Actually, this is a favourite saying by my university. It found the most appropriate place here in this blog post dedicated to summarise the main achievements by EDEN, its Governance and the Community in three years perspective. These achievements may be summarised and presented in two most important strategic steps taken: to consolidate the Community and to revisit and reshape practices, services and European policies in education. These steps supported EDEN developments in line with the EDEN Constitution. They were implemented through collaborative leadership and partnership, and resulted in the impressive picture we have today of our association.
Consolidating the Community
“Real virtuality”
There exist example practices which highlight the challenges raised for organizational leaders. One of these challenges is to find a way to answer the question – how flexible the organization can be in terms of individual group initiatives, and how strict it should be in terms of tradition, how new initiatives are in line with the existing ones, how integral they are or should be.
The winds of change in societal developments described by M. Castells and Van Dijk, a “self-expanding network” of the community finally moved to continuous “space of flow” in “timeless time”. Besides physical traditional events, the “real virtuality” was implemented through new initiatives for virtual events started in EDEN in 2016, introducing European Distance Learning Week (#EDLW), European Open Education Week, but also the series of webinars by EDEN NAP Steering Committee.
These new initiatives consolidated the EDEN community, receiving attention and contributions from new members and experts from the European and global arena. #EDLW embraced latest trends, developments, historical and futuristic perspectives – amazing list of intellectual – discussion records and resources available!
If success factors were identified for the initiatives above, the following could be mentioned:
- trust in the idea and people behind,
- shared responsibility and activities,
- involving coordination,
- bringing as broad consultation on the topics, timing, scope as possible, and,
- taking collaborative and easy approach, under the distributed leadership and involvement of great colleagues.
Read the full post on the President’s Blog.