...maybe some of you might be interested in this:
we already have Steve Thompson participating, and we are looking for new
and creative perspectives to shape distributed live experiences with a
great effect on learning, I mean we do now have camcorders and streaming
and projectors, so we should talk about how we make the most of the
experience that broadband can facilitate:
----------------------------------
This is a call for people that are both passionate for regional or local
development and new technologies to help and facilitate the growth of
community cohesion and cooperation throughout Europe - for the benefit of
our villages, small towns and rural areas.
The question is: can the gap between education - rich urban environments
on one side and and rural and peripheral areas be bridged by new and
unconventional combinations between modern Internet technologies and the
emergence of new learning channels and places in regional systems.
The answer to this question is crucial also for "bridging the broadband
gap": the emergence of new communication infrastructures is very directly
linked to feasible and practical ideas and models to use them and the
concrete expression of needs.
We suggest a model of "Global Villages", that means that every region and
regional policy in Europe pays increasing attention to the emergence of
specific locations (be it central, be it decentral) that can technically
and culturally, through competence and understanding, through linkage to
the main local actors and the awareness of needs, facilitate a growing
exchange of knowledge and experience between the regions, towns and
villages of Europe.
To achieve that, they create or use internet access points like
telecentres, libraries, community centers, educational places or places of
entirely different nature and they start an interactive learning process
by video communication including modren presentation technologies.
Such an approach towards a "Global Village" has been successfully started
some time ago in the Austrian Village of Kirchbach in Styria. We have been
able to observe a constant interest from local population in educational
activities that were totally unusual in a village setting - university
lectures interactively transmitted from Graz and other places by video
technologies - for now about five full years!! 80 lectures and even
week-long congresses have been synchronously transmitted. The range of
themes was broad: Positive Visions of the Future, Sustainability,
Agriculture, Technology, History, Languages, Culture, Literature, Theology
and others. One thing was important and unusual: there was a local person
kowledgeable enough to even hold a lecture if the transmission would fail.
And this very person was channeling the local questions to the remote
speaker and continuing the discussion after transmission has ended.
We did a little film on that:
[
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1115065278070024444&hl=en#
]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1115065278070024444&hl=en#
or
[
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/VideoInEnglish
]
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/VideoInEnglish
We have been encouraged by this success to think about a "virtual
university of the villages" and move towards a more horizontal and
peer2peer scheme of education, where we use in a sharing spirit our best
offers to complement each other. We should share our best knowledge and
our best offerings in order for others to do the same and we should create
a community that guards fair use. Thus we will multiply our possibilities
and reach many people at many places at the same time.
So from this background we want to issue the following invitation:
From January 17th (arrival) to 28th /departure) we will bring people from
all over Europe together who have some experience in the field. We want to
augment the techniques and methods of videobridging in particular, on the
background also of using stored videos as learning materials in general.
We want to get and give new impulses. We can finance travel and
accomodation costs for 16 participants supported by the Grundtvig/LifeLong
learning program of the European union.
if you are interested, please continue reading here:
[
http://www.videobridge.at/GrundtvigWorkshop
]
http://www.videobridge.at/GrundtvigWorkshop
it is still possible to apply!
best regards
Mag. Franz Nahrada
GIVE Forschungsgesellschaft - Labor für Globale Dörfer
Globally Integrated Village Environment
Research Lab for Global Villages
Jedleseer Strasse 75
1210 Wien
Tel. 01-2787801
[
http://www.dorfwiki.org ]
http://www.dorfwiki.org
[
http://www.globalvillages.info ]
http://www.globalvillages.info
f.nahrada(_AT_)reflex.at
f.nahrada(_AT_)give.at
