Gender Diversity: Breaking the glass-ceiling and getting to the top of companies

Terms like gender equality, gender diversity or quota of women are often discussed, but what is done in order to achieve gender equality?

GenDiv (Collaborative Learning for Gender Diversity in Decision Making Positions) is the only European project of the 2013/2014 LLP funding period focussing on gender diversity. The project wants to promote competences for and the access to top management positions for women.   

 

Linked to that is the search for company and management cultures which 

• offer alternative opportunities beyond the supposedly “proven” ways on climbing the career ladder,
• create fair chances for both, women and men and
• handle issues regarding the compatibility of work and family life with sensitivity.

With GenDiv we support a cooperative and mutual exchange and learning process between men and women as well as improving conditions, management cultures and measures for gender equality in companies. We do that by developing a specific qualification programme for female high-potentials and guidelines as well as recommendations for gender diversity in management committees.

The project started its activities with a survey on the status of women’s empowerment for decision-making positions. This was accompanied by personal interviews with men on policies and experiences with women’s empowerment for decision-making positions. Focus groups with women and men also discussed strategies for a reconciliation of work and family and measurements to further recognize and integrate men in gender equality actions in the management. The results of this research study will be published in a final summary report at the beginning of 2015.

Gender Diversity – Who does it affect? 

Discussions on gender diversity very often focus on the female perspective. To perceive positive change within gender inequality both, men and women have to be addressed on every level and in every sphere of society. Therefore, gender diversity concerns everybody. With this in mind the project consortium follows a gender integrative, participatory approach and brings together both genders during development and implementation.

With respect to quality assurance a selected group of management staff and high-potentials from leading national and international organisations meets regularly in each of the partner countries in order to exchange relevant questions of leading competencies and management responsibility, and give input and feedback to project results.

You are invited

• to visit our project website www.gendiv.eu,  
• to share your best practice experiences in terms of successful gender diversity measures of companies with us and
•  to subscribe to the GenDiv newsletter.

Contact us: Franziska Steffen, E-Mail:  f.steffen@dieberater.com

GenDiv is a Eurpean project funded by the LLP Programm of the European Commission.

Conference on ICT Skills for girls!

On Ocotober 15th a conference on promoting entrepreneurship among secondary school girls through ICT will be held in Antwerpen, Belgium.   

Online participation possible!  

You can attend all talks, interact with presenters, send your comments and questions live, and engage with all participants through online tools.

If you are interested and want to participate, don't forget to register as soon as possible. Click on this form to register.  

What do you need to be able to connect to the online conference? A computer with speakers, internet access and a browser (Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are recommended).   

This conference is beeing organised within the EU Project ICT-Go-Girls!. The project offers advice on resources and methodologies for implementing lessons to link the beliefs of young girls regarding their professional future and the real work environment. It is based on role models and exercises that encourage young girls to work in the ICT-sector or to become entrepreneurs.   

The ICT-Go-Girls! activities provide teachers with a wide range of ideas for implementation that can be tailored to suit different classroom settings. It builds upon the skills of young girls while allowing more in-depth thought about professional options. It is based upon their psychological and physical needs including performance indicators within the classroom.

ICT-Go-Girls! does not only allow young girls to reflect on their professional future but also promotes deeper thought and the development of essential skills, attitudes and knowledge concerning decision-making processes with regard to professional choices.  


-This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.-

Active Ageing: A paradigm shift in todays society

Population is not only becoming older, but people are also staying active longer. With this change, the needs of senior citizens have changed as well. But what is it that they want or need? They want to participate in social life be part of the society and stay in charge of their own lives - just like every other citizen.

With this in mind, the European Project „Peer to Peer Support“ (PPS) conducted a survey asking senior citizens a bunch of questions concerning how further education for senior citizens could meet their need. This survey shows that 67 percent of the participating seniors are interested in training courses on active ageing. 39 percent of them are especially interested in the possibilities of earning money during retirement. 32 percent want to know more about mental health and another 32 percent are interested in using technology. The PPS training will be developed until the end of 2014 on the basis of these survey results with experts in public health and seniors themselves.

In Spring 2015 a training on “Active Ageing” will be held in Vienna for seniors between 55 and 75 years of age, just before retirement or after retirement, who want to discuss and learn more about topics of active ageing, such as participation in social life, health, mobility, and other topics. The training is being developed within the European project “Peer to Peer Support” (PPS) “.

Peer Learning as a cooperative learning model – The PPS project is based on peer learning, within knowledge and experience are passed on by trainers of the same age or in similar life situations as participants. The training is therefore conducted by older peers with support of the project team.

If you are interested in taking part in the training „Active Ageing“ or if you want to be informed about the development of the training, then contact us:

Dr. Katharina Resch

Tel: +43 1 5324545 - 1156

E-Mail:  k.resch@dieberater.com

PPS has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the authors , and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained theirein. 

Project Sustainability - What's the problem?

Your projects are not made of deliverables.  They are made of sweat and blood and tears, of tight deadlines, late nights, sleepless nights – no nights – of budget air-travel, unwashed taxi-drivers and bad hotel breakfasts, a pantomime on the European stage, monitored and observed by a critical audience of unqualified critics.

If it’s not for the deliverables, then what is it for?

Think about this.  Think about how much of your working life you waste working on projects with no lasting results.  How many hours have you spent slogging away on project deliverables that are never going to reach their target audience once that final cheque has cashed?  How many minutes each day could be better spent making a real difference in your sector, that you are dwindling away appeasing European bureaucrats?

This is not the land of efficient goal-focused project-management, this is a cyclical race track of time and money, a rabid dog chasing its tail all the way to Brussels, leaving a carbon footprint in its tracks.

Sustainability.  The great word.  

Yes, we need to write something here.  We need to have a plan.  Maybe they like the sound of this.  Then we can look proudly over our ceremonially-stamped intellectual property-rights agreements, feeling smug as we bang the last nail into the cash register.

This, I believe is not what you want to have in mind when you cast your mind back over your professional career.  All those great things you left unaccomplished.  All those lives you never changed.  All the dust you gathered on the fruits of your labour, those fruits that so very easily could have been something else, something spectacular, something almost meaningful.

We believe in sustainability.  

We believe in long-term impacts.  We believe in value for the European tax payer.  Not just value for today, but for tomorrow and the days that follow.  We want to help you to discover sustainability and find ways to make the impact of your work go further and last longer.

Be part of the sustainability revolution 

– these are the fruits of your labour – let’s make them count.

You want to talk more about the sustainability of your projects then conctact Paul Talbot from die Berater® p.talbot@dieberater.com 

Open Registration for Conference on Youth Unemployment in London, September 11th

Registration is now open for the conference 'Bridging the Culture Clash between Employers, Youth People and Local Cultures' on the 11th September at the Osmani Centre in Whitechapel, London, which is free and open to anyone (subject to numbers) with an interest in this area.

The conference is the final event of 'Big Bang', an international project funded by the European Union's Lifelong Learning programme, which has been exploring the extent to which mismatches between the 'culture clash' of work, school and 'local or street' culture is one factor amongst many that are contributing to long-term youth unemployment across Europe.
To register click here.

The conference will start with an informal lunch and networking, and will hear from examples of relevant work in the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Iceland. Presentations will include those from:
- Illias El Hadioui of Erasmus University, whose work was one of the original inspirations behind the project, is a published author from the Netherlands . He has written and spoken extensively on the relationship - and the mismatch - between the 'street culture' of young people and the norms of school and college culture. He will present a theoretical framework that he has developed  to describe this manifestation and highlight the experience of urban youth in large multi-ethnic urban conurbations in the Netherlands.

- Steve Rawlings of Building Lives Training Academies in East London has developed a number of successful apprenticeships in the construction industry, which have been featured in the Evening Standard. He will present a number of case studies and talk about working to bring young people and employers together.



Young people from Big Bang partner 15billion at one of their recent employability workshops.

The conference will consider the challenges of a 'lost generation' which has emerged since the Financial Crisis of 2008 in that whilst unemployment in general has increased internationally, these increases have been disproportionately high amongst young people.  This is a global phenomenon and has been the subject of much discussion as to the causes and solutions - such as that in a recent commentary published by Demos.

Are you interested in organising high quality Erasmus+ KA1 training for adult education staff?

The team of GINCO Tools & Training organises a

 

Second Pilot Course and a Conference

on competence development for international course or¬ganisers and trainers on 9th  – 12th of September 2014 in Alden Biesen + Leuven (BE).

The course will be led by the question: Which competences are needed to organise high quality European trainings for adult education staff?

During the course you will

• receive answers on your burning questions regarding the new European education programme Erasmus+ and it affects the organisation of European IST courses and
• go through the process of organising European in-service-training (IST) courses and develop vital competences to reach a high level of quality.

Thematic focus will be on validation of learning outcomes, evaluation and quality, PR, marketing and outreach as well as management and organisation.


Since the GINCO T&T team assesses competence-based teaching and learning as a key element, it will reduce theoretical inputs and presentations by trainers to a minimum. Instead you will be learning in an applied competence-based methodology and setting.


As a part of course the GINCO T&T conference, where the audience will be enriched by additional stakeholders, will take place in Leuven.

Course venue: 9 – 11 Sept.: Landcommanderij ALDEN BIESEN, Kasteel¬straat 6, B 3740 Bilzen, Belgium, Web page: www.Alden-Biesen.be

Conference venue: 11 – 12 Sept.: Park Inn hotel, Leuven (Louvain) , Belgium.
(http://www.parkinn.com/hotel-leuven). The hotel is situated next to the railway station with a direct connection to Brussels international airport (15 minutes).

The GINCO T&T team is looking forward to your application (download form:
www.ginconet.eu/pilot2candidate.doc) which will be received by the coordinator guy.tilkin@alden-biesen.be.

Innovative learning & sharing of experiences - Presentation of PACE Platform at the FoE Conference, Florence

How to implement and set up a learning platform for knowledge exchange in European project management? The main challenge is to collect useful and interesting resources and to make them accessible on a collaborative plattform.

Maren Satke, bridges to europe project manager at die Berater® used the opportunity to promote the project PACE (Project Actors community in Europe) at the international conference “The Future of Education”. The 4th International conference “The Future of Education“ which took place in Florence (June 12-13) aimed at sharing good practices in the field of innovation for Education.

 

Maren Satke during her presentation on PACE

Using social media and learning management systems (LMS) for the exchange of knowledge, for learning and communicating in an educational context were the topics of a wide range of presentations dealing with innovative teaching and learning methodologies. PACE creates a Project Actors Community in Europe and demonstrates how learning can happen in the setting of the management of EU-funded projects. A common learning and communication platform on EU Project management tools is established in the project. The platform will serve not only as a library for supporting project management tools but also as a market place to discuss and exchange experiences on EU project management practices. The main aim of the project is to unite the practice of different projects in order to provide the best tools & resources for future projects.

JOIN THE PACE PLATFORM NOW!

Apart from the virtual exchange, PACE will offer additional opportunities for networking and exchanging best practices in EU-project management: Save the date for the 1^st PACE BarCamp, November 14-15 2014 , Florence, Italy!

 

Girls in ICT Day 2014!

The International Girls in ICT Day is an opportunity for girls and young women to get inspired about ICT sector by getting a first-hand look into the ICT institutions and listening to women role models.

Within the EU Project ICT Go Girls we are now organising a big event for the international Girls in ICT Day on April 24th in Spain!

It is an honor for us to have these wonderful speakers in this event

• Alba Souto, co-funder of BAMPIFU (http://bampifu.com/) and Pica y Wafu (http://pikaywafu.com/)
• Ángeles Pariente, founder of A2, Laboratory of Ideas  (http://www.a2laboratoriodeideas.com/)
• Cristina Gamallo, Founder Member of SITUM (http://www.situm.es/)
• Susana Ladra, V Associate Dean of Academic Organization, Computer Science Faculty, UDC (http://www.fic.udc.es) and researcher. Ada Byron Award, CPEIG 2013.

We will keep you informed about the organization of the event, you can follow us on:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ICTGoGirls
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ICTGoGirls
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaYnwE2ZurwETyjAShB6_XNmWYnHQycAf

And we still encourage you to send us your video message for the international Girls in ICT Day on April 24th!

Check our idea: Video Message Request.

  

How to predict learning outcome? CRITON event held in Vienna, Austria

On Wednesday, March 19th 2014, die Berater® held a dissemination seminar called EU Cafe for the CRITON project as well as for two other European projects. With the EU Cafe, die Berater® aims to provide an informal insight into its current EU projects.

The project CRITON is a transnational cooperation project to enhance the learning process in distance education systems and e-learning, using assessment methods for predicting the progress of students and to improve evaluation methods leading to better learning outcomes and more personalized learning.

CRITON aims to provide innovative solutions to meet the learning needs of the three main target group:
1. Learners of all levels involved in e-learning or distance learning
2. Tutors and teachers in adult education using e-learning or distance learning
3. Institutions of adult education offering courses with e-learning or distance learning
offering a modern web based environment (a smart platform) to be applied in all educational levels that use e-learning.

Holger Bienzle during his welcoming speech

The opening speech was held by Holger Bienzle, head of bridges to europe at die Berater. Afterwards project coordinator Mr Erol Koc introduced the 28 participants to the CRITON project and invited them to take an active part in the upcoming piloting phase. The main aim of the event was to introduce the participants to the CRITON platform for assessing the possible success or failure of learners in their engagement in eLearning settings.

Discussion round with participants

The participants, mainly consisting of trainers in adult education, engaged in an open discussion about the use of predicting learning outcomes. Their main point of interest was the importance of monitoring and analyzing learnering progress as well as how teachers can even better prevent an underachievement of learning outcomes.

A big PLUS for education: The new EU funding programme Erasmus+ has started!

• Plus 40 % of funding for education, youth and sport!
• Plus simplified implementation rules!!
• Plus many more funding opprtunities for innovative projects!

The new EU funding programme Erasmus+ officially started with the New Year and published the first Call for Proposals with deadlines on 17 March 2014 (mobility projects) und 30 April 2014 (cooperation projects).

In total 14.7 billion Euro will be availaible in the coming seven years for exchanges of staff and learners, in-service-training courses abroad, development and piloting of innovative educational products, „knowledge alliances“ of education providers and enterprises, filling sectoral skills gaps and other aspects of lifelong learning.

bridges to europe, the international plattform for project management, can help you to use these new funding opportunities in the best possible way: by strategically focusing your project, finding suitable and reliable cooperation partners or writing the entire project proposal for you.

More info on Erasmus+ go to http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/index_de.htm

You want to know more about bridges to europe? Visit our website www.bridgestoeurope.com 

Are you involved in EU Projects? Then join the Project Actors Community in Europe

Are you involved in European Projects and interested to improve your project management performance?  The new EU Grundtvig project PACE (Project Actors Community in Europe), coordinated by die Berater®, takes up the issue of European Project Management. 

A high number of valuable tools, training materials, internet resources and other guidance publications have been developed and produced in various LLP projects   However, the take-up and use of these tools by the wider EU project community has not been as great as it could have been, for a number of reasons: they are often hard to locate, they are not regularly updated and the full potential for Social- and Multi Media in the dissemination and valorisation of these products is often not used.

PACE builds a Community of Practice of European project actors with the aim of supporting each other by

• collecting,
• sharing,
• updating,
• further improving
• and disseminating

existing tools for transnational project management. Through an interactive communication and learning platform members of the community can share experiences and develop tools in the main topic areas of European project management.

In addition to the platform PACE will develop and implement new forms of self-organised events - PACE BarCamps -  for networking and sharing good project-management practice

The first Pace BarCamps will take please in Florence, Italy in November 2014!

EU project managers are invited to join PACE and participate in the development of a new and innovative European project management kit! Now that the project has just started, the platform is work in progress. Early birds are welcome to share their experiences and to discuss new trends in European project management linked to the new ERAMUS+ programme.

Find more information on www.projectactors.eu

Tackling youth unemployment

Feeling lost is something experienced by a lot of young people and can be found throughout Europe. In Spain more than 55 percent of young people are unemployed; this does not give young people a great deal of perspective, prospect or hope in finding work.
 
With the EU-Project Youth Employment Support (YES), die Berater® established an innovative training and coaching toolkit to support HR managers, recruiters and in-company advisors who employ and educate young people from marginalised groups.
 
The Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation Project „Big Bang“ adapts these existing materials to address current issues of youth unemployment and to ‘build a bridge’ between work-based culture and the culture of social exclusion. This will include addressing the problem of low ambition of young people and those who are participating in anti-social and/or negative peer group behaviour, such as ‘gang’ culture and offending.
 
The issues addressed by the YES and Big Bang project have now been presented at The European monitoring conference in Brussels on 11th and 12th February 2014 in order to contribute to work-based learning (WBL) and support of youth employment and economic competitiveness in Europe. Established apprenticeship systems are of high relevance when it comes to youth employment, and at the conference one of the key questions was what types of collaboration and support is needed to attract and engage more companies, and particular SMEs, in training young people as the future workforce in Europe

Big Bang is and EU Project funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme. 

You want to now more? Go to http://bigbangllp.eu or contact Bozica Ilijic, Projectcoordinator of the Big Bang Project: b.ilijic@dieberater.com  

Changing perspective through wikis

 

Phones, computers, and mobile devices are essential tools for managing the economy, transportation, and also in the training sector! The Internet is much more than a series of 1s and 0s; it is a complex human system with its own mechanisms, codes and zones of influence. The pervasiveness of this environment in our lives is so important that the internet has become the breeding ground for the major transition from Homo Sapiens to the Homo Numericus.

At first glance, this transition appears chaotic, uncontrolled, unpredictable and completely diffuse, especially in wiki environments. But behind this apparent disorder, chaos in motion, it could be that a new fundamental is at work, with very specific properties. And its applications remain largely unknown.

This fast development can sometimes scare or simply demotivate. Why update one's skills if today’s technology becomes obsolete tomorrow? Who has never felt helpless and a little stupid in front of his computer? Who has never lost important files? Thought a message was sent by a human being when it was sent by a bot? Got lost within multiple versions of a document exchanged with colleagues? Felt outdated and out-of-touch? Or should we see all this as a challenge? The challenge of developing more social and writing skills and critical thinking, the challenge of generating more opportunities to make our projects successful, to see them adopted by the wider community, the challenge of moving "out of the box" in our professional practices. Anticipating developments and changes is one of the strategic skills that any person must acquire.

And this is the challenge and hope of the project WikiSkillls: getting you to hop into the wiki culture.

WikiSkills is a European project funded by the European Commission aiming to analyze and apply benefits of adopting a wiki-culture within educational settings. Traditional learning environments are often characterized by one-way knowledge transmission processes in which the teacher, as only source of knowledge, assigns a learning activity that is conducted autonomously by the student.

Through WikiSkills participants from different educational sectors, cultures and ages (schools, universities, professional and adult training) learn how to use wikis for their socio-professional development. The project developed, implemented and evaluated an innovative training curriculum focusing on how to make the best use of wiki environments in educational settings, so as to reach high learning objectives and foster a community of learners within Europe.

Through this, WikiSkills promotes innovative pedagogical approaches that foster creativity, competitiveness, employability and entrepreneurial spirit, equity, social cohesion and active citizenship.

 

To learn more about WikiSkills go to www.wikiskills.net

EU project managers gaining PACE



Holger Bienzle, die Berater® at the AIVD (on the left)

Holger Bienzle of die Berater® presented the PACE (Project Actors Community in Europe) project at the annual conference of the AIVD, the Slovakian umbrella organisation of adult education providers.

In the presence of high officials from the national ministries of labour and education and of EAEA, the European Association of the Education of Adults, the perspectives of transnational cooperation in the light of the upcoming new EU funding programmes were  discussed by more than 60 stakeholders.

PACE, the emerging Project Actors Community in Europe, which offers ample learning and sharing opportunities for European project managers, was very much appreciated by Slovakian adult educators as a chance to build on previous project management know-how.

How to validate soft skills for today’s global labour market place

Professional life and career development is increasingly determined by continuous learning to adapt to rapidly changing demands. In the service sector, personal, social and organisational competences (SPOC) are especially necessary; thus becoming competitive factors at the job level. The European project VITA utilises a unique and innovative validation system (LEVEL5) for these competences to provide evidence of human potentials for learners, educational professionals and employers.
VITA Final Conference in Dublin - Honoured by the presence of the Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciarán Cannon T.D.

The VITA system is aimed to assess and evidence competence developments by means of the LEVEL5 system which is specifically designed to assess and visualize personal, social and organizational competences acquired in non- and informal learning settings. VITA has been realised within then European countries. The final conference in Dublin was held in a historic place with a long tradition of studying and learning, the Dublin City University.

The Minister addressed the audience with a very inspiring speech, in which he also underlined the importance of improving continuously competences and skills:




Ciarán Cannon T.D., Minister of State for Training and Skills

“Today’s conference is the culmination of two years’ work which has been exploring the validation of social, personal and organisational competences across a range of education sectors in ten European countries. These soft skills, as they are often referred to, can be difficult to measure but are a very important aspect of today’s global labour market place. Such skills may not be learned in a formal setting but are often acquired in informal settings through day-to-day interactions – at school, at home, in the workplace or through active citizenship in your local community. These skills have become a competitive factor in the labour market and through this project VITA aims to build a standardised method of measuring these soft skills.” 


One of the additional highlights of the VITA final conference was the award ceremony in which the award winners were given the VITA prize for innovative project ideas.

Winners of the VITA Award and the VITA project partners

If you want to learn more about the VITA project please visit: www.vita-eu.org or contact our project manager Bozica Ilijic, b.ilijic@dieberater.com

European Proof of Voluntary Work

Volunteering does not only benefit others, but also benefits the volunteer as an individual. Within volunteering settings various social skills are being developed, but these are hard to document on paper.

The RIVER system, which was developed in the EU Grundtvig project of the same name, is an assessment and evaluation method for recognising the development of competences that are gained during volunteering activities. The RIVER methodology is now available as a management tool for institutions and networks that organise volunteer activities. For a better understanding of the method, a brochure as well as a manual and training materials have been developed and are free for download.

Whether and to what extent competencies are further developed through volunteering, can be evaluated by using different RIVER methods - from the self-assessment, to tandem evaluation or a focus group. The RIVER methodology is based on LEVEL5, which is an approach and instrument to document and visualise competence development.

The approach is supported by a software to create a meaningful evidencing document (certificate) including a 3D visualisation of the development of the volunteer.
You want to use the RIVER methodology for your organisation? Follow these links and learn more about RIVER and its application:

RIVER Brochure

RIVER Manual

RIVER Training

ICT-go-Girls empowers young girls through education

It is a fact that a sense of Initiative and Entrepreneurship as one of the crucial key competences for lifelong learning of the European Commission is underrepresented in European secondary schools. Research reports show that girls are less motivated in pursuing entrepreneurial careers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), opting rather for traditional jobs.  ICT can provide a flexible and potential motivational environment for empowering young girls in their future choices, their studies and jobs.

The ICT-go-Girls project aims to enhance entrepreneurship skills among lower secondary school girls, by using ICT as the key element. Young girls 10 to 14 will be empowered with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to create future opportunities for innovation and quality ICT related employment.

 

Career Education for Girls

As missing knowledge on the diverse job profiles and routines in the ICT sector as well as stereotypes on the character of people and work in the sector are reasons for girls not to opt for a career in this field, it is important to address the landscape of ICT jobs nowadays, underlining the creative, social and highly communicative side of jobs in this field as much as giving insights into options to work self employed in this sector. This project involves relevant actors from the ICT sector such as schools, universities, teacher training institutions, ICT research centres, educational administrations etc. in Europe and overseas spreading to Australia where research studies can be compared to the European results. ICT-go-Girls focuses on key competences for lifelong learning such as: Entrepreneurship, Digital Competence, Mathematical Literacy and Communication in Foreign Languages.

Including Role Models

This approach of girls to get in touch with female role models is widely used with different formats from presenting biographies of women online to ambassadresses or databases with women available to meet girls during events at schools etc. Here, we would like to underline the importance to give insights not only into the job profile and a usual working day, but to ensure also an insight for the girls into the personal life of these women. Future family life, motherhood and how to combine this with work, in particular when it comes to a male dominated sector, is of high relevance for the girls and their future choice of career. When designing actions with role models, the principle of “the closer, the better” is helpful in terms of meeting in person, but even more in relation to the age difference to the girls.

 

Thinking outside the Box

In order to make a difference, ICT-go-Girls emphasizes on teaching or promotional material with a gender sensitive language and avoids the representation of stereotypes in pictures, story boards etc. used. This is of utmost importance in order to make the variety of choices visible, especially when it comes to gender as well as a professional sector with deeply rooted stereotypes.

The Simplicity of Wikis – how they work

 

 

 

 

 

Wikis permit asynchronous communication and group collaboration across the Internet and are therefore widely used in various sectors and levels of education. With its idea of a potentially collective, democratic, open, and dynamic design of knowledge creation wikis enhance collaborative learning.

The European Project WikiSkills…

...provides opportunities for meaningful collaborative learning activities;

...promotes digital literacy, as well as social skills, writing skills and critical thinking;

...develops a sustainable virtual community of practice among the different project countries;

...enables educational communities to contribute to the actual information society;

...empowers civic behaviours, social inclusion, employability and cultural understanding.

 

 

 

There is one simple button that is the core of a wiki: the edit button!

 

 

In every wiki - just click on it and see what happens! Edit things and then just click save. And that's it! Like emails or blogs, wikis are very simple to use.

 

A wiki enables online-group collaboration and asynchronous collaboration

With wikis a group of people can collectively edit text. This text can be viewed and also changed by anyone who wants to contribute and has something to say about a particular matter.

Everybody knows Wikipedia, but wikis are not only for encyclopaedias. Wikis go beyond that!

 

Wikis can be used for many different purposes

Examples include community websites, corporate intranets, knowledge management systems, and note-taking.

1. Co-authoring

› Technical documentation

› Q&A

› Grant requests

2. Meetings

› Defining agenda

› Recording participant names

› Writing reports

3. Brainstorming & community of practice

› Gathering and publishing of good practices

› Discussions

4. Project management

› Listing tasks

› Completion status

 

A number of wiki platforms are available – MediaWiki, DokuWiki, XWiki to name a few – and each wiki platform supports a slightly different bundle of features to support collaboration.

 

You want to learn more about wikis? Go to www.wikiskills.net

 

Paradigm shift in education – is competency orientation the key?

Educating adults is a specific field of expertise; it will have to meet high standards, ambitions and expectations. This will only be possible if the profession of adult education sees itself, and is seen as a professional domain with its own professional structures; standards; quality policies and professional development programmes. The sector needs to organise itself at a European level.

With the European GINCO network as well as the GINCO tools & training project we seek to do exactly that. We bring together the professional players in the Adult Education sector to analyse, discuss, and develop the quality of professional development of adult educators in Europe in its global context and establish a higher level of professional competence among the educators at work in this sector.

 

Adult lifelong learning requires a competence approach. This implies that learning is leading to actual change of performance. In traditional approaches to teaching and learning the emphasis was on learning activities that would raise the level of knowledge, attitudes and skills. These three components however merely represent someone’s potential. In a competence oriented approach we focus more on improving a person’s actual performance in an actual situation. We focus on providing the feedback and inputs needed to help the person raise his/her level of performance.

Within the project GINCO tools & training we elaborate further on this to include also the developers and organisers of Grundtvig in-service courses. The project, its tools and training offers seek to equip Grundtvig course organisers (organisers, managers, developers, facilitators and trainers) to allow them to create optimal competence oriented learning conditions for adult learners in international Grundtvig courses.

To learn more about the GINCO network and the project GINCO tools & training go to www.ginconet.eu

European Conference “Recognition of Learning in Volunteering”

It is a great pleasure to invite you to the European Conference on Recognition of Learning in Volunteering, which will be held on November 12, 2013 in Vienna, Austria.

Given the demographic trend and the increasing number of elderly people in Europe, it seems even more crucial to create opportunities for elderly to stay active. Involving a larger number of seniors in voluntary work might turn out to be a major tool in active ageing strategies.

The one day conference „Recognition of Learning in Volunteering“ will focus on the issue of developing and recognizing competences through volunteering. After the keynotes, workshops will be held in the afternoon, giving participants the possibility to test the RIVER methode – a framework for recognising informal learning outcomes of volunteering activities and for planning competence development in volunteering activities.

We invite you to join us at this European Conference on Learning in Volunteering.

When: November 12, 2013 (10am - 4pm)
Where: Dachsaal Urania, 1020 Vienna

To participate please write an Email to Maren Satke, m.satke@dieberater.com until November 4, 2013.

For more information on the conference contact:
Maren Satke
Project Management & Consulting
Phone: +43 1 532 45 45 - 1156
Email: m.satke@dieberater.com