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,

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

Publisher
European eCompetence Initiative
Editor
Dirk Schneckenberg