Newsletter of the European eCompetence Initiative

NETWORK NEWS

First Edition
October - December 2004

EDITORIAL

by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Johannes Wildt

Dear eCompetence and eLearning actors,

the integration of eCompetence in higher education is a complex concept with a variety of different elements and perspectives. Adding to this complexity of the matter itself is the additional European diversity which is represented by the large number of our partner institutions. eCompetence is a relevant and interesting object for reflection, and we want to cordially present you our research with the help of this newsletter and our website.

Iain Mac Laren and Jenny Booth like to present you their ideas on the dissemination activities they have in mind.

Dirk Schneckenberg summarizes the results of the Vienna project symposium. The charming images of this meeting, which we can present thanks to Sjoerd De Vries, give a nice impression of the welcoming atmosphere. Thanks again to our hosts Ada Pellert and Thomas Pfeffer for excellent organisation of this event!

We like to regularly include local insights on eCompetence activities, which take place in our partner institutions. In this first edition Thomas Kanstrup describes the concept of the Aalborg Strategy tool-box, an effective practice targeting the meso-level of the university. Next you find a presentation of the Finnish Connet virtual community, a contribution by Esko Marjooma. The Connet case stands for the success you can within such a multi-diciplinary network.

In our publish or perish era our Swiss partners SCIL have launched the elearning-reviews.org platform to serve as a helpful tool for all those involved in research on eLearning. We like to present you this project and include one review in each network news.

Finally we have a special section to inform our partners on upcoming project activities. In this newsletter Iain announces our symposium in Galway, Thomas Kanstrup and Thomas Pfeffer indicate the next survey activities and Dirk Schneckenberg proposes four action plan workgroups which aim to structure the Community of Practice activities.

Best regards,

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Johannes Wildt

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Publisher:
European eCompetence Initiative

Editors:
Dirk Schneckenberg
Jenny Booth

A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE ORGANIGRAM TO CLUSTER OUR CONTRIBUTIONS

by Dirk Schneckenberg, University of Dortmund and Maurice De Volder, Open University of Netherlands

You may start to wonder what all this CoP organigram fuss is about... . So I will try to clarify things here a bit. Remember that, on the second day in Vienna, each of us pinned his or her contributions and needs to the action plan pinboard? Right - well, the CoP organigram and outlined action plan workgroups build on this basis.

The main purpose of the organigram is to give you an overview of each partner in the project in a visualised way. That relates to the point made in Vienna, that it's important to make ourselves visible in the virtual CoP in order to bridge the time gap between our symposia (‘real’ CoP meetings) and remind ourselves that the project is still up and running.

The main purpose of the action plan workgroups, defined by Maurice, Johannes and Dirk in Dortmund last week, is to cluster the single contributions and needs of each partner. We aim to channel the upcoming survey activities into one of these workgroups. Each workgroup has a moderator who will animate the communication within the group. We invite you to give us feedback on your workgroup. Or it may be that you would in fact prefer to to be in a different group, if so, please tell us. Of course, you can if you like be in more than one workgroup, but we suggest that each partner focus most of their energies on one 'primary' workgroup.
The workgroups are:

Research Journal Article Writing and Reviewing
Case Studies and Data Collection
Research on eCompetence Theories
Dissemination Products and Activities

You may also wonder why your profile card has a 'Skype' line in it. Once the workgroups are confirmed, we would like to bring you into the Skype communication system. Skype is a Voice over IP tool, which we use regularly to hold web-based tele-conferencing between coordinators. It is easy to use and saves money. You only need a headset (with mouthpiece) for Skype. We will contact you with detailed information on this technology soon.

We then aim to integrate all the workgroup information into our CoP portal in the web. Our idea is for you to have instant access to the other partners in your workgroup, your virtual workgroup space and the Skype addresses of all project partners. To reach this goal we do need your feedback on the proposed workgroups and Skype activities though, so please do let us know what you think! You can contact either Maurice or Dirk for any feedback on the CoP portal.

FOR MORE INFO CONTACT
Dirk Schneckenberg
Tel.: +49 231 755 55 37
eMail: dirk.schneckenberg@uni-dortmund.de

Maurice De Volder
Tel.: +31 45 57 62 784
eMail: maurice.devolder@ou.nl

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