EDEN President’s Blog

Dear all, first of all let me wish you a belated Happy New Year! The winter in England has been fiercer this year - certainly we have had more snow than we are accustomed to - but is beginning I think to abate a little. I found the yellow aconite just coming into flower in my garden as soon as the snow melted. Many of you will still be in a great deal of snow and ice, but some will not have seen any at all!

The year starts sadly with the death of Robert Beevers, aged 90 years, at his home in Oxford. Not a name that many readers of this blog will know, I am sure. Robert was the first Director of Studies at the Open University, head of a department known as Regional Tutorial Services. Appointed at the foundation of the University in 1969, that is 2 years before the OU started teaching, Robert conceived how students in distance higher education in an Open University might be supported. He invented with his small team the concept of tutor, counsellor, and the idea of study centres supported by regional centres, that have been so influential around the world. And yet his name is hardly remembered at all. There was one short piece of writing from him which can be found in the now defunct journal Teaching at Distance, May 1975 number 3 (the journal morphed into Open Learning) . The article offers a profoundly interesting insight into the thinking in those very early years in our field of work about the relationship of the learner to the study materials, and what sorts of freedoms and constraints should be provided. Robert was also an authority on the garden city movement, and authored as book that is still referenced entitled The Garden City Utopia: a Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard. I remember Robert well, being at the senior end of the profession myself! He was an intellectually acute man of great kindness, and had an irrepressible desire to reform education for the benefit of adult learners.

We held our EDEN Executive Committee meeting in January, in London, at Camden Lock in the Open University London Region offices. We looked at the final details for the Valencia conference, and further to the Research Workshop to be held in Budapest 25-27 October. This was the first Executive Committee meeting without Martine Vidal, who has retired from CNED, her institution in Poitiers, France, and after many years of wonderful support from EDEN, especially in the ways she has helped EDEN make better contact with France and francophone Europe. We will however be able to welcome Martine back to our Valencia conference where she will give a keynote.

Contribution from Martine Vidal, Vice-President

On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, and of the tenth anniversary of the China Distance Education Society (CDES), CCRTVU, now the Open University of China, has organised an International Forum on the 16th and 17th of October 2009, on the theme of : “Challenges and Opportunities for Open and Distance Learning in Lifelong Learning in a Global Financial and Economic Crisis”. It was followed by a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People, on Tienanmen square on the 18th.

As Vice President of EDEN I have had the privilege of being invited to tackle the following subject in one of the Forum plenary session, on the first day: “Innovative Competence: Strategies and measures to address demands and changes in socioeconomics in evolving contexts, and ability of coping with local and global challenges”.
At the end of my talk I officially offered a copy of the EDEN book «Distance and E-learning in Transition, Learning innovation, technology and social challenges» as a birthday present to CCRTVU.

The whole Forum has been an amazing occasion, with participants from all over Asia and from parts of the western world. I met numerous Asian colleagues, in both formal and informal ways, such as : Prof. Ge Daokai, President of CCRTVU, Vice Presidents, Zhang Shaogang, and Yan Bing, Professor Zhang Yuguang, Professor Li Yawan, with colleagues from her department - Haishan Chen, Spring Dai, and from the Chinese Ministry of Education: Professor Wu Qidi, or from related institutions: Dr Zhang Yousheng. From Taiwan Prof. Chen Dar-Wu, Jack Fei Yang, from Malaysia, Wong Tat Meng , the Vice Chancellor of the Wawasan university, or Prof. Yan Ze Xian, rector of the Open University of Macau, and Prof. Yoichi Okabe, Vice president of the Open University of Japan … and many more with whom it has been so interesting to share experiences, and to realise how important the hopes and efforts are invested in distance education.

I have been really happy to be able to continue the previous contacts between EDEN and CCRTVU, as several visits from us to CCRTVU (Alan Tait more recently, Ingeborg Bø and Ulrich Bernath two years ago …) or from CCRTVU to EDEN (Professor GeDaokai, Li Yawan, …), various exchanges and participations in annual conferences have taken place.

Among the other international guests I had the pleasure of meeting again with Carl Holmberg, Secretary General of ICDE and previously an EC member of EDEN. At the inaugural session, just our two networks (that is, not based in Asia) were present on stage, as can be seen on the photograph posted on the Forum homepage:

Well, you do have to look carefully to the very end of the row, there we are, Carl and I…

More about the forum and the participants in the plenary and parallel sessions can be found at on this site.

Among the participants in the plenary sessions :

• Ge Daokai - President, the Open University of China
• Sir John Daniel - President, Commonwealth of Learning
• Martine Vidal - Vice-President of the European Distance and Elearning network (EDEN)
• Prof. Gajaraj Dhanarajan - Vice-Chancellor & CEO, Wawasan University
• Dr. Susan C. Aldridge - President, University of Maryland University College
• Prof. V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai - Vice-Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University
• Prof. Anuwar Ali - President/Vice Chancellor，Open University Malaysia (OUM)
• Prof. Sarah Guri-Rosenblit - Director of International Academic Outreach, The Open University of Israel
• Carl Holmberg - Secretary General for the International Council of Open and Distance Education (ICDE)
• Prof. Denise Kirkpatrick - Pro Vice-Chancellor, the Open University of UK

Parallel sessions had been organised as well, and two special “Debate sessions”, one in Chinese, one in English, where two teams of three students were to defend (affirmative side) of argue against (negative side) the idea that distance education was not more cost efficient than face to face education. The teams belonged to either the University of Beijing (traditional) or CCRTVU. It was a lively session, with a few jokes (on the advantage of being on site for getting married, or the fact that DE must be better because the Party says so), but some more serious arguments too, notably on the “Open” status of DE vs the selective process of traditional universities. We were involved via electronic voting! This gave the opportunity for students to express themselves (something we are keen on at EDEN too, I think). Given the circumstances, you will not be surprised that the distance education students won!

Sir John Daniel is getting involved

Prof. Li Yawan has been very welcoming, and showed us the developments of CCRTVU. She took us to the headquarters of CCRTVU, showed us the several communication rooms, videoconferencing facilities, etc. and told us they would be moving next year as the university is developing fast and needs more space.
And she paid great attention to our cultural curiosity as tourists : I now have a stone seal engraved with my initials and enough brushes and ink for taking up calligraphy when I retire.

Li Yawan also showed us the numerous presents made by CRTV universities in the provinces on the occasion of the CCRTVU anniversary, exhibited in the hall of their main building : extraordinary sculptures, tapestries, traditional artefacts, etc.

Visit to Tianjin RTVU

A few weeks before the Forum, Carl Holmberg and I had received invitations to take part to the opening of a seminar of presidents of Asian universities at Tianjin University on October 20th.
After that session all in Chinese, and a few photographs later, we had a more private session with President Feng Xuefei, Vice presidents Wand Fanzhen and Wang Xiaoming and other colleagues: Prof. Dou Mengru and Yang Shunqi,Wong Tat Meng.

We visited two study centres in Tianjin and, on that week day there were many senior citizens attending, very much concentrated on the computer screens. The university uses radio and satellite television, Internet and videoconferencing for pedagogical purposes. We visited one of the two Schools - a technical one – where a new videoconferencing room had just been installed: very advanced technology and immensely comfortable seats, the kind no French academic (not to mention the students) would dare dream about.

And we were also introduced to the refinements of Chinese cooking.

In Tianjin, university dinner

On the 29th of October I received this message, that I wish to share with EDEN:

On behalf of President of OUC Ge Daokai, Vice-president Zhang Shaogang and every member of Organizing Committee of ISODE, we would like to express our sincere thanks for your attending to the Forum and the passionate email. Meanwhile, we deeply appreciate your valuable experience and visions for the Forum. We have been convinced that all of your contributions to the keynote speech, TV interview, debate salon, visiting in OU Tianjin and etc will be significantly beneficial for the development of OUC and open and distance education in China.

Finally, we wish EDEN and CNED a brightest future and our collaboration and friendship to be stayed everlasting. Warmly Welcome to China in the near future!

But back to the title of my blog entry: just after arriving in Beijing, and a little jet-lagged, I went for a walk by myself, and discovered a very quiet tea house in the middle of the Sun Yat Sen park, close to the Forbidden city. There was no one in it, and I sat on the veranda with a cup of green tea, getting slowly acquainted to the new environment, the park, the ornamented covered passage. A half hour I will not forget. It got late and I hailed a sort of “motorbike taxi” (a good thing I was seated not looking ahead, but backward on that little shaky one-seater) and got back into reality, into busy Beijing!

A wonderful tree trunk in the Sun Yat-Sen park in Beijing

This month has taken me first to Romania where I had the pleasure of presiding over the awards ceremony for some 80 Open University graduates and Diplomates from our Business School partnership with CODECS. This is a fascinating organisation that was founded after the big change in political system in the country: the CS in the last part of the title refers to ‘Civil Society’. Over the last 15 years of partnership with the Open University they have contributed a huge amount to the management capacity of the country needed to develop new social and organisational models. There is still the enthusiasm of a pioneering group of staff and indeed of students. This was also my first visit to Bucharest, which has some beautiful large houses and villas, often in a nineteenth century French style with oyster windows in the roofs, set in wide boulevards, along side and in-between some huge and less attractive housing blocks. In the distance from almost anywhere lies what is now the huge Parliament building, monument to the grandiosity of the former Ceausescu regime that was bizarre even by the standards of the time. While in the UK the economic crisis has been bad, it is clear to me that the impact on the economies of some countries it is a great deal worse. For those of us trying to work with organisations to sponsor students for learning and development, this represents a very considerable barrier.

Later in the month I made a short trip to Beijing, this time to the Second Forum for International Educational Leaders at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). I spoke there about the work we are doing at the Open University in developing our engagement with employers, in very related ways to the work I was witnessing in Romania. There was considerable interest in this from Chinese colleagues at UIBE, who not only have a campus based programme in their field, but also a large scale on-line distance education programme across the whole of China. I was able to sign a partnership agreement with UIBE for the Open University for the use of some of our Continuing Professional Development courses, which they will deliver on-line in the Chinese language. They were kind enough to given me a scroll painting, and chose one of a bridge to represent the links between our institutions, cultures and countries.

These tasks of building and renewing the skills and competences of people in the workplace face us to all across Europe, and I am clear from this as well as other visits to China that the combination of energy, resources and organisation makes that country determined and able to move fast down this track. UIBE’s President Shi was clear in his address to the conference that embedding innovation and creativity in their education at all levels must be the next task, a language that is familiar from the European Commission and national governments across both continents. EDEN has great potential in bringing people together to provide a network for the energy and resources that we need to combine together, working as we must across the complexities of competition and co-operation within Europe and around the world.

The Executive Committee met twice in the last month! The first time we met using the CISCO Webex system, where we were able to work from 8 different locations with both video and audio, looking at documents managed by our facilitator Tapio Koskinen who was in fact in the US. I have to say the system worked very well and offers significant opportunities for improving our process and reducing cost and time for travel. We dedicated the Webex meeting to business of the sort where brisk movement through an agenda was going to achieve most. Central to this was the preparation of the 2010 conference in Valencia, details of which have just been sent out to colleagues in the EDEN Newsflash. This left us in our second meeting that took place in the beautiful city of Porto, with the chance to look at the strategic possibilities for the development of EDEN.

I have to say a word about the very enjoyable and valuable Open Classroom conference held in Porto, in partnership with the University of Porto and led by Professor Antonio Teixeira of the Universidade Aberta of Portugal. We had more than 100 participants at the meeting, with excellent keynote speakers and parallel sessions. Very innovative was the Twitter trail that was managed under Antonio’s leadership that provided a forum for debate through the meeting, and a record of that debate for later reflection. The Porto Message that resulted from the conference looks to influence leaders in the field of schools education at national and European levels.

The Executive Committee then met over two further sessions looking at a stakeholder analysis, led by Ari-Matti Auvinen. We reflected on the question as to who were the principle stakeholders in EDEN, and how we could more fully meet the range of expectations. I should say too that we welcomed to his first meting of the EC Wim Van Petegem of the Catholic University of Leuven.

The conference also enjoyed a wonderful tour and evening dinner in the Ferreira port Cellars!

The summer holidays are well and truly behind us and working life is busy as ever! I had a very good break and the only academic thing I did was to assess a PhD thesis from the Allama Iqbal Open University of Pakistan. Otherwise it was a wonderful break with family.

News from EDEN is that the Open Classroom conference in Oporto in October has attracted considerable attention, with over 60 papers and workshop submitted, resulting good expected attendance. A huge vote of appreciation is owed to Antonio Teixeira of the EDEN Executive Committee and the Open University of Portugal. This conference organised every two years for the last 10 years is hugely important. The school classroom could be recognised in many aspects for what it is by a visitor from 150 years ago. Of course many progressive changes have been made, and in many countries, certainly including the UK. ICT has been installed and plays a role in the learning and teaching strategies of the school. These allow the school to break the boundaries of its immediate physical base, and of the range of knowledge and understanding of its staff. However, the process of learning in schools is undergoing fast change as it has done in other sectors.
As a result of this, enquiry and scholarship have become core activities in almost all fields. The new technologies have played an extraordinary part 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, thus stands at the heart of human activity. It 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 and across organisational types. While 30 years ago enquiry in the sense of independent, even if supported, research was primarily restricted to postgraduate work in universities, it has now spread into baccalaureate or undergraduate degrees, and further into schools, as important practice that learners need to master. As importantly, enquiry supported by scholarship has now spread to all sorts of organisational roles and at all sorts of levels. Supporting the learner demands the development and enhancement of these scholarly skills.

The EDEN Executive Committee also meets during the Oporto conference, and we will take the opportunity not only to take forward the business of planning the major events that EDEN supports, but also to step back and take a strategic look at what EDEN does and how it should work for its members and supporters. The core of our role is to support the professional development of those who work in our field across Europe. Your comments before we meet would be very welcome. Please use this blog to feed back.

It is getting to the height of the summer here in England: what we call the height of the summer anyway. We have had some really hot weather in July, but have now returned to the more familiar mixture of sunny periods interspersed with rain, some of it really heavy. The news tells me that elsewhere in various parts of the Mediterranean there are some very serious wildfires, which have taken the lives of fire-fighters. The climate seems to have become, as many have observed, very unstable, with ‘big’ weather events much more usual but at the same time unpredictable.

All of this accords with the theme of what I wanted to comment on in this contribution to the blog, namely the issue of our responsibilities in distance and e-learning towards sustainability.

I was very stimulated in this by a workshop we held at the Open University on sustainability and the curriculum. We had excellent contributions from Stephen Gough of the University of Bath, followed by our own Gordon Wilson, who is Director of the Environment, Development and International Studies Programme at the OU. The most familiar definition of sustainability is one that essentially derives from the Gro Harlem Brundtland Commission, and centres on the imperative not to compromise the needs of future generations for the present. While there are difficulties in this definition: for example, how do we know what the needs of future generations are, and over what period can we realistically plan, nonetheless the definition has a common sense practicality that in my view keeps it valuable.

We learned from our speakers that there are two strands to the consideration of sustainability in education: firstly there is the strand that is concerned with process, and with which we are more familiar. That is to say, the consumption of non-sustainable resources that we use to maintain our systems. For example, can we say that in distance and e-learning we use less non-sustainable resources because our students do not need a campus, do not have ‘two homes’ such as residential accommodation as well as a domestic home, do not travel to the campus etc. How would all this stack up against the use of computers on which we major in our field? And however it stacks up, how do we reduce the use of such resources in our field, and what targets should we set?

Over and above this, we need to consider the curriculum dimension. First of all, what elements of explicit curriculum can we create and maintain to ensure that graduates from universities and colleges in the field of sustainability will be able to help advise and manage for the future. More challengingly, what areas of curriculum outside the obvious ones such as environmental studies should reflect sustainability issues? The answers were much wider than many of us had considered. It must include all the applied sciences and technologies, management, many of the professions such as teaching, social work, and nursing. It is easier in fact to ask the question as to which areas of curriculum should not embrace issues of sustainability. And last of course how do we ensure that our students leave our institutions equipped to manage these issues in the range of places that they are going to live and work in.

So all in all a fascinating introduction to these issues for us, and which left many colleagues across the faculties who were not familiar with them with a lot to think about.

The campus at the OU is emptying now for the summer holidays, which means that the volume of email is declining. Very welcome! I have started to use Twitter, really to see what happens when you do. You can follow me, if you want, @AlanTait on http://twitter.com/ I am following a number of interesting individuals in our field, who also tweet, as the verb has become. I think learners could develop communities, for quite short periods which might be very supportive to them. See what you think. In the meantime, here I am ready for a summer holiday. All best wishes.

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!