the background of the EUscreen project which is creating an online resource with more than 30,000 video clips drawn for the archives of European broadcasters. During this meeting, the project team presented the selection criteria that has been drawn up to categorise video resources which will be sorted into 14 primary categories like 'Environment and Nature', 'Politics and Belief, etc...

This video content, which will be made available via Europeana, will also be organised into comparative virtual exhibitions comprising selections of materials from different broadcasters under specific topics, e.g. Eastern European Television vs Western European Television.  Trials using the EUscreen approach will begin in Autumn, 2010. ATiT is a partner in EUscreen, supporting the take-up of these materials in the educational sector.

For a detailled report on the workshop see the EUscreen website.

ATiT staff recently met in Spain with partners of RURALeNTER, a project funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme. "RUeNTER", as it is also known, is analysing the needs regarding public services and ICT services of citizens of four rural areas in Austria, Greece, Romania and Spain. The identified user needs will be addressed through training workshops taking place in the first half of 2011 and a supporting online portal with training support materials and social network functionalities.

During this second partner meeting, which took place on the sunny and beautiful premises of the University of Barcelona Spain, all partners discussed their progress and planning for the next stage of the project. ATiT is the leader of the Quality Assurance and Evaluation workpackage and we presented our evaluation methodology during this meeting which includes a peer review process of the project’s deliverables and the deployment of several online questionnaires to receive feedback from different RUeNTER actors throughout the project.

To find out more about the project, visit the project website. If you would like to receive the project's six-monthly online newsletter, please send us an e-mail with your details.

Almost 400 people attended the EDEN annual conference held in the beautiful city of Valencia from 9 - 12 June. The theme of the conference this year was 'Media Inspirations for Learning' and so a presentation of the MEDEA Awards given by Sally Reynolds from ATiT turned out to be a popular choice for lots of participants.

This presentation provided a snapshot of how the MEDEA awards scheme has been growing since its launch in 2007 and a description of the types of entries it receives.  It was also a timely reminder that the closing date for receipt of entries this year is 31 July.

EDEN also provided a good opportunity to promote the Media and Learning conference being held in Brussels on 25 - 26 November in collaboration with the Flemish Ministry of Education, where themes related to to how best to utilise the impact of media will be the main focus of discussion.

This month's newsletter includes an introduction to EuroCreator, which is offering video resources to European teachers. It also gives an insight into an innovative special interest group on educational podcasting and tells the story behind the MEDEA 2009 Finalist, Studiecoach, produced by the Dutch Open University. 

Readers of the May issue can read about KlasCement, offering video resources to Dutch-speaking teachers, learn about several calls for related competitions such as the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards and the JAPAN PRIZE and find out more about what is happening in the field of media and education through the articles and announcements about recent developments and publications contained in the May edition.

Read the newsletter on the Media in Education website.

RURALeNTER is an initiative which will review the types of ICT services available in rural communities in Greece, Austria, Romania and Spain with a view to finding out just how much rural citizens know about the value such services can have.

It will also develop and deliver a generic training curriculum in these countries focusing on how to prepare rural adults to use and exploit ICT services, by means of blended learning models.

This initiative is partially supported under the Lifelong Learning Programme and will create a set of policy recommendations to policy makers and regional authorities about the ways in which rural citizens can take advantage of ICT services.  ATiT staff are involved in the evauation of this initiative. Find out more from the RURALeNTER website.

The April/May edition of the Virtual Campus newsletter has been published by ATiT and is available from the Virtual Campus website.

Highlights this month include a summary of recent US activity relevant to e-learning and virtual campuses, a report on a workshop on e-learning in South America, an insight into the activities of the Association of Academic E-learning in Poland and a topical collection of announcements, reports and publications in the field of e-learning and the virtual campus.

For more information you can visit the Re.ViCa web site at http://revica.europace.org or the project's wiki and inventory: http://www.virtualcampuses.eu.

11 schools in the west of Ireland are now actively using web 2.0 tools thanks to the SoRuraLL project in which ATiT is a partner.

These schools use a variety of different tools to share information about what they are doing. They include schools like Feakle National school which has put junior and senior classes' bookweek photos online and Moveen national school which has posted photos of pupils making pancakes for Pancake Tuesday. Other schools like St Joseph's secondary school use their own website which the teachers manage themselves to post reports about how well the hurling team is doing.

A number of other schools are getting involved in using these tools to support their links with schools in other parts of Europe like St Mochullas national school which now posts its own photo gallery of their work in the Choir project.

Work on SoRuraLL will continue for the rest of the school year and a conference called Social Applications for Lifelong Learning highlighting outcomes of this and other related projects will be held on 4 - 5 November 2010 in Patras, Greece.

The April edition of the Media in Education Newsletter is now available and includes a report about EdReNe's recently held strategic seminar on repositories of learning resources.

It also includes an article about Planet SciCast, an online video-sharing repository which was one of the finalists in the MEDEA Awards 2009, articles about two different IPR-related websites and an introduction to the MEDEA National Contact Point in Malta which is the Centre for Literacy at the University of Malta. 

The April edition also includes information about the call for submissions to the Media and Learning conference being held 25/26 November in Brussels.

This edition is available on a dedicated newsletter website where you will also find issues of this monthly newsletter dating back to September 2009 as well as information about how you can sign up to receive the newsletter every month.

ATiT has also recently launched a website dedicated to the MEDEA:EU project which supports the organisation of the MEDEA Awards and which is partially funded under the European Commission' s Lifelong Learning Programme.

The latest edition of the Re.ViCa newsletter is now available and includes analysis and information about a host of different developments related to virtual campuses worldwide. It includes a short retrospective on the Learning and Technology World Forum 2010, a report on the recently announced partnership between the Ohio and Minnesota higher education systems and an analysis of the role and impact of the HEFCE Online Learning Task Force.

The newsletter also contains an announcement about the work that will continue to be done by the Re.ViCa team in 2010-2011 as well as a series of announcements about reports, publications and other recent developments related to the virtual campus phenomenon.