Saturday, July 9, 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.

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