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EDEN Newsflash - May-June 2008
Only few days are left until the opening of the EDEN Annual Conference in Lisbon (11-14 June). The event is accompanied by the usual high interest of the international professional community: with over 520 registered delegates from 42 countries, representing more than 260 institutions.
There will be a Conference blog organised with the kind support of Mirjam Hauck (Open University, UK), offering the opportunity to be involved online and follow a record of (highlights of) the event.
1. EDEN welcomes the following new institutional members having joined the Association since April 2008:
You can check them at the "Welcoming New Members" link on the EDEN web.
2. EDEN Fifth Research Workshop, Paris - 20-22 October 2008
We would like to kindly remind that contributions are invited by the second deadline 18 August for the above event titled "Researching and promoting access to education and training: the role of distance education and e-learning in technology-enhanced environments". The event intends to put special emphasis on the "rights" and "access" to education, in the jubilee year of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights.
To read details about the workshop and how to submit proposal, please visit the conference pages.
3. New articles in EURODL
We are pleased to inform you that a number of new articles and a new section have been released in the European Journal of Open and Distance Learning.
The new wection is a Special Issue - Access to Education, result of the unique international collection of six international online scientific journals. The articles in this Special Issue reflect on the theme "Distance education and the right - or access - to education".
The newly published articles are:
4. New posts on the President's blog
Alan Tait, EDEN President is writing about his experiences and impressions in China where he travelled in order to take forward the partnerships that the Open University UK is developing.
Morten F. Paulsen, member of the EDEN Executive Committee, wrote an article titled "Barred from the Internet", in which he shares views on what potential online education may have in the improvement of prison education.
5. Annual General Meeting 2008 in Lisbon
Please, be kindly reminded that the EDEN Annual General Meeting will take place on 14 June, Saturday at 15.30, following the Lisbon Annual Conference at the conference venue, Cultural Centre of Belem. The formal invitation and supporting documents are posted on the NAP Members' area.
6. News from EDEN member organisations and partners
The Open University of Israel is giving on-line public access to academic digital books and accompanying study materials.
In April 2008 the Open University of Israel (OUI) embarked on an OER project, with the intention to give free and open access to its learning materials and to a selected collection of its books, all in Hebrew. The project is based on the Endowment model (Downs 2007) and is conceptually similar projects like OUUK's OpenLearn and MIT's OCW. The unique aspect of the "Open Books" endeavor is the conversion of full titles from print to e-books and to audio books (in MP3 and other formats). The OUI will open more than 250 of our text books in 50 different courses, from Physics to History, from Literature to Geology. Many of the on-line titles are supplemented by video lectures by the course designers or by other experts. Additionally, the core materials will be supplemented by reusable learning objects prepared by the teaching staff at OUI, like on-line quizzes, lecture summaries, presentations, dictionaries, and video-recordings of live sessions. Right now there are more than 85,000 different items that will be made available to students and the general public.
The OUI vision is to enable users to access OUI learning materials on mobile platforms and to add translated versions of the courses, initially in Arabic and Russian, for potential international audience.
The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies - IPTS is conducting a research project on the impact of web 2.0 innovations on education and training, in collaboration with the European Commission, DG EAC.
As part of this project, IPTS will set up a database comprising examples of initiatives that use social computing for learning. The objective of the case collection is to provide an empirical basis for further research on the impact of social computing on learning. The data will solely be used for scientific purposes.
IPTS is interested in gathering data on all social computing projects and initiatives that have an effect on learning, whether directly or indirectly. If you know a case that might be interesting, please submit it to the database by answering the following questions. If you know several Learning 2.0 projects, please register them all. All cases registered by the end of June will be included in the research. An overview of these cases will be made publicly available soon afterwards on IPTS webpage. Additionally, all case contributors will be informed about the research results via email once they are published.
You can submit a case by filling in the questionnaire online or by sending it to: jrc-ipts-learning-2.0@ec.europa.eu.
The SINCERE project, Specific Support Action funded by the European Commission in the frame of FP6 Priority 7 aiming at Supporting International Networking and Cooperation in Educational Research invites you to participate to an on-line survey on a roadmap for educational research in an international perspective.
This survey is being conducted as part of the project, believing that educational research should understand change taking place into learning systems, adapt to change and shape the future. A set of related actions for each of these dimensions is proposed. You are invited to rate them according to the scale proposed and possibly suggest new ones.
Sincere consortium is hoping that you will accept the invitation and look forward to your valuable contribution in the definition of the roadmap for the future of educational research in an international perspective.