Management

The MEDEA Awards 2012: 212 entries from 31 countries, and 95 judges from 29 countries… this is a nice snapshot of the media and learning community. Judges are ploughing through the entries. Looking at games and apps, but also at traditional media such as DVDs or online videos. Are there trends already to be seen? Hard to say when we have not been able to see all entries yet, but in one way it seems that there is somewhat less pure linear content, but that process and context is coming more and more to the front stage. Quality is certainly at least on a par with what we have seen last year, and remarkable is the creative power of many end users who generate their own media materials. One more week of judging to go, and then nominations will be announced. The Awards will be handed out during the Media and Learning Conference at the Ministry of Education in Brussels on 14th of November.

On Tuesday 25th of September 2012, the MEDEA: Media & Learning Association was formally launched at the office of Public Notary Guillaume Roberti de Winghe in Leuven.
Until the first annual general meeting of all members in December 2013 Eleonora Pantó (CSP, Italy), Gerard Casanova (Aunege, France) and Mathy Vanbuel (ATiT, Belgium) will act as President, treasurer and secretary, with Ene Koitla (EITF, Estonia), Bernard Mullarkey (IADT, Ireland) and Wim Van Petegem (DOeL K.U.Leuven, Belgium) acting as additional board members.
The MEDEA: Media & Learning Association has the statute of an iVZW and its main aims are to promote and stimulate the use of media as a way to enhance innovation and creativity in teaching and learning across all levels of education and training in Europe. In order to achieve this objective, the Association will amongst other things continue to organise the MEDEA awards and international conferences and workshops. The MEDEA: Media & Learning Association will also provide online support services including workshops and newsletters and will encourage participation of its members in national and international projects. Membership to the association will be open to all individuals and organisations that are interested in taking these objectives forward. More information on how to become a member can be obtained from the secretariat@medea-awards.com

Partners of two projects, MEDEAnet (funded by the EC under Key Activity 3) and MEDEA2020 (funded under Key Activity 4), met at a jointly held meeting in Leuven on 24-25 September 2012. There are plenty of connections between both projects through their support and activities related to the MEDEA Awards and the annual Media & Learning Conference. Both sets of partners also organise  training in the field of media-based learning, which meant that there was plenty to talk about. This was particularly relevant given the  launch of the MEDEA: Media & Learning Association.

Partners gave reports on the current status of workpackages, such as the number of MEDEA Awards entries, conference registrations, the status of workshops and webinars and other work including the status of the annual report on media literacy and education being undertaken in MEDEAnet.

Thanks to this meeting, partners will be able to work more effectively together to ensure the future of the valuable activities organised in both projects, and opportunities for future collaborations were discussed to sustain the established network.

The REC:all team held its second project meeting on Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 June in London. An important outcome from this meeting is the planning of a series of seven webinars which will be held during the coming months. During these webinars speakers will discuss how lecture capture can be used in higher education in an innovative way, discussing best practise examples as well as addressing legal, technical and pedagogical issues (the detailed program will be online soon). Two key reviews which will be major outcomes of the project were also central to the discussion that took place during this meeting. The first focuses on pedagogy and looks at how learning goals can best be reached when using video in educational settings. The second deals with technical developments in lecture capture and the various approaches that institutions can take when seeking to implement robust infrastructure.

Sally Reynolds from ATiT presented MEDEAnet at the recent EDEN conference which took place in Porto from 6-9 June. The title of this presentation was "5 years on and Just Getting Started: Sharing the experience of the MEDEA Community in building a sustainable European Network".

During the presentation Sally described the development of the MEDEA network and explained the strategy currently being adopted by the MEDEA community to establish a permanent organisational basis for the many different activities that have developed in the past 5 years since the launch fo the MEDEA Awards in 2007. She discussed the main obstacles that have faced the community and outlined where the main areas of growth lie.

The new MEDEA/Media & Learning Association will be launched during the Media & Learning Conference on 14-15 November.

Social media are increasingly important for Lifelong Learning Programme projects as they provide important validation and verification channels. The Web2LLP project is organising face-to-face and online courses on web strategies and social media for managers and members of LLP projects. The week long face-to-face course will take place in Leuven, Belgium on 18 – 23 February 2013 and you can apply for funding to your LLP national agency by September 2012.The online courses will be held in February – July 2013. These 10 hour courses organised in 5 modules of 2 hours each are available in English, French or Italian and will be backed up by an online help desk and support service. Furthermore, to help better understand your training needs in respect to social media, you are invited to complete a very short questionnaire which will take no more than 5 minutes to fill in. Find out more from the Web2LLP website http://www.web2llp.eu/

Partners in the VISCED project on Virtual Schools have been meeting this week in Sheffield to discuss the work to date and to plan for the final stages of the project. This meeting also included a gathering of the project's International Advisory Committee where the outputs of the project including critical success factors for the successful deployment of virtual schools were disussed.

These meetings followed the very successful Virtual School Colloquium which brought together virtual schools from 14 different countries, these included schools catering for students that are travelling or seriously ill. It also included schools aimed at marginalised and isolated students.

Full details of the presentations given will be available shortly on the VISCED project website.

E-ViEW partners are meeting this week in the University of Porto. The main topics for discussion are the final plans for the international activities amongst students from Portugal, Poland, Ireland and the UK. These activities follow on from the the national activities that have taken place amongst work-based learners in most of the partner countries. Several of these activities will take place against the backdrop of the Olympics taking place in London and the European Football Championship takng place in Poland. Theye will focus on several of the cometencies identified in the E-ViEW Framework for work-based learning and will utilise the online E-ViEW Virtual Campus. Find out more from the E-ViEW project website.