Hi Franz,

It has been such a long time since we were in touch - I hope you are well.

AvrilBailey from AnCosan passed on some information to me about a conference you are planning in Austria during January 2010.

I am very keen on the power of technology to support learning and some elements of my current project are designed to exploit that. I am disappointed that I cannot be with you, because it coincides with a critical time in my work schedule. However, the thought occurred to me that perhaps some of the workshops could be hosted in a video bridged environment - thus co-locating participants who have the will, but not the means to attend in person.

This could be an opportunity to prove the concept in a very practical and convincing way. Whatever technical wrinkles that emerge could be resolved during the life of the conference and offer a platform for future development.

I am pursuing some ideas that are somewhat parallel to your work. I hope that in the future small, but geographically separated, communities of practice can have their learning needs met by providing high quality content, cheaply in cyberspace. I guess my poetic imagination is overactive and leading the scientific by a few strides - but perhaps necessarily so.

Anyway, I wish you every success in this endeavour and I have nodoubts about its potentially profound impact.

Best regards,

John Keogh.

I replied:

John, I would like to invite you to our online community:

http://videobridge.ning.com

here is a letter I sent out to a lot of people who applied for the workshop but could not be selected (Their number was simply tooo big - what a pleasant surprise!!!

Dear All,

I decided to write a common mail to inform all of you.

I received from all of you your communication about your interest in our Grundtvig Workshop Streaming - Sharing - Learning . Some of you have already been informed that our workshop is pretty full, and that there is still a waiting list, and that we could not take even some very interesting proposals that some of you submitted. So I am sorry, that we could not invite you...but!

See the people that will be with us in January here: http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/GrundtvigWorkshop/Participants

Now, due to the overwhelming interest, we decided to open up our online community to those who are actively interested to participate and create a kind of online participation scheme.

We think that the more people are involved, the more people might be able to make active contributions and others could benefit from those contributions.

As some of you may know, we organize the workshop alongside the "Pattern Language" model of Christopher Alexander. That means, we will encompass the whole area that is touched by our workshop:

• The questions of learning, learning communities and the role of supporting visual experience,
• The whole issue of how to produce good video material and to capture the situation,
• The whole question of how to provide a circumstance where this video material can be presented synchronously and attractively at several locations (Internet Broadcasting)
• The whole question of how this can be used to enhance and support education in areas with little educational offerings - and really inspire and motivate the local learners...
• The whole question of how this can be funded, organized and institutionalized,
• The whole question of how, with the connection between diverse learning communities, a new potential emerges of distributed, interactive intelligence, that can address even areas of research and knowledge organisation, of common endavours of all kind
• The question how all these materials are stored, accessible and meaningfully organised
• The question how to win people with experience over to share their knowledge and offer their best contribution as teachers and presenters,
• The question of combining learning, cooperating and codeveloping .

Please ask yourself what you really want to know, and what you might already know. We need people who do research and we need people who benefit from that research. Once you might be in one role, once you might be in the other.

So we do organize an online community - powered by NING - where we welcome those of you who really seriously want to work with us on the subject. Even if ypou are not in Vienna for the Workshop you can be part of the wider community.

You will initially be asked to answer some profile questions like:

"What do you intend to learn in this community?"

"What can you contribute and others can learn from you?"

Please answer them thoroughly so we can know you better.

We will support the formation additional working groups on the NING according to your needs and we even want to be the venue for various recurring special interests that are outside the central focus, like:

• How to work by video with other teachers in the school system
• How to produce simple and understandeable visual aids in societal communication.
• How to organize dialogue with mass media and PR specialists

But keep in mind that the main issue is the patterns: Patterns that will allow us to create new and exciting educational settings especially for rural areas:

http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/PatternLanguage http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/PatternLanguage/Matrix

So here is the address of the NING

http://videobridge.ning.com

if you decide to sign up, I will be glad to meet you there!

Franz Nahrada GIVE - Globally Integrated Village Environment Research Lab for Global Villages

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