EFITA 2011 Conference - Impressions

The EFITA 2011 Conference, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic between July 11-14 is officially over. I had the opportunity to be in the Conference from the beginning on Monday and leave after its closing on Friday. During these days I attended a number of interesting lectures, made a presentation for the Organic.Edunet Web portal (User Satisfaction Analysis) in the EFITA – ICT Adoption Session, was responsible for the VOA3R Workshop (with the precious help from Diane!) and made 3 presentations in that workshop (on behalf of my colleagues from Rural Inclusion, Organic.Lingua and my presentation for Organic.Balkanet). Also I attended and participated in the Rural Inclusion Workshop. All of them on the same day. I didn’t have much time to be prepared for all these, as this trip to Prague was the third (and last) of a series of three consecutive 5-day trips (Maribor, Slovenia for the Organic.Balkanet 4th Project meeting and Malta for the I.S.L.E. Summer School).

Presenting the VOA3R Review Process

During the EFITA Conference I had the opportunity to meet new people from various institutes and make interesting conversations with them. It was also an opportunity for me to meet some of the VOA3R project partners for the first time and some of my old teachers and colleagues, like Prof. Sideridis from AUA (Greece) and Prof. Roman with Maria Toader from USAMVB (Romania). The Conference was really well-organized in various aspects, from the transportation of participants to and from hotels to the nice joint events (the latter gave us the opportunity to taste the local beers/wines and dishes – especially the Monastery event on Thursday evening was really nice!). Internet access was available almost everywhere (but it was not always easy to use laptops, as the clicking sound of the keyboard was really annoying!), staff members provided help all the time and the premises of CULS were really appropriate for such event, especially the smaller rooms hosting the Workshops and various individual sessions.

Family photo of the VOA3R partners after the 2011 VOA3R Workshop

Prague is a really nice place to be, full of sightseeing spots, easy access to most places through the well-organized public transportation system and nice places to have a beer/snack/lunch. The existence of the river in the city was really amazing, especially when combined with all these sights around. However, I was in the unpleasant position to have my luggage forgotten in the intermediate stop to Geneva so I arrived in Prague only with my backpack, containing only my gadgets (netbook, digicam, mobile phone etc.), but with no clothes. I had to spent a full day with the same clothes and some complimentary stuff provided by SWISS in a really nice messenger bag (e.g. toothbrush/toothpaste, shampoo/shower gel, shaving stuff etc.). It was really strange to be at the Conference wearing my bermudas and a not-so-formal shirt!
I found the Conference really interesting and a nice way to promote and disseminate your work. I just wish I had more time to wander around Prague…

EFITA 2011 Conference

This trip to Prague for the EFITA 2011 Conference will be the last one of the series of 5-days trips during the last month. I am here to make a couple of presentations about the Organic.Edunet Web portal and to support the organization of two workshops (well, mostly the VOA3R one).

The trip didn't start well, as my luggage was left in Geneva, where I changed flight from Athens to Prague. This led to me wandering around the conference with my short pair of trousers and looking really casual... I was really annoyed about that, as well as by the fact that I was informed that there have been two bookings for me at the Hotel!

Some of the giveaways I received from Swiss in order to stand a day without my luggage

The 1st day of the Conference went pretty well, with a wide variety of topics and presentations. Tomorrow I will take some time to work on my presentations and study the organization of the two workshop that I will participate in (VOA3R and Rural Inclusion). Wednesday will be a full, hard day so I'd better be prepared!

vprot next to the Rural Inclusion poster @ the Poster session of EFITA 2011

I.S.L.E. Summer School - 3rd project meeting

I just got back home from the 4-day (4-8/7/2011) Summer School/ 3rd Project Meeting of ISLE Network. The whole trip was interesting, as it made me understand how far can Malta be from Greece, depending on the flights available...

The meeting, in my opinion, was really successful, as it included not only interesting key-note speeches from people outside the network (e.g. Dr. Niko Roorda from the Netherlands talking about AISHE: Assessment Instrument for Sustainability in Higher Education - really relevant to our project) but a nice overview of the status of our work described by each WP leader. There was also a session dedicated to the next project meeting, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal and will be collocated with the Professionalization Fair (including companies involved in the area of Sustainable Development)

In addition, there were some additional tools/methods introduced to the project partners, such as the Problem-Based Learning, presented by the Slovenian team (Dr. Marija Lesnik) and our favorite Learning Scenarios, presented by the Agro-Know team (well, specifically Vassilis and Andreas). Since the time allocated to scenarios was rather limited, after we presented the methodology and templates, we asked project partners to work on their own scenarios and develop a number of them, that could be used later for developing a nice handbook on the implementation of learning scenarios in this specific field. We really hope that partners will correspond to that task...

We (as Agro-Know), in the context of Good Practices in Education of SD, also presented the I.S.L.E. MOLE Course Management Platform, in which we plan to ask partners to upload a full course on SD, as it is delivered in their University (e.g. Presentation, additional relevant files, references, notes, slides etc.) and create a collection/curriculum of topics on SD that will expose differences in the approach of teaching relevant topics in different universities around Europe. We will have to work intensively on that, since it will take time and coordination to achieve a good result.

As WP8 - Dissemination WP leaders, we received a number of comments/suggestions about dissemination options, the use of existing tools and future plans on this issue. We will have to work on some of these ideas (e.g. ISLE newsletter, brochure) and revise some others (e.g. leaflet, ISLE poster and website) in order to meet the needs of the project. We presented revisions in the web site, new links page and the new workspace for the ISLE project, to store Deliverables and related documents.

It was really nice to see people from the previous project meeting in Teramo as well as to meet new faces (e.g. Vanessa from Austria, Manu from Luxemburg, Vesna & Marija from Slovenia, Magdalena from Slovakia etc.). We had a nice time during the meeting and a really interesting time during the joint events (including visits to archaeological sites, museums and traditional restaurants as well!). These were 4 full days of work and social events and a big thanks should go to Louise, Everaldo and Adrian for organizing all these for so many people (more than 40 participants this time!).

Still got lots of work to do and we'll present/discuss more during the Lisbon meeting.

Organic.Balkanet 4th meeting - Day 2

Day 2 of the 4th Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting is now over... it was a really exhausting day!
Since I had not slept well last night, it was not easy to get up in the morning, but the worst thing is that despite the efforts and temp accounts created for us, we still didn't have internet access in the meeting room.

I started with my "offline" presentations about Pedagogy (Developing a training course & Implementation of participative techniques, the last one being really hard!). Among the attendants there were four Slovenian OA advisors, which seemed rather interested to the topics. After that, I made a demonstration of the Organic.Balkanet MOLE portal and then a hands-on exercise, including the registration of new users, creating a course, uploading new material and working with metadata in the MOLE platform. We faced some issues with the platform but in the end we managed to end successfully the course.

A really nice and full lunch followed in the "Novi Svet" restaurant (what a coincidence!), where we had fish among others (yeap, sometimes I eat fish!) and a nice shrimp soup. It's a good thing that returning to the meeting room we had a coffee break, so we got revitalized, even though temporary.

The meeting continued with a presentation of the progress of each WP and I had the opportunity to add another presentation to my record, this time about the Dissemination activities, as GRNET is the WP5 leader. The meeting ended at about 19.00 and left us all exhausted... just a quick walk with some of the partners to visit the oldest vine in the world and a quick pass by the Lent festival by the river Drava.

Now I am trying to catch up with my emails (too many to handle, due to my lack of connectivity all day) and work on some stuff about the forthcoming 3rd ISLE project meeting/Summer School in Malta. I have to start packing as well, as tomorrow I am leaving Maribor and I have an early train to catch!

Organic.Balkanet 4th meeting - Day 1

Day 1 of the meeting was really interesting: I had the opportunity to meet the rest of the project partners, some of them for the first time. There were also two officers from the Romanian National Agency, that would monitor the progress of the project and discuss some issues with us.

Unfortunately there was no internet access in the meeting room, so we had to make some re-arrangements in the schedule: All of my presentations were moved to day 2 of the meeting! This presentation marathon to follow reminded me of the first two days of the CerOrganic ToT School  some weeks ago.

Apart from that, we enjoyed a very tasty lunch in a classy restaurant really close to Hotel Orel (to which I am staying), which included a variety of dishes, an excellent dessert and a tasty local cold wine. The meeting was resumed with a little delay, but we managed to go on and attend a number of presentations that were originally going to take place on Thursday.

After the end of the meeting we had a mini-meeting with Salvador, Prof. Roman and Maria, for a quick dinner at "Novi Svet" restaurant. It is a really nice restaurant, mostly with fish and rather large portions. The Adriatic Calamari was splendid!

Last thing I did was to return late to my room, exhausted and spent more than two hours revising my presentations for tomorrow...

Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting - Day 0

Despite the general strikes of the public means of transportation in Greece (the Athens Airport was only reachable by taxis - and I hate taxis!) as well as the strike of the air-traffic controllers starting at 08.00 this morning, I managed to fly to Vienna from where I am going to continue my trip to Maribor for the Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeting.

The preparations for the meeting have been really extensive, as we have worked on various different tasks:

• Dissemination: The project website was updated with the latest news and events. The project brochure was revised and a newsletter including news and references to the project was prepared. We have also worked on disseminating the Training Course, which is supported by the Organic.Balkanet project and will take place in Mesta village, Chios island Greece in October 2011. Two papers were prepared by the GRNET team, concerning the project and they will be presented during the EFITA 2011 Conference and the 2011 VOA3R Workshop.
• Content: About 10 courses classified in 3 different training modules (Pedagogy, ICT and Training Scenarios) have been prepared and revised, in order to be a part of the Organic.Balkanet training curriculum. The templates for their descriptions and presentation have been prepared and sent to partners a long time ago. A handbook for the implementation of training scenarios has been developed for the project and will be enriched with the scenarios developed during the training events.. 
• ICT: We have adapted the MOLE platform in order to fit the specific purposes of the Organic.Balkanet project. Our courses have already been uploaded there and everything seems to be ready for the rest of the project partners. Two handbooks have been adopted for use by the trainers and trainees of the Organic.Balkanet training events respectively.
• Evaluation: We have designed and developed questionnaires for the evaluation of both the content and the training scenarios developed by the project.

I met Prof. Roman (the project coordinator) & Maria Toader from USAMVB in the Maribor train station (we took the same train - me for just one stop... what a coincidence!) and it was a really nice surprise. It is always nice meeting friends, especially when you are far from home. We arranged an unofficial meeting in the evening, to visit the premises of the University of Maribor (where the meeting will take place) and go sightseeing (apparently while discussing project issues...).

I.S.L.E. day

This week I tried to organize my work in a different way and dedicate one day to one project (and its tasks). Today the day was dedicated to I.S.L.E. tasks:

• I prepared a draft version of the template for the ISLE deliverables
• I worked on the learning scenarios that the Agro-Know team is going to present during the Summer School of the project in Malta in a couple of weeks. A went through my presentations again and slightly revised them (these revisions will never end - each time I find something different to revise!) 
• I implemented some of the project's website revisions discussed during the project's 2nd Meeting in Teramo, Italy in February. This took me a lot of time because I am not really familiar with the Joomla! platform and the number of changes was really big... not only I had to make hyperlinks for more than 80 institutional logos, but to create and populate some lists with web links relevant to the project, and I had no idea how to do that. So the help from Yiannis (Devplus) proved to be really valuable!

BSCW Workspace interface

• I worked on the final details of the ISLE workspace (based on the egroupware platform) and started working on the workspace's handbook. I hope I will manage to finish it by tomorrow, since it will cover only the basic functions of the platform. We had to migrate from the BSCW public workspace, as the available storage space was really limiting.

e-groupware Filemanager user interface

In the meantime I had the chance to work on a presentation for the EFITA 2011 Conference that will take place in Prague, Czech Republic between 11-14 July. I also made a little break and revised some of my presentations for the 4th Organic.Balkanet project meeting and training that will take place next week in Maribor, Slovenia.

Then there was this awful lot of emails that had to be answered (some of them immediately!) and some internet connection issues that really disorganized me...it was a good thing that I had all this offline tasks in my schedule, so it was really easy to keep up with my work.

Preparing for the Organic.Balkanet 4th project meeeting

The last days at the office have been really intensive; only a few days are left before my long trip around Europe and there are a lot of open issues that I will have to take care of before I leave office. So far my biggest concern is the 4th project meeting of Organic.Balkanet, which will be combined with a training event for testing the curriculum and methodology of the project. The meeting will take place between 29 & 30 June, 2011 at the premises of the University of Maribor.
During the last days I have been working on new presentations and revising existing ones, preparing my contribution to both the project meeting and the training event as well as reviewing dissemination activities of the project. The Organic.Balkanet MOLE platform will be used to store, index and deliver the courses online and its official presentation will be also during the meeting.

Apart from that, we have been really busy with some new tasks of the VOA3R EU project, which still looks really interesting and fresh to me. I am really anxious to go through the next steps and get more actively involved in this project. The team is really supporting the project and we have focused our efforts in specific tasks.

Agro-Know Team

I've been working for Agro-Know since January 2011, when the new offices in Vrilissia were prepared. I've been working with Nikos for quite a long time, during my days at the Agricultural University of Athens and Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET), working mostly in the Organic.Edunet EU project. It seems that our good cooperation during these days led to my recruitment in the Agro-Know team.

Since January there have been some changes in Agro-Know, as it is constantly developing. New faces have come on board, new projects are coming, my role in the team changes from time to time, evolving to something more interesting and challenging.

The current line-up of the Agro-Know team. A couple of partners are missing but we're still happy!

Today was one of the good days. Even though we faced terrible internet connection problems, we managed to go on with our work, celebrate the b-days of two people and organized something nice for a third one. The weather was fine and we took our first team photo in the balcony of our offices!

I am currently working on various topics for various projects, such as Organic.Edunet, Organic.Balkanet, Organic.Lingua, CerOrganic, I.S.L.E among others, and this makes my work interesting. Training scenarios, implementation of ICT tools in the training context of Organic Agriculture trainers and farmers, curriculum development, annotation of digital resources with metadata, interconnecting digital repositories and providing access to these resources through the Organic.Edunet Web portal. This portal is one of my most important tasks and a significant part of my time is devoted to its improvement and dissemination.

My job gives me the opportunity to travel quite often, and I really love travelling: I like to meet new people, see new places and try to get as much as possible from each place (culture, customs, sights etc.). I usually carry my digicam with me (my Olympus E-300 looks really bulky to fit my business trips...). I even started rating hotels and restaurants, apart from keeping a diary from these trips. In a single word: Experiences!

It's nice working for Agro-Know, and this is obvious!

1st OPAL meeting for 2011 & the power of Web 2.0 tools

I was relaxing at home, browsing the news through internet channels and watching TV at the same time. While checking my Facebook account, I saw a post from EFQUEL about the 1st OPAL Consultative Group Meeting for 2011 (OPAL stands for Open Educational Quality Initiative) and since I am actively involved (even a little bit) in OER, I was immediately drawn to it.

The meeting was held online using the Adobe Presenter platform, and the participants had the chance to see live video, watch the presentation slides, chat by typing messages as well as use their webcams and microphones and participate in the discussion.

A Twitter backchannel (#opal-oer) was setup by the organizers for the communication of the event and I managed to see a couple of tweets during the meeting.

It was the first time I watched Ulf Ehlers making a presentation (ok, I have watched a couple of his recorded presentations which he prepared for the CerOrganic Training of OA Trainers Summer School in Chania, Crete a week ago) and I was really amazed this time, too. Interesting presentation, fluency in English and straight to the point notes. It is really strange that we have worked for the same EU projects twice (Organic.Edunet & CerOrganic) but we never had the chance to meet. Among others, I was excited to listen to Wayne Macintosh, for whom I have heard a lot and read some more, about his contribution to the OER initiative. His contribution was really substantial, too and he was really into it.

This thing tonight reminded me of some last-minute meetings with friends, to which at first you are reluctant to participate but in the end you feel so glad that you followed the stream and had such a good time! That's what happened tonight, this event really dragged me out of my couch and let me stand in front of my laptop, excited by this unexpected night event.