eu-project

With our company eduate.eu we are partner in several european projects. The focus of these projects are learning from each other, share experiences, do things together, developing special skills etc. - all in a European view.

The project I want to talk about is a G2 Learning Partnership Project and it is funded by the European Commission in the framework of Socrates. Funded by the European Commission means not that you can spend thousands of Euros in nice bars in Brussels. Funded means, that you get the flight costs (up to a limit) and a bit money for paper and printer ink in the office and so on.

Eduate.eu (Christine Graf) is the project coordinator of the Cross Cooking project.

Project description:
The project aims to rediscover and preserve traditions in cooking across Europe, whilst enhancing the possibilities of learning and cross-generational and cultural cohesion - read more.

So in these kind of projects there is no real money (in the sence of getting rich) involved and most of the people do not have IT skills. All of these projects needs a website and a communication system (even Phone, Skype, E-Mail, whatever). For most of the smaller projects it is nearly impossible to do something more than five HTML pages with the outcomes of the project. For this project we wanted to make few things different. We choosed Drupal and tried to develop the website in a way that the project participants can follow the development and still be able to use the website. That means no special design, no individual module development, etc because that would be too expensive. Another decision was to open all the content and the discussions, because we spend European tax money and the website visitors should see everything. If there were technical needs during the project, we installed a contributed module and tried to find a clever solution. The project started with Drupal 4.6 and now we have Drupal 5.7

And now?

After one and a half year and several meetings (real & virtual) the group has written a European cookbook in many languages on-line! This cookbook is a collaborative work made with the Drupal book module by people who never touched a computer before.

Because they want to share all the recipes from Wales, Germany, Italy, Finland & Hungary  they decided that the cookbook is downloadable for free (download here). It is also possible to buy it but the most important thing is to try out cooking

From my perspective this was a wonderful project and the group has reached much more for the development in Europe than they expected at the beginning!

And I am very happy about the fact, that Drupal is one big Lego Brick in this project.

At the moment the group has applied for another project with the name "doing2learn".

I am very curious!

As I promised long time ago I will talk more about our european projects.

In one project, we have a few videos and today a had ... not a real problem ... but something like a chain reaction But finally the video from the turkish tv station made it on the website!

Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords

Btw:

Have you seen Sara & Christine in Ankara?

Icecream

Where was the shop?

Aim of this project was to find a common agreement regarding the content of the methodology.
The suggested proposal was written by some partners of the group and focus on assessment centre as a tool for assessing strategical individual competencies. Also contained will be self assessment and, outgoing from the results, a plan for personal development will be suggested. All will be available on a CD, also for limited time on the project website.
My resume:
As different as our backgrounds and level of experiences as different are the approaches to test and develop strategical individual competencies. The result ais a common agreement, not really revolutionary, but not bad.
I know, there are no easy recipes and personal development is a difficult and never ending long way.
It is sometimes a walk on the edge to test soft skills and give pre-formatted suggestions for personal development.
Companies use such tests for a pre-selection out of a large number of applicants.
But more common are online test environments which simulates real working processes, or project related internships. Both tools, used for a longer period of time gives assessors and attendees a better possibility to recognize resp. show their competencies.
However, for some persons the test can be an impulse to thought about personal weaknessess and strenghts. In the wild forest of personal coaching methods are lots which promises fast results on an easy, mechanical way, but also some whith a real focus on personal development.
Each human being has it's own strategy to cope with it'S weaknessess and opportunities, by ignoring them, do not realizing them or giving responsibilities for own decisions and behaviour away. Just few wants to go the deeper inside to reveal reasons for and change behaviour.
We do not really always want to know what happens inside
C'est la vie!

Yesterday, early in the morning I started a long journey to Heraklion. I tooks me 18 hours to get there  from Barcelona, with three stops in between. Here we will have our fourth project meeting to develop the methodlogy to test and how to assess them.

It will be a strong working meeting, but this morning I had a bit time to go around in Heraklion.

I am just back from a meeting to start a new European project.
It was a hard, intensive three days work because of many unexspected things. The application was written at the end of last year/beginning of 2007 and in between the world has been changed in terms of institutional conditions and objectives. Not all partners were able to sign the contracts and so me. At the moment I do not know what will happen with machm-it.org.
We still have a bit time to take a decision, would be great to continue our project work.

Since last sunday I was a participant of the first meeting of an european project. It was the first time that I was involved in such a process, so I was very curious what will be happen there.

The meeting took place in Tolmezzo, Italy.

The EU is providing different frameworks. In these frameworks, they try to face the aims, the goals (the dreams ) of the EU coming together.
This project is in the framework Socrates and the people who applied for want to produce a thing called "Teaching Bank" and "Toolkit".

My role was to propose an idea for a website which covers the idea of project. So, I thought, it is a good way to show them Drupal and a small part of wath is possible with CCK and Views. Drupal is Open Source Software, it is comparable with LEGO bricks and  of course ... I like it. Christine is running a project which uses Drupal (cross-cooking.eu). It was a bit tricky to set it up, but the participants like it because of the consistent user interface an the easy way to create content.

In this project the partners are from Latvia, Turkey, Sweden, Italy, UK and Germany.

In the application they have defined different workpackages to reach the aims of the project.

In the meeting room, there was no wireless internet connection, but luckily I had my small fonera router with me. So I tried to find an access to their companies network and after an hour it was working well.

When I attend computer conferences, usually all the people have laptops and they do something with there machines.

Here in this meeting room, there were a few laptops, but it was the Microsoft dominated world. People use MSN, MS Word, MS Powerpoint. Often they receive preconfigured Laptops from their university or company with all that stuff on it. Nobody was using Firefox Browser, Open Office and so on. From one laptop I hear often a sound: "Attention, possible Virus attack!". The owner of that seems to be proud to have a machine like this.

So I realized ... it will be a long way to an open environment like Drupal.

The first day people discuss about bureaucratic things. Budget, subcontracts, work packages ... paper, paper, paper.

For me it was interesting to see how these projects are structured. There was one new partner in the group and the other partners knew each other from former projects. The new partner seems to be very experienced in european things, especially the bureaucratic ones.

It's hard to describe the effects in the meeting but imagine: people from six different countries and cultures try to work together. It reminds me of my own school time, when we try to work in groups. Sometimes it was a disaster, sometimes it was possible and very seldom it was "a cool gang of partners". It takes always time to come together, to understand and respect each other and so on.

The italian partners were very polite, nice, friendly, ... (good people) and they try to offer us a friendly environment (atmosphere) with delicious food and these things.

At the second day we showed our ideas of the website. A website is always a complicated thing because in the beginning you have nearly nothing but an idea and it is hard for people who are usually not involved in these processes to get the idea. Because it was not really clear, how the structure and the outcomes will be at the end, we proposed a few possibilities to come to a solution (different Drupal modules, wiki, ...).

Another small thing I realized: When people see me working with a laptop with internet connection, they assume that I can help them to fix problems on their pc, so I helped a few people to get internet access (in the meeting room, in the hotel ).

For these projects it could be so helpful if all the partner could have a bit more media (internet) experience.

Often they are "prisoners" in closed university/company environments. They have to use services which are sometimes not the best for their work and not their choice. Open Source Software is nearly unknown. Web 2.0 platforms like facebook, flickr, linkedin, ning are not common and when they chat, they know often only MSN. When they like things, they have it on their mobile phone, but the use of the mobiles is expensive (roaming) and it it hard to grab the media from there to the internet.

The whole days I was thinking, what I can do to change something. In the group is one partner with "his own" social network solution which he developed in the last years. It is a platform with "everything abot e-Learning" inside. On one hand it is a good idea, on the other hand it is the "boil the ocean" approach. He was used to this type of software/platform but for me and most of the others in the group it seems to be as closed and complicated as all the other things. May be ten years ago, he had the same experience than me and then was thinking how to do it better ... I don't know.

The target group of the outcome of this project is for me not clear defined at the moment but it seems to be the teachers in the EU and in Turkey. "The teachers" is an interesting term. For example in Germany, we have around 800.000 teachers. The average age is 49!. Any questions about the use of platforms like facebook, myspace, second life ??

Okay ... I will write regularly about my experiences in this project, but now it is enough for today. As I said I enjoyed the time and I am lucky and surely proud to be a part of this project

here are a few photos of the meeting:

Each European Project needs to be evaluated by partners, internal and external evaluators. So OBELFA. As we wrote our application we asked checkpoint e-learning and they agreed.
It tooks one and a half year until checkpoint e-learning has got the first request from the coordinator to sign a contract for the external evaluation!
And that happened afterwards:
E-Mail-Schriftwechsel

Have a look at the ideas we for structuring the blended learning cook book.
Inbetween we have further discussion in our internal forum at the project website.
But it is still the same: important questions like format, content are not clear at the moment.
[img]http://www.bloghouse.org/sites/www.bloghouse.org/files/cookbook_01.JPG[/img]
[img]http://www.bloghouse.org/sites/www.bloghouse.org/files/cookbook_02.JPG[/img]

The last two weeks were really busy. First of all j'ai pris en cours de français à Carole. (J'ai rêvés de conjugation

During that course I learned the absoulte basics in French and a lot of more difficult to explain how to's in french:

• to open a professional bank account in two days,
• ask for special building materials
• explain the different possibilities to create a company in france.

In between I always worked a bit at our building site. I opened a very thick wall, build in a window and I plastered a very large stone wall. During the evenings, with a feeble arm and sleepy eyes I worked a bit for money and a bit for machm-it.org. Yesterday, finally, I finished the constitution of our new entreprise. Tomorrow morning I am going to Helsinki for the second cooking project meeting.

In december 2006 Tine was at the Online Educa in Berlin. The machm-it.org project group MoDAL made a presentation about their work.
Beside other things they have shown two videos.
My task was now to bring these videos on the project website ...
But how?
Both videos were on a DVD, very big .VOB files (>300 Mb).
After a bit searching I found the following possibility.

1. With AutoGordianKnot2.40 you can make a much smaller AVI file (40 MB)
2. With RivaEncoder you can make from the .AVI file a smaller .FLV file (7 MB)
3. With the free FLV Player you can insert the videos at the website.
(-> All downloads are attached in the german version of this article).

Thats it.
But I had the problem that Joomla! and the other CMSs are filtering javascript commands from the content. So I created the content item in the Joomla! admin interface and changed the text with the necessary javascript code in phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately it is not possible to edit the content item in Joomla!, but the videos are there
modal-eu.net