EDEN President’s Blog

I am writing this blog entry following the EDEN conference in Gdansk. First of all what a discovery the city of Gdansk was to me! The medieval city was reconstructed from the 1960s on after the total destruction of the Second World War, and a very beautiful job has been made of it. The fact that Gdansk was a Hanse city, one of the many cities that were in the Hanseatic League representing an early attempt to create a common trading area in Europe, is of contemporary interest! My photograph is of a Hanseatic warehouse, of a sort that can be found in as diverse places as Hamburg, Germany and King’s Lynn, England, both Hanse cities. The river Vistula flows to the sea through the city, and the conference took place in the wonderful new Filharmonia Centre, on an island in the middle of the Gdansk city centre.

As President of EDEN my perspective on the conference will be different from almost anyone else! My role was to act as a sort of continuity person: introducing the conference and reminding participants what sort of organisation EDEN is and how we have developed over the last year; and providing the concluding words at the end. Over the last year some 30 new institutions have joined EDEN, along with some 150 individual new members of our Network of Academics and Professionals. During the conference I met a range of individuals who want to build closer links with EDEN, including Carl Holmberg, Secretary-General of ICDE together with Prof Denise Kirkpatrick who is a member of the ICDE Executive Committee; Russ Colbert of Polycom, which has been a loyal sponsor to EDEN over a number of years; and Rob Abel of the IMS Learning Consortium.

The conference brought together more than 300 participants from 44 or so countries. You can find the keynotes elsewhere on the EDEN website, and they provided very stimulating introduction of a range of perspectives on our main theme, that of innovation and creativity in learning. In my opening remarks I spoke of the fact that the EDEN community was at the heart of innovation in learning by virtue of the commitment in so many different institutions and organisations across all sectors of education and training to use flexibility and new technologies. The parallel sessions in all their variety bore this out. The EDEN book, that I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, appeared on time for launch at the conference: ‘Distance Education in Transition’ has more than 50 chapters drawn from the last 8 years, and gives a tremendous overview of the field. It repays study!

It was wonderful to welcome some of Europe’s foremost scholars in our field to the conference, namely Professors G. Michael Moore, Otto Peters, Torstein Rekkedal and Gilly Salmon. All made their own contributions to the meeting, and rarely can one meeting have had such a stellar collection of intellectual leaders at one time! It was also good to welcome back Past EDEN Presidents Ingeborg Bø and Erwin Wagner.

I should mention two more things: firstly that the conference dinner and dance revealed that the EDEN community love to dance and that we include in our number some very elegant movers and shakers on the dance floor! And more seriously, that we had to say goodbye to two very notable Executive Committee members who came to the end of their terms, namely Uli Bernath, of the Ulrich Bernath Stiftung, Germany and formerly of Oldenburg University, and Albert Sangra of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UoC). They have worked very hard for EDEN and we owe them a debt of gratitude. We elected Morten Flaten Paulsen of NKI Norway as Vice President, and we welcomed Alan Bruce of Universal Learning Systems, Ireland to the EC. They will be great colleagues to work with.

So all in all a memorable and productive week. Thanks to all who came. nd for those who want now to make a note in the diary: our next annual conference takes place in Valencia, in partnership with the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, from June 9-12 , 2010.

I have been working with fellow Pro-Vice-Chancellors at The Open University UK on a policy to support Scholarship, that is to say a policy and associated practices and resources to support not only that we understand by the terms research, but also the wider range of practices that have the activity of enquiry at their heart. Enquiry in this context is impartial, seeks to build on existing knowledge and submits itself to judgement by immediate colleagues, networks of peers or the public, or indeed all three.

We most often associate this set of practices and values in a University with research as is conventionally understood: discovery or genesis research. However as Ernest Boyer set out back in 1997 scholarship has a wider set of meanings and practices. He defined them in four groups as:

1. Discovery scholarship is most closely aligned with traditional research. Discovery contributes not only to the stock of human knowledge but also to the intellectual climate of the university. New research contributions are critical to the vitality of the academic environment.
2. Integration focuses on making connections across disciplines. One interprets one’s own research so that it is useful beyond one’s own disciplinary boundaries and can be integrated into a larger body of knowledge. The rapid pace of societal change within a global economy has elevated the importance of this form of scholarship.
3. Application focuses on using research findings and innovations to remedy societal problems. Included in this category are service activities that are specifically tied to one’s field of knowledge and professional activities. Beneficiaries of these activities include commercial entities, non-profit organizations, and professional associations.
4. The scholarship of teaching (and learning) recognizes the work that goes into mastery of knowledge as well as the presentation of information so that others might understand it.

Boyer’s work has been influential in steering Higher Education institutions towards a plural understanding of what Scholarship in a University is, and therefore how a wider range of activities than those that have traditionally been called research should be valued and supported. His work delivers recognition of the value of all forms of scholarship in a non-hierarchical way.

It is interesting to note however that Scholarship is now a form of activity in its variety of far wider interest than just the world of the University. Firstly it has over the last 30 years spread down through the age groups. While 30 years ago enquiry in the sense of independent, even if supported, research was primarily restricted to postgraduate work, it has now spread into baccalaureate or undergraduate degrees, and further into schools, as important practice that learners need opt master. In primary schools in England plans are being made now for ICT to be an essential element in the curriculum, and enquiry will rightly be at the core of that activity for children aged 5-11.

It is also true that Enquiry is a core activity in almost all fields. Thus the emphasis put on knowledge workers and on knowledge management in all sectors of economic and social activity. The new technologies have played, as is well known, an extraordinary part over the last 10 years or more in liberating knowledge from the locally produced and managed to the universally available with contributions from around the world. Enquiry, supported by scholarship in the broader sense as proposed by Boyer, thus stands at the heart of human activity.

EDEN’s commitment to scholarship over its entire lifetime through its conference papers, its journal EURODL , and most recently through the book on developments in distance and e-learning over the last decade, to be launched at our 2009 Gdansk conference, has been demonstrated to have been an absolutely correct commitment for a professional association and network. Our journal, web-carried, open source and free at the point of delivery, represents as do others, a very contemporary focus for scholarship.

Lastly, and on another note, it is very good to know that this blog has gained some 233 readers per day according to our statistics, and even reached the total of 10,332 in the month of October last year. Greetings to you all from Cambridge, where the blossom has been beautiful (see the photo of clematis in bloom in my garden, just to lift the heart!)

This entry has been written shortly after returning from our two day Executive Committee meeting in Porto, hosted by the Universidade Aberta of Portugal and its Vice President Professor Antonio Teixeira, himself a member of the EDEN EC.

Our task at this meeting, as well as dealing with regular business, was to reflect on where EDEN has come from over the last year and where it is going: a sort of retreat. We started by examining what the constitution set as the core purposes of EDEN, namely our ‘commitment to fostering developments in open, distance, flexible and e-learning, providing a platform for all regions and countries of Europe for collaboration and co-operation for all sorts of organisations’. We looked carefully at the growth of EDEN, which continues both for institutional and individual members. We admitted 6 new institutions to EDEN at this meeting, and now have over 200 institutions in membership as well as some 1200 individuals. EDEN does cover a range of organisations as it always intended to do: while the great majority are Higher Education institutions who have a blended offer, we also have companies and organisations in the fields of on-line learning, media and publishing, as well as schools, colleges and other networks. We noted with pleasure the increasing interest in EDEN from institutions and organisations outside Europe, especially the USA and China. Our journal EURODL continues to be supported by the European community as well as wider afield, publishing some 30 refereed articles over the last 12 months.

Our core conclusion was that we want to further develop the service to and engagement of members to EDEN, and we will examine in particular ways in which awards for excellence might provide a framework for building that. I am tasked with providing a draft proposal for an Award for Excellence in Innovation in Distance and E-Learning that we will circulate to EDEN Senior Fellows and others for consultation before bringing forward.

Our regular business included the final preparation for the main 2009 EDEN conference in Gdansk, Poland. We have more than 200 papers submitted, a range of exciting keynote speakers, and an exciting city and seaside to explore (see the conference section of the EDEN website!). We also discussed, led by Antonio Teixeira, the arrangements for the Open Classroom conference in Porto later in October this year. The conference centre is the former Customs House, right on the banks of the River Douro, and is a splendid setting. The city of Porto, I should report for those who do not know it, has a magnificent landscape, built above the high banks of the Douro, and with 6 wonderful bridges cross-crossing at high level. The river banks are also home to the range of producers of port wine, many which had British origins, with the vineyards lying up the river and the cellars lying in the city. Some of the traditional boats that transported the port in barrels are still in use, and can be seen going up and down.

Back home at the Open University UK, the first evidence of the economic recession is beginning to appear in reports from directors of training and development in large companies reporting that they have less to spend than they had a year ago. At the same time they report that this will impact in particular on sending people away for training and education, and for our field of work with its flexible approaches this could and should mean opportunity.

The last month has seen work for EDEN continue on a number of fronts. I kept you in touch with the progress of the EDEN book in my last post, and that work goes on, especially in regard to copyright, pricing of the volume and the index which Uli Bernath has produced to a high level of sophistication in very short time.

We are also looking forward to our next Executive Committee meeting, which is being hosted for us in Porto by Antonio Teixeira of Universidade Aberta. We will look at this meeting to evaluating our work over the last year in an open way: what has EDEN achieved well; what could EDEN achieve better; what new opportunities are there for the Network? I intend to give a summary of EDEN’s work from the Executive Committee perspective at our annual conference in June this year in Gdansk.

I have also been continuing our work on the EDEN journal EURODL , with our Assistant Editor Mirjam Hauck and the Journal Secretary Amy Siu. Preliminary figures show that after refereeing and amendments we have published 33 articles over the last year, and have rejected 10. This is about the same proportion as in the previous year. And I am pleased that the stream of articles continues to come to EURODL, and believe we are building the opportunities for scholarship in the European dimension through this journal. We are also through Mirjam’s suggestion pursuing recognition by ERIC and BEI.

To cite from the ERIC website:

ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

The ERIC mission is to provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information that also meets the requirements of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 .

ERIC is already considering accepting us on to their list of journals, which if successful will give additional recognition in the world of academic publishing.

BEI, the British Education Index are yet to respond.

The British Education Index supports the professional study of education by facilitating the identification and use of specific reading matter and event-related information.

I will give more information as it emerges!

February has seen an extraordinary month of activity in pursuit of the EDEN book! By this I mean the volume of ‘best of EDEN conferences’ that the publisher HERMES/iSTE has asked EDEN to prepare, and which we very willingly have set about to achieve.

The story started with a combination of the wish of the EDEN Executive Committee to be able to offer to the world an enhanced opportunity to benefit from the major intellectual capital that exists in the conference papers over the more than 15 years of EDEN’s existence, with the publisher’s understanding that this would be attractive to the market. Martine Vidal, Vice President negotiated with Hermes (iSTE), a Paris and London based publisher, that we would prepare from over the last 9 years a volume based on the best conference papers which would give an account both historically and thematically of developments in distance and e-learning, primarily in Europe. Martine was joined in this endeavour by Uli Bernath, also Vice President of EDEN, and by our indefatigable Secretary-General Andras Szücs.

The first thing to say is that we have been enormously heartened by the enthusiasm of the authors from the EDEN community conferences who have come back with a willingness to revisit, update and revise their conference papers to develop them into papers for the book. This has demanded a great deal of work from them over a short period of time.

The papers in the volume demonstrate a number of things: firstly the ways in which EDEN has succeeded through its conferences to map innovation and analysis across all of Europe over the recent period. The geographical and cultural reach of EDEN is fully representative. Questions are also created from this volume for further research, amongst which is the issue as to the specificities of distance and e-learning in Europe itself. There are a range of educational traditions in Europe – Napoleonic, Humboldtian, the Nordic history, the Anglo-Saxon models, and more – to what extent does distance and e-learning represent these or can it be seen to be offering a newer synthesis out of its own history(ies)? Also gratifying to note is the number of papers that come from outside Europe, showing that European researchers and practitioners are engaging the interests of the global community, but that EDEN as a network is doing the same.

After a planning meeting at On-Line Educa in Berlin before Christmas, the race has been on over the possibility of having the book published and available at the main EDEN 2009 conference in Gdansk in June. At the minute we have the texts ready, which represents a Herculean effort by Martine, Uli and Andras, and we are trying to manage the copyright issues which are the remaining barrier to achieving the deadline. Fingers are crossed on this, as we say in English (do people cross their fingers for luck all over Europe? I think so!).

Oh, and the daffodils are out in Cambridge!

Dear readers, a belated Happy New Year first of all. I hope all those who work in our field of distance and e-learning across Europe, and our friends further afield, have a prosperous and successful 2009. EDEN certainly hopes to contribute to that success through our support to you.

My New Year began with the ‘flu! As it did for many of my friends and colleagues. However things could only improve and soon did.

I was in late 2008 invited to join the ‘Commité Editorial’ of Distances et Savoirs, the French language journal in our field managed from CNED in France, and edited by Martine Vidal, Vice President of EDEN. In early January the journal held its annual Editorial Board meeting in Paris, and I attended for the first time. I met a group of some 15 colleagues, drawn primarily from France but with international members like myself from Norway, Switzerland and Belgium. The day was in the very best sense very French! The discussion was at a high intellectual level, evaluating the directions of open and distance learning, and the ways in which the journal could contribute to it. My experience of Editorial Boards elsewhere, including that of EDEN’s European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (EURODL), is that the focus is much more dominated by immediate business, and less able to explore the context in which how the journal must develop. Distances et Savoirs performs a hugely valuable task in its commitment to the development of research and practice, and its dissemination in our field primarily through the French Language. Despite the use of English in so many European contexts we still live and work to a distressingly considerable extent in separate professional communities, divided by language. Who amongst us can really say we have good overall knowledge of the developments in our field in Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden, as well as France and the UK, to take some leading examples. Many of us, too many of us in my view, remain isolated in Europe within our language communities and are not able to participate or avail ourselves of the wide range knowledge that exists across the European continent. This is particularly true of the British with our low level of language competence (I will say this before readers comment on it!). The French language of course defines communities in Canada, Africa and the Caribbean as well as in Europe, and the same arguments would apply there too. So Distances et Savoirs makes a tremendous contribution to Europe as a whole through its comment to our professional field in French.

My second January event was in a partnership of the Open University UK with the Universidade Aberta, the Open University of Portugal. Working with Vice-Rector Antonio Teixeira (a member of the EDEN Executive Committee), we ran a workshop on change management with the Deans and their equivalents in our two institutions. Change is of course a constant in all organisations, but the Universidade Aberta has over the last 3 years gone through a remarkable transformation in its adoption of innovative e-learning practices, and seen its student numbers rise. The Open University UK similarly has many challenges to face, both in its development of e-learning and in our rethinking of how a contemporary curriculum can best support current and future cohorts of students. The British group were received with great hospitality by our Portuguese colleagues in the beautiful headquarters building, the Palácio Ceia, in Lisbon, and our group of some 15 people spent a very fruitful 48 hours examining our own individual case studies for change, using a peer group of 3 or so colleagues to review, asses and advise on how to take them forward. This sort of bottom–up professional development is in my experience enormously rewarding, and working across different institutions and different cultures can be a really liberating experience, and I believe we all found it so.

The year’s work at the Open University UK has well and truly started, and we are, as so many must be across Europe, examining the implications of the financial recession on our University’s business over the next 3 or so years. Recession can drive individuals to flexible institutions such as those who use open and distance learning, as people lose their jobs or fell vulnerable in them, and need to build qualifications. A crisis in employment, so distressing for the individual, means that we have a huge responsibility to respond to their needs (readers might like to visit the ‘Outsmart the Recession’ pages at the OU UK website, which are intended to help visitors to the OU web presence who believe they are facing this problem.

Your EDEN Executive Committee meets early in February in Brussels, and will be discussing the ongoing preparation for our major meeting this year in June in Gdansk, Poland, on the theme of Innovation in Learning Communities. All you need to know about the conference can be found on the EDEN website, and I hope to see you there!

Best wishes for 2009!

On an evening at the end of November I found myself travelling by car from Domodedovo airport south of Moscow, passing through white snow-covered pine woodland. This was my first visit ever to Russia. I had been reading the novels of Turgenev as it happens, and while my trip had the perfectly practical purposes of visiting the Open University partner LINK, my thoughts lay at that moment at least with the very atmospheric world of Russian novels.

The business of the trip began with a meeting on Friday morning with LINK, the long-standing partner of the OU Business School. LINK is an independent higher education institution, formed by university colleagues at the time of perestroika, in Zhukofsky, a town based some 50 kilometres from Moscow and the seat of LINK HQ. The city was in Soviet times one of the ‘closed cities’, dedicated as it was to aerospace. LINK was established in the years of change to introduce modern management education in Russia using distance learning . The partnership with the Open University is now some 17 years old. My first meeting was led by Rector Sergey Schennikov, who gave a historical overview of LINK. Student numbers now stand at some 12,000 on Certificate and Diploma Programmes and MBAs, using both Russian and English language options.

The main topic of discussion at our first meeting was the impact of the economic recession expected by the two organisations. While it was difficult to know how the recession would impact on distance higher education, it was clear to all present that we would have to prepare for significant problems. It can be in times of recession that individuals have to requalify and reskill themselves to an even greater extent when unemployment hits or is threatened. For organisations however who spend money on learning and development they may well find their budgets difficult to sustain. It is too early to see the effects of the recession very directly now, but this blog will surely reflect on this topic over the next period.
In the afternoon I travelled to Moscow for the evening degree ceremony organised by LINK for the Open University MBA. This took place in the British Embassy, with 18 graduates, and some 100 people present. The graduates looked wonderful in their Open University sky blue gown with yellow hoods. I was very pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest expressed in the press conference organised beforehand with some 12 journalists, and 4 even came for interviews after the ceremony.

I was able to go to the Bolshoi Ballet on Saturday evening, courtesy of LINK. Fabulous! The ballet was La Sylphide, a story set in the Highlands of Scotland, of a sprite who deceives and destroys a marriage. It was everything I had expected of Russian ballet, with wonderful lead dancers whose elegance and sense of timing was superb.
On Sunday I had a free day and was given a wonderful tourist visit by Irina Smirnova of MESI, seeing the sights of Moscow. The extraordinary churches in the Kremlin with their golden onion domes were, well, extraordinary. As was St Basil’s cathedral with its multi-coloured domes, in Red Square. As was the Tretyakov Gallery of Russian art, all of which was new to me. As were the blinis and borsch soup for lunch! And I really enjoyed what is called ‘Chekhov corner’, where the statue of the great playwright stands outside the Moscow Arts Theatre.

On Monday I travelled to MESI, an institution that is well known to some readers of this blog. For those unfamiliar, this is the Moscow University for Economics, Statistics and Informatics, a public university. It has some 5000 conventional students on its campus in Moscow and a much larger number distributed at some 80 sites run by partners across Russia and the ‘near abroad’, using contemporary technologies for the support of learning and teaching. I gave a lecture on contemporary issues in distance education, in particular concentrating on the way in which the 1970’s and 1980’s models of distance education, with their necessary concentration on the provision of well-organised content, must give way in the use of new technologies to the embedding of strategies for learning in which students have greater responsibility for the sourcing of content themselves. The rethinking of pedagogy, which is widely advanced, must lead the use of technologies for education.
So home on Monday evening, after an eye-opening trip to a country and culture that was new to me. I am sure it will not be my last.

Contribution from Martine Vidal, Vice President

EDEN had kindly been invited by Airina Volungeviciene, Centre of Distance Study at Vitautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, to take part in the international conference on “Adult learning and e-learning quality” organised by the university on November 25th and 26th, and I have been very happy to be the spokeswoman for EDEN on that occasion.

Many pleasant events and encounters made the journey to Kaunas and the conference particularly rewarding.

First of all, at Vienna airport I met Ildiko Mazar from EDEN Secretariat, in charge with the follow up of all the European projects EDEN is involved in, and it was nice traveling half the way with her. She was coming for a presentation on e-learning initiatives and quality references in Europe and also for the kick-off meeting of the REVIVE project on the occasion of the conference.

Then I had a hearty welcome from Danguole Rutkauskiene, who took me around the Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) where she is heading the “E-learning technology centre”. At the centre I visited the video-conferencing room where a lecture was taking place, with a group of students in the amphitheatre and eight other ones attending the lecture via the Internet. The system developed by the centre, VIPS, holds several hundreds of modules, each with easy direct access to each slide and to the corresponding comments from the teacher, and other useful and interactive refinements for distance or autonomous learners. It is very user friendly and has been adopted by other universities, among which Bologna medical university. The engineers from her centre have been in charge with the recording and direct broadcasting of the conference for the next two days.

On the second day of the conference, while Ildiko was attending the REVIVE project presentations, and was being impressed by the very professional preparation of it, I had the opportunity to listen to several more engineers explaining about further developments for the VIPS system, some in partnership with other universities.

The conference itself was really interesting, with presentations tackling quality from different quarters and angles, and, usually, they were comfortingly merging in focus and perspectives.

Some presentations were in Lithuanian, like the one Danguole made on “Mobile technology and new challenges for Quality of E-learning” with her team, others in English. But we had the benefit of a bilingual issue of the journal “The quality of higher education” prepared for the occasion, with all article translated in English: that is very much appreciated.

Nevertheless, later on I also attended a session in Lithuanian, for librarians, just to hear how the language and discussion flow smoothly when they take place in native language – it ended in a rather passionate way, and I was explained by Margarita Tereseviciene, from the department of Educational sciences at Vytautas Magnus University, that the librarians were pleading for a better recognition from the rest of academics – quite rightly too, and not very different from what happens in my own country.

As EDEN Vice President, I also had the pleasure of being personally received by Professor Pranas Ziliukas, Vice President for Studies of KTU, and we exchanged ideas about the relativity of quality.

But we were not just having a conference by ourselves in Kaunas… networks were being activated meanwhile, the sessions were broadcasted live. Ildiko even received an SMS from Scotland after her presentation on “E-learning Initiatives and Quality References in Europe” requesting more information and links to the projects she had mentioned.

And then we had a grand Internet finale for that day.

Two participants of the Eurovision Song Contest, one from Lithuania, Julia (of the “4Fun”), who was in the conference room in Kaunas with her guitar player and the e-learning centre technicians, and “Walters and Kazha” from Latvia, who at the same moment were being hosted by Riga University, sang together in perfect harmony and synchronisation (image and sound), a song they had composed together.

I forgot to say we had started the first day in music, with a lovely tune played on “kankles”, a Lithuanian sitar by a student from the University.

Danguole also showed me glimpses of snowy Kaunas by night, old and new, made me cross as many bridges as possible over the Nemunas and the Neris, and, very appropriately the bell of knowledge in Raudondvaris, close to Kaunas. (Sorry I did not hear its music, too high for either Danga’s or my own levels of knowledge.)

More music was in store though, as Nijole Saugeniene, Director of Centre of Distance studies at Mykolas Romeris University, kindly drove me back to Vilnius, accompanied by lovely daughter and with Irena Zemaitaityte, the Vice Dean of the Faculty of social policy in the same university in Vilnius: we played lots of musicals from former time in the car, and I was explained all the joy of the Lindy Hop dance. But we also briefly stopped at Trakai castle on the way.

I spent 24 hours with the Oil and Gas industry in Aberdeen earlier this month, in the North East of Scotland. It is wonderful to look into the window of other people’s worlds, even if for a short period. This trip came about when I accepted an invitation through the good offices of the OU Scotland to an event for the industry with a range of universities organised by OPITO: the Oil and Petroleum Industry Training Organisation. For me this was an element in the what we call here engagement with employers, that is to say sitting down with employers and working out with them what they need for learning and development, rather than the more simple model that we already do well which is to propose that they use the courses and awards that we already have. Employer engagement is a major agenda here for Higher Education in the UK, driven principally by government and supported by funding. It demands significant cultural change for many universities as it invites business and public sector organisations to share in the development of the curriculum that we teach. It does not represent an overall change away from the broader curriculum that we at the OU UK offer, but a new activity that we build alongside in new directions.

Anyway, the seminar gave me a chance to sit alongside colleagues from major Oil and Gas companies to hear about what it was they wanted from universities. I was surprised by the almost total focus on the recruitment of the brightest and best of new graduates, and on coping with the difficulty in persuading new graduates that the Oil and Gas industries are attractive places to build a career. There was almost no focus from the industry representatives on the development of people in their existing workforce. My only contribution was to point out that if the competition for the brightest and best new graduates was already fierce this would only get worse because of the demographic down turn, in many developed countries at least, of this age cohort. This would mean development of the current workforce would become even more important than it was already, and that the emphasis on non-campus based forms of study that supported learning in and around the workplace rather just the campus would become all the more important. This took me, as readers will have already guessed, to the huge contribution that distance and e learning is able to make, especially for companies that were, as so many are in the Oil and Gas sectors, global in their operation. The contribution seemed to be well received, and to my surprise was regarded as representing new insight that would have to be engaged with at a future event. The contribution that distance and e-learning can make to learning and development for continuing professional development is of course central to national and policies across Europe and more widely, and of course to the European Commission. I would be interested to hear from colleagues about your experiences in this field, and how this broader agenda of what we call employer engagement in the UK is being addressed elsewhere.

I was interested to discover that as well as being an important base for managing the Oil and Gas industries of the North Sea, Aberdeen also represents a very important base for professional services for the industries on an international basis. I was very impressed by OPITO, who managed their intermediary role with great skill and hope to go back.

I can also tell readers that I had what may well have been the best steak in my life: Aberdeen Angus is of course very celebrated beef, at least here. The rain poured down for most of my time in Aberdeen, and when I commented on this to the taxi driver on leaving, he just remarked laconically that it was ‘good Scottish weather’. On the next stage of the journey home I sat in a train that may have been the most crowded train ever, as what seemed like the entire student population of the University of Dundee made the journey to Edinburgh on a Friday evening. A rather bumpy ride back to London on the commuter plane completed what had been a very stimulating trip.

I would like to open up through this blog a discussion of what should be EDEN’s ambitions for the support of research. This follows the 2008 EDEN Research Workshop which was held last week from October 20-22 in Paris, in partnership with the Centre Nationale d’Education a Distance (CNED), and based in UNESCO. We had some 180 participants from 36 countries, 14 of which were outside Europe. So in terms of the issue of research in our field we clearly continue to demonstrate from our earlier Research Workshops a strong commitment from Europe, and an increasing interest from colleagues outside Europe in what we are doing here.

The 2 EDEN Vice Presidents Martine Vidal and Uli Bernath did the preparatory work along with the EDEN Secretariat, and our thanks are due to them all. Martine and Uli put special emphasis on a scientific approach to the refereeing of conference papers, and to ensuring a focus that would clearly differentiate this meeting from our annual large scale conference.

The origins of the conference lay in the work of Martine in bringing together 6 journals, led from Distances et Savoirs of which she is Editor in Chief, on the theme of Human Rights and Education and the particular contribution that Distance and E-Learning can make. This remarkable initiative, a first of its kind as far as I know, meant that the different communities of the journals all made their own commitment to examining this issue. Of course it lends itself to the agendas of the UN, and of UNESCO in particular, which made the Place de Fontenoy UNESCO HQ a particularly appropriate place for the meeting. Our own EDEN journal EURODL made its contribution to the special issue.

It was also a great pleasure to be able to congratulate the joint winners of the Best Research Paper, presented by Professor Torstein Rekkedal of NKI, Norway, on behalf of the Ulrich Bernath Foundation. The joint winners were Kay McKeogh and Seamus Fox, of Dublin City University, for their paper ‘Opening Access to Higher Education to all? What motivates academic staff in traditional universities to adopt e-learning?’, and Fanny Salane, a research student in France, for her paper ‘L’enseignement à distance en milieu carceral: droit a l’education ou privilège?’

What is clear straightaway is that there is a strong commitment from practitioners to develop a research, development and evaluation dimension to their work. This comes through in a large number of papers and presentations. What is less clear is the extent to which Europe has an academic focus on research, based on empirical methodologies, building theory, supported by research students etc, in the ways in which have been better developed in North America. Indeed we were lucky to have as visitors and presenters to the conference two of the best examples of such practice in Professors Terry Anderson of Athabasca University, Canada, and Michael G. Moore of Pennsylvania State University, USA. I referred to this tradition in my own remarks to the conference as the Humboldtian model, which has taken such effective root in the USA in particular over the last 150 years (the conference plenary address can be seen here due to the help of the University of Strasbourg).

There were suggestions on several occasions that the enormous contribution that is made to research and development by the European Commission with the range of funding programmes for research and development may at the same time divert focus from this Humboldtian tradition.

All this leads me to ask some questions for and on behalf of EDEN that we need readers’ contributions to explore further. These are:

• What is the contribution to supporting research that EDEN should make?
• What are the priorities in terms of activities and events?
• Is there a synergy that we can build from practitioner originated research and empirical and theory building research?
• What are the research issues that need to be prioritised and privileged?
• Who needs support and how should we assist?

I would like to hear from readers of this blog on these or other questions for the support of research in our field.