Dear fri­ends,

When we met last time in Fin­land, we thought of having our next mee­ting in Athens, enjoy­ing the warmth of the South and the hos­pi­ta­li­ty of our col­le­agues from Athens again. Sin­ce then, a lot has chan­ged in our lives — things we took for gran­ted  dis­ap­peared tem­po­r­a­ri­ly, but also crea­ti­ve ide­as appeared whe­re we did not expect them. We all hope that all of this will bring us for­ward, somehow.

What we also expe­ri­ence is that digi­tal tools sud­den­ly beca­me top prio­ri­ty in edu­ca­tio­nal orga­ni­sa­ti­ons. This tur­bo-trans­for­ma­ti­on has good, but poten­ti­al­ly also some less posi­ti­ve sides. Nevert­hel­ess, we do not need to seek for argu­ments any­mo­re if some­bo­dy denies the poten­ti­als of ICT in edu­ca­ti­on.

So we will per­form this mee­ting also using ICT tools. Our own expe­ri­en­ces using video­con­fe­ren­cing, howe­ver, made us noti­ce that using this for hours is very tiring. Also tech­ni­cal pro­blems like poor inter­net con­nec­tion and delays bet­ween sound and video make the­se video con­fe­ren­ces a chall­enge. Hence, we try to per­form this trans­na­tio­nal pro­ject mee­ting in mixed mode. Some con­tents are pre­pared in advan­ce, others (par­ti­cu­lar­ly when we need to dis­cuss) will be done via video con­fe­rence (inclu­ding the pos­si­bi­li­ty to par­ti­ci­pa­te by pho­ne).

Con­tent pre­pared in advan­ce: Par­ti­cu­lar­ly vide­os and Power­point slides can be view­ed in high qua­li­ty at your com­pu­ter, becau­se you down­load them first and view them then. Tech­ni­cal pro­blems or poor inter­net con­nec­tion will not dis­turb us using the­se con­tents pre­pared in advan­ce.

Inter­ac­ti­ve parts: Here we use video con­fe­rence soft­ware. But even if this does not work well on your side, you still can par­ti­ci­pa­te by pho­ne (see box right­hand­si­de / below) for details.