The following short Video was produced last year to showcase the first experiences with VideoBridge, a simple methodology to share educational content between institutions. The idea this leads to is to encourage these educational institutions – especially those in rural areas, but not only them – to share and record the best they have to offer and build an entirely new curriculum on the base of cooperative exchange. The idea is not only that in producing a shared lecture the quality of the lecture is augmented, but also that institutions at the producing end can show their expertise and specialisation. Furthermore, at the receiving end, the learning process can be arranged by moderators in a way to add whatever they need – so learning is successful for the locals. This would form in my view eventually the base for a virtual p2p university of the villages.
Forgive me the few minutes of personal introductions at the beginning, but this helped me already not to be forced to travel and demonstrate at some conferences. We are pretty busy with our dream of bringing a network of 300 places of access and learning into existence here in Austria, and I will also try to instigate international (and maybe global) VideoBridge clusters that eventually could grow together. For the beginning please leave a comment here if you are interested.
Our next attempt will be a European network of adult education institutions based on strong ties that we created in our MIR project. (Adult Education as Source of Motivation, Integration and Resources for Local Development).
But there are many projects in the loop and it would be great to hear of yours!
Franz,
This all makes good sense but I am uncertain about the problems of language and subject. We are just getting started with a community here in Costa Rica. Our people mostly use Spanish and English. Our interests will be orientated in the wet tropics, around food production, housing, soil reconstruction, energy production and such.
In any case I want to be kept abreast of advances in this project.
Roy
I will forward to Franz, just in case he does not see the comment,
Michel
The problems of language and subject are very important issues to deal with. We are trying to instigate a bottom – up process of places interested in VideoBridging. This could be then taken up from organisations like the Global Telecenter Alliance to assure support and funding. It is important that we collect expressions of interest in places like here.