Blog Post

Wednesday (23 November 2011) at noon, we left the office in a big rush. The sun was finally shinning, after three weeks of rain in Spain. We (Nicholas and I) were heading for Brussels, where they barely see the sun for weeks. Not that it matters, as we knew we’ll spend the next two days inside the Flemish Ministry of Education, attending the Media and Learning 2011 conference on behalf of the European Commission’s eLearning Europa portal that we manage from P.A.U. Education.

The event? It was a hit. Over 300 representatives of the eLearning world gathered together to share good practice ideas and to vote for the MEDEA Awards for User-Generated Educational Media 2011 and the MEDEA Awards for Professionally Produced Educational Media 2011.  

With so many faces around us and yet it felt like home! It was surprising to see many people we knew from our different projects among the participants. At one of the stands, we met Elina Jokisalo (Finland), an ex-colleague of ours. In the afternoon, we met John Mcdonald (UK), the Head of the EC Task Force of the European Year of Volunteering 2011, introducing the Special Award for Educational Media Promoting Volunteering 2011.

Janine Duchar (UK), who is working with us on the European Year for Active Ageing 2012, was there with us during the two days of the event.

Jun Song, from the University of Luxembourg came to say ‘hi’ to us while we were hosting the eLearning Europa stand. She is one of the Facilitators of the LS6 Community on eLearning Europa. The organiser of the conference, Sally Reynolds (UK), is also a partner in the LS 6.

We also met Nikitas Kastis (Greece), from Menon, an organisation we have worked with for the ePractice initiative. Later on, Nicholas recognised a representative of the Lifelong Learning program of the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA), Piero Fratini (Italy), who was part of the Piccolingo Campaign for Early Foreign Language Learning.

On Thursday evening (24 November 2011), we had dinner with our colleagues Agnes (half Catalan, half French), Gary (half Israeli, half American) and Javier (half Spanish, half Belgium), who were in Brussels for the kick-off meeting of another project that we are involved in, AfriCAN Climate, a portal on exchange on climate change in Africa.

All together, we felt very… European (for the record, I am Romanian and Nicholas is half Cypriot, half British).