Put a Cork in it

I spend too much time travelling around it seems. And tomorrow I'm packing my bags and walking through the metal detectors once again. This time I'm flying out to the Emerald Isle, accompanied by 9 (yes 9) of my third year student teachers. We will be taking part in a two week Intensive Programme of study which will start at the Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland and finish the following week at Fachhochschule Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, in Germany.

During the next two weeks, my students, together with their counterparts from Germany, Ireland and Poland, will discuss how best to develop and use new learning technologies and collaborative software to support learning and teaching. The group's collaborative content management project (CoCoMa) is one of Atlantis' recent successes and there are other developments in the pipeline. The Atlantis project, which is a rolling Erasmus student mobility project has funded travel for the last 3 years. It enabled more than 30 (yes 30) undergraduate and PhD students and staff to attend this year's Plymouth e-Learning Conference, where the Atlantis project members presented 14 (yes 14) peer reviewed research papers. They truly are an innovative and prolific bunch of young people and it is both a pleasure and a challenge to work with them. Above is a picture of me addressing the group at an evening meal. To my right is Professor Udo Bleimann, who is the chief architect of the project.

So from tomorrow we will be based in Cork, and then over the weekend the group will transplant itself to Darmstadt via the good services of Ryan Air. Over the 14 (yes 14) days of the Intensive Programme, the group will attend lectures and demonstrations, give seminars, discuss their projects and participate in a number of cultural visits. My students will visit one or two (yes 1 .... or 2) schools to see how primary school teachers in other countries manage their classrooms and use their technology.

For the rest of the academic year the group co-operate through a combination of Web based tools and video conferencing sessions. I hope they all behave themselves...