| NETWORK NEWS |
| Sixth Edition June 2006 |
| EDITORIAL |
by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Johannes Wildt Dear eCompetence and eLearning actors, Welcome to the Sixth Edition of our European eCompetence newsletter. Finally we have published our eCompetence book "The Challenge of eCompetence in Academic Staff Development", which presents 24 contributions from all over Europe and even one contribution from South Africa. Next to conceptual backgrounds, the book focuses on institutional staff training measures and approaches to individual eCompetence development. We hope that the book contains interesting findings to all actors, which are involved in academic staff development and building support and infrastructure for eLearning in their universities. As the book is published under the Creative Commons licence, you are free to download all contributions from our website. The fourth eCompetence symposium has taken place in March at the University of Dortmund, embedded into an International Conference on Academic Staff Development. We have seen excellent presentations from eLearning experts, including Gilly Salmon from Leicester, Jan Elen and Wim Van Petegem from Leuven, Michael Kerres from Duisburg - Essen, Iain Mc Labhrainn from Galway, Hans Boon from Pretoria, and Dieter Euler from St. Gallen, to mention only a few. All presentations and a summary of all eCompetence sessions is also available at our website. Although we have analysed and learned a lot already on eCompetence, much remains to be done. In educational research, there is a continued strong interest in competence development and management, as well in as competence assessment methods. eCompetence combines educational questions on how competence can be developed with questions on technological innovation and its impact on educational institutions and structures. The research outcomes in our project can serve as basis for further and more fundamental follow-up investigations on this important topic in the European higher education landscape. We will present our reflections in a workshop at the EDEN 2006 conference in Vienna. The conference title, is by the way, "E-Competences for Life, Employment and Innovation", which underlines the relevance of our topic. Best regards,
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THE EDEN 2006 eCOMPETENCE WORKSHOP IN VIENNA by Dirk Schneckenberg, University of Dortmund 
After the project is before the project. Although the eCompetence project has officially ended now, the topic remains important, and we like to build on the project outcomes and push the theme further forward in the ongoing discussion on ICT integration into European higher education institutions. One upcoming event for raising awareness is our eCompetence workshop, which we will hold on 15 June at the EDEN 2006 conference in Vienna. The workshop fits nicely into the thematic focus of EDEN 2006, which is set on "E-Competences for Life, Employment and Innovation". The title of this workshop is "What is eCompetence? Theoretical Considerations on the Concept of eCompetence in an Educational Perspective". The workshop aims to detail eCompetence for the higher education context, where the topic is closely linked to recent discussions that have evolved in eLearning on the strategic challenge to implement new technologies in a sustainable way into universities. Desideratum is the eStrategy which guides the efforts universities undertake to integrate ICT into their work processes. This strategic challenge reflects the situation many universities currently face in the area of eLearning. eCompetence research represents one aspect within the discussion of integrating new technologies into universities. Its main interest is on the role of the human factor in this technological innovation process. Nonetheless the term 'eCompetence' is and remains a fashionable buzzword without concrete meaning, if its main implications are not detailed and discussed within specified contexts. The main challenge for a theoretical discussion of eCompetence in this workshop is to relate the general term of competence to the specific "eContext" - which will be in our case the electronic context that is gradually evolving and changing the work culture in higher education. You can download the workshop announcement here: eden_workshop.pdf.The programme of the EDEN 2006 conference is available at: http://www.eden-online.org/eden.php?menuId=277 FOR MORE INFO CONTACT |
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