Last week we were invited by The European Commission to Brussels for what they call a concertation meeting. The meeting brought together some 100 representatives of the European Minerva and eLearning Action Plan projects (Minerva is the e-learning strand of the Socrates education programme). Prior to the concertation meeting, which took place on Thursday and Friday, we were invited to a meeting with two other projects - JOIN and FILTER, which the project officer, Brian Holmes, felt were close in aims to our project - to explore the possibilities of working together.

Rather than write a traditional meeting report, I have written this account of the meetings in the form of a blog - or web log - entry. The main reason for this is that as always with such meetings many of the most interesting discussions took place outside the formal meeting and I wanted to capture those discussions for SIGOSSEE partners and members of the Special Interest Group (SIG).

OK - first meeting first. It took place in the DG Education and Training headquarters in the very unlovely ‘Commission’ quarter of Brussels (why oh why have they torn down so many fine old buildings to build faceless office blocks). The representative from Join! - Alexandra Toedt from the University of Cologne presented her project first. JOIN! is very similar in aims to SOGOSSEE - looking to explore the potential of Open Source Software for education and training in Europe. Their partners are based in Germany, Spain, Italy, France and Poland. However, their objectives - or more accurately - what they want to do - are different from SIGOSSEE and remarkably complementary. JOIN! - like SIGOSSEE - have said they will set up a SIG and will establish a web presence. Their main activities are based around holding a monthly Open Day in each of the partner countries for people to bring questions about OSS and to get information and advice. Secondly they want to establish a directory of Open Source Software for education. Unlike SIGOSSEE they are particularly focused on Virtual Learning environments (VLEs) - more on this later.

Following the JOIN! presentation, I introduced SIGOOSEE. Brian was particularly concerned with exactly who we were hoping would join the SIG - a question we need to consider more carefully. The third presentation was by Sylvia Van de Bunt from the FILTER project. FILTER is more focused on issues around open information and knowledge and, as the name implied, wanting to look at the different filters to such knowledge which are emerging through the use of ICT.

Following the presentation of the projects we each had a one-hour individual meeting with Brian Holmes. FILTER went first so, along with Ray and Sara - the Raycom partners on the SOGOSSEE project, Alexandra and me set out to seek coffee. We quickly established that we could work together - both in terms of the project aims but also in terms of our ideas and hopes for the work and how we like to work. We agreed that we should launch a single SIG group and that we would share the web site and that we would discuss the issues further over the next two days.

On to the meeting with Brian. We clarified a number of details regarding the partnership contract and the finances. Brian asked us to produce him a short report every three months keeping him up to date with developments. The Commission thinks that Open Source Software is going to be an important issue in e-learning development over the coming period. However, he was concerned that they could not be seen to be endorsing OSS, given that they have on-going relationships with both the Industry Group, which represents the big software companies in Europe, and with industry content producers in education and training. He was extremely supportive of the idea of us working closely together with JOIN! and raised the possibility of future events around OSS in Brussels. He also raised the question of just what Open Source Software the project was focusing around. He suggested we should look at learning software and at learning content. This might mean we need to review slightly the aims for some of the research groups. But I think he is probably right. On the other hand, I think JOIN! is wrong in focusing at the moment too narrowly on VLEs and missing out on component architectures and tools.

A meal out and several beers with Ray and Sarah concluded an unusually productive day! A quick note of where we stayed. The Hotel Welcome is a wonderful small hotel on Place St Catherine’s with each room individually ‘themed’. Ray and Sara had a room with African decor, my room was blue. Great place, small, friendly, well placed and with soul. Why can’t all hotels be like this?

Day two in the snowy landscape of Europe’s capital, was at the Borschette Centre, a building which even by Brussels standards, is grimly ugly. Easy to find your way to, though. Just go to Schuman on the metro and follow the trail of people with wheelie cases and laptops down the road to the centre. Security is tight these days and it took twenty minutes to get in. having no paper version of our invitation I had to show the letter on my computer before security would admit us.

The meeting was spit in two, with different introductory sessions for the Minerva and eLearning Action Plan strands and optional workshops for the rest of the agenda. The morning strand was given over to administrative matters - useful but not particularly exciting. In the afternoon I went to two workshops. The first was on quality in e-learning with four presentations.

The first by Ulf Daniel Ehlers presented the EQO project. They are developing a substantial on-line database of different approaches to quality management for e-learning. Some of the work looked very useful and there is no doubt that a lot of work has gone into the project. I had two reservations. The first is that the pedagogic aspects of quality were peripheral to their approach - whilst I tend to think they should be central. The second was their own quality approach to entering information on their database. For this they are using ‘expert’ assessors. Given the relationship of quality to practice I am wary of ‘expert’ approaches and would far prefer a peer review system.

The third presentation by Maureen Layte from the SEEL project also put forward an interesting approach to developing on-line portfolios for learning. Claudio Dondi presented the third project - SEEQUEL. This I felt to be the best of the three in that it showed a clear appreciation of the many different criteria which could impact of quality. The main issue, I think, is not that there is one correct way, or that evaluators can include all the different criteria, but that when designing any instrument to evaluate e-learning - and assessing quality ultimately is based on an evaluation system - the evaluators are aware of just what they are not including or measuring.

The second workshop was ours - on Open Source Software. About 60 or 70 people attended. The first presentation was from Mihkel Pilv from Estonia who introduced the ideas and work behind the LearningFolders project. It was a wonderful presentation - full of humour, lively and lots and lots of ideas. Very briefly, they have produced an on-line catalogue of task sheets for use in education. The task sheets are contributed by teachers and trainers and are all Open Source. They are getting some 100000 downloads a day! There is great potential to develop and extend the project. It is clear that Open Content is as important as Open Source Software in education and this something that SIGOSSEE needs to pick up on. Over the course of the next 18 hours we had opportunities for many more discussion with Mika. We have agreed to work closely with him in the future.

I gave the second presentation on behalf of SIGOSEE - see PowerPoint slides. At the end I launched the new web site - www.ossite.org to a modest ripple of applause. The final speaker was Alexandra Toedt who presented the JOIN! project.

What was perhaps most remarkable was that despite the fact we had not discussed the presentations in advance we all were providing the same message - a fact not lost on our audience. Open Source has a coherent set of underpinning ideas and philosophies. Furthermore, by good chance, our approaches to the development of OSS in education were completely complementary.

After the workshop and in the evening social and the following day we were approached by many delegates saying how interested they were in the project. Perhaps most important was the European School Net who are keen to disseminate our work to their members and will take an RSF feed off the OSSite.

I showed my leadership qualities after the meeting in guiding a number of thirsty delegates to a pub, prior to the official meeting meal. The social event was at DG education and Culture’s offices where we were very happy to discover the staff club had a full size snooker table. About ten we went into town for yet more talking (and a few beers). Especially interesting for us was Nav, the director of IT in a large UK vocational college. Nav said he wanted to pay for software because that way he could trust it. Open source seemed dodgy to him (soon after this dsicussi9on Nav walked into a lamp post - hope your head is better now Nav!)

Up early the next day and back down to the Boschette. Fifteen minute wait in freezing cold to get through security. Its getting more difficult to get into a Brussels meeting than it is to fly to New York!

I had to leave at lunchtime. Before going, I went to a session on pedagogy and ICT. Most of the stuff was interesting but not particularly new. Much time was spent extolling constructivist pedagogies - I would be far more interested to see examples on constructivism in action.

One outstanding presentation made it worth the effort of getting up so early (OK - so it was not so early but it had been a late night before). Sadly the project is not on the programme and I cannot remember the name but I will track it down. It was a project involving young children - perhaps 7 or 8 years old in the redesign of their school environment and to design and development of a on line environment for sharing and learning. the kids and parents were involved at every stage of the development. The presentation - far from the usual PP slides - featured pictures of the kids plans for the environment and pictures of the kids working. Truly brilliant.

OK - what came out of it all.

An agreement to work together with JOIN! sharing a common SIG and web site. An agreement with JOIN and Learning Folders to do a joint symposium at the European Conference for Educational Research and to look for new projects together in the future. A lot of interest in our project and lots of new contacts. An agreement that we can present the project on the Commission Stand at the Learntec conference.

Not a bad start for SIGOSSEE