project

Partners from 22 different countries got together in Utrecht this week to launch the new EUScreenXL project. Over the past 4 years, its predecessor, the EUscreen project has put more than 40,000 televisual items online in an act to make historical audiovisual content widely accessible.  EUscreenXL, will invest even more in the online accessibility of European Television Heritage.EUscreenXL will extend the core collection with another 20,000 high quality TV items and will make more than 1,000,000 metadata sets of the consortium's 22 content partners' collections searchable and accessible on Europeana. ATiT is a partner in this new project where staff will be involved in the evaluation of the revised portal.

A series of 3 hour-long webinars will take place in December on the subject of work based learning and the experiences of the E-ViEW project team who have been developing and piloting a European Virtual Campus aimed at learners who want to enhance their management skills and competences within a European context. Each webinar lasts from 16:30 to 17:30 CET and they will take place on 5 December, 12 December and 19 December. Participation in these webinars is free but you need to register online to be sure of a place.

Sally Reynolds from ATiT presented MEDEAnet at the recent EDEN conference which took place in Porto from 6-9 June. The title of this presentation was "5 years on and Just Getting Started: Sharing the experience of the MEDEA Community in building a sustainable European Network".

During the presentation Sally described the development of the MEDEA network and explained the strategy currently being adopted by the MEDEA community to establish a permanent organisational basis for the many different activities that have developed in the past 5 years since the launch fo the MEDEA Awards in 2007. She discussed the main obstacles that have faced the community and outlined where the main areas of growth lie.

The new MEDEA/Media & Learning Association will be launched during the Media & Learning Conference on 14-15 November.

MEDEA2020 is a project supporting the annual MEDEA Awards which involves partners in Spain, Italy, France, Poland and Belgium. It is led by ATiT and involves the organisation of workshops, the support of the monthly Media & Learning newsletter, the annual Media & Learning conference and other dissemination actions as well as the awards scheme. Project partners met this week in Torino to discuss the progress of the project and to support the organisation of a workshop in Torino on the use and re-use of media resources. Find out more about MEDEA2020.

Last week on 26 January, the Kick-off meeting for the European MEDEAnet project took place in the Irish Institute in Leuven, Belgium. This 3-year networking project resulted out of the success of the MEDEA Awards, an annual competition that encourage innovation and good practice in the use of media (audio, video, graphics and animation) in education. The motivation behind MEDEAnet is first of all to extend the reach of the network of the MEDEA Awards by providing opportunities for local events linked to the MEDEA Awards and to involve not only early adopters, but also mainstream practitioners in networking opportunities.

MEDEAnet partners will organise workshops in 7 countries sharing best practice with the input of MEDEA Award winners and finalists; provide a 12-part series of public webinars on related topics; publish an annual report on media literacy, skills in educational media production and the use of media-based teaching resources; promote knowledge building and sharing amongst practitioners and roll-out a large-scale dissemination and exploitation strategy on media and learning. Secondly, plans to establish the MEDEA Foundation as a legally constituted membership organisation in 2012 are underway. MEDEAnet, which is supported under the European Commission's Lifelong Learning Programme, involves partners who either have a national or a large-scale regional brief and who are mandated to support innovation in teaching and learning as part of their organisational responsibility. Through them this network will reach teachers and trainers who are less skilled and motivated to use media-based learning approaches.

Partners in the E-ViEW consortium are preparing to roll out a pilot series of management courses early in 2012 aimed at work-based learners and are currently developing the approach which will taken for elements within these courses. As part of this preparation, ATiT staff helped to organise a meeting of eLearning experts to advise on the current set of plans and to support partners in their work. This meeting took place on 11 October in Leuven and involved partners from Poland, Portugal, Ireland and the UK along with experts from the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Bulgaria and Portugal. Find out more about E-ViEW on the project website.

The EdReNe thematic network held their 4th strategic seminar on repositories of learning resources in Barcelona from 24-26 March. EdReNe brings together people responsible for European webbased repositories with content owners and other stakeholders within education. This seminar explored EdReNe’s overall themes: which repository strategies work, how do we engage users and producers, which are the relevant standards to ensure interoperability, and how do members address the complex handling of intellectual property rights.

It also provided an opportunity to launch the next stage of EdReNe's life as an independent network and about 80 people attended including many of the associated members of which ATiT is one. For more information about the interesting work EdReNe is doing including their recently published series of synthesis reports, visit the EdReNe website.

The November edition of the Re.ViCa newsletter is now available.

Highlights this month include:

• a presentation of the Re.ViCa Handbook which is about to be published and a sneak preview of its contents
• an overview of the collaborative work carried out by the Re.ViCa International Advisory Committee and the growing network of experts contributing to the virtual campus wiki
• a summary of the current status of the Open University of Japan by International Expert Dr. Kumiko Aoki
• introductions to several experts in the field; David Porter (BCcampus, Canada), Em. Prof. Terry Mayes (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK) and Em. Prof. Gajaraj Dhanarajan (Wawasan Open University, Malaysia)
• a round-up of announcements, reports and publications in the field of e-learning and the virtual campus

For more information visit the Re.ViCa web site or the virtual campus wiki and inventory set up and managed by the project team.