AMSTERDAM WEB2LEARN MEETING MINUTES

Before day one: September 25, 2013

Maria, Jan, Michal and Giuseppe met with Onno in Belgian beer specialties bar De Zotte in the Amsterdam city center.

Day one: September 26, 2013

Venue: CWI, Science Park 123, 1098 XG Amsterdam. Room: L017

9:30 All meeting participants gathered at the venue: Maria, Giuseppe, Serkan, Merve, Jan, Michal, Beatka and Onno. Onno opened the meeting by welcoming all.

Prof. Arjen de Vries welcomed all to the venue as a representative of the venue. He provided an introduction on the venue location: the Center for Mathematics and Informatics, being the national science research center for mathematics and informatics, not associated with any university but serving as an adult learning institution.

9:50 All partner representatives presented an overview on the activities they had implemened so far, sometimes of the difficulties they had encountered and the results so far.

Maria spoke about the training sessions with the parents and the testing out of concrete Web 2.0 tools with them. The parents, according to her, were very eager to learn. A first few recommendations for the good practice selection of Web 2.0 could be destilled: Edmodo, Mind42 and Google Maps.

Giuseppe mentioned the difficult institutional situation he was in with his organization and the partner school having problems coming to terms with each other.

Serkan related how training sessions had been conducted within the Izmir local government, both for civil servants and for school MTs and teachers. There was not much interaction within the groups, he told the others, rather there was an eager consumption of all new information.

Jan and Michal described traning sessions they had organized for unemployed individuals at their language school facilities and how the testing of Web 2.0 tools really brought to light which applications might be useful and which weren’t. Examples of useful applications were: Skype, Prezi, Delicious and Scoop.it.

Onno expressed his frustration with the fact that the school working together with his organization had not yet been willing to organize meetings with the parents but that they had finally set a date in November. The school MT had also agreed on meeting with the partner representatives on the second day. Onno explained how he had pre-selected a large set of Web 2.0 tools together with education specialists, NGO representatives and teachers and that he was anxious to test out the resulting suggestions for their practical use with the school parents.

11:45 After the coffee break all participants gave a demonstration of one of the Web 2.0 tools that they had gathered in their selection of tools so far. Giuseppe showed an Italian recommendation system and community, Maria showed what the parents had learned from Google Maps, Serkan explained why the trainees had found Dropbox useful, Jan and Michal highlighted WhatsApp and Beatka and Onno introduced Screenr.

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break. The participants were joined by prof. Arjen de Vries.

13:30 After the lunch break the project’s projected end results were discussed. Maria explained how Edmodo would function as the partnership multilingual elearning platform. Onno suggested howto structure the Wordpress blog as part of the handbook and glossary with categories and tags. Jan raised the question of how to construct the report on good practices.

15:00 Serkan asked who would be present with how many participants in Izmir. He presented an overview of where the preparations for the meeting stand. He announced that most probably the partcipants would be able to visit a school in Izmir.

15:30 A prolonged walk in the old city center of Amsterdam – not excluding the Red Light district –

provoked a heated debate on the moral implications of tolerating a display of sex and drugs in the city.

In the evening all had dinner at Loetje – a cult typical Amsterdam steak house.

Day two: September 27, 2013

Venue: Unic, Van Bijnkershoeklaan 2, 3527 XL Utrecht

9:00 – 10:15 The partner representatives traveled together to Utrecht, to the school.

10:15 All meeting participants gathered at the venue: Maria, Giuseppe, Serkan, Merve, Jan, Michal, Beatka and Onno. First the school was introduced by by teacher Petra Keller, responsible for the lower three classes of the school. Also present was parent Hans van Manen.

Since the school is an innovative school all students work with laptops. The students do not get class-wide education but are receiving education in groups that are appropriate to the subject. Hans explained the parent perspective. Maria, Jan, Michal, Giuseppe and Serkan wanted to kow every single detail of how the school didactics and organisation functioned.

11:00 Two students appeared to take the group on a guided tour through the school. Again the partner representatives had a range of questions for them. All were amazed by the students’ apparent ease to talk English and to interact with adults.

11:30 The partner representatives, the teacher and the parent played the serious Augmented Reality game IDentifEYE, suggested by Beatka and Onno as a preliminary Web 2.0 good practice. The game had been tested before on adults but the big test would be the testing with the parents in the Unic parent meetings to come. Hans, the parent, was really enthusiaStic while Maria had a lot of questions on the game.

12:15 Attendance certificates were handed out. Then the group left the school, first for a cultural walk in Utrecht and then for a last walk in Amsterdam.