european projects

The two-years learning partnership project ETRUST comes to a close and on this occassion I would like to reflect on what we did and learned.

The project aimed to improve the well-being and safety of migrant workers by encouraging employers to use effective e-learning content as part of a blended training approach to Health and Safety. We started with researching the laws and regulations of H&S trainings in our countries and Europe. Partners identified and evaluated e-learning content and tools that support Health and Safety training. On that basis, we analysed them and compared these on a European level. This led us to an insight to the situation of e-learning for H&S trainings and the rules of this market.

As the first year of the places2b project ends in few weeks, it's time to summarize a bit what we have done and achieved so far.

We at cocoate.com aimed to start building a network of local actors and association as the basis for a common development of our village. The first talks with the biggest association in Fitou, VHV, were promising but when it came to binding actions, they quit. So we started from the scratch, distributed project information in the village, made some public presentations and we got an amazing group of people which are enjoying to explore and share and start such a community process in our village.

Together with Isabell, I presented our experiences implementing Drupal, or at least open source software, in European educational projects

I was writing some project applications for educational projects in the last weeks. Its hard work and I could not have manage that without exchanging my ideas with Isabell and Hagen, without their feedback and support. There are always some tricky points in such applications and you have to answer, amongst others, how you will sustain the envisaged impact of the project beyond its lifetime. This is tight connected to the methodology you will use to achieve the aims of a certain project. The following generalized summary mirrors the main points of what I have written for different projects. These points might be not really spectacular, in project reality often difficult to follow , but essential to sustain the impact and for further development.

I had the opportunity to attend the Global Tourism Forum (GTF) in Andorra on Monday this week. Approximately 200 representatives, leaders of global players in the tourism industry, politicians and lobbyist where attending that event, organized by UNWTO.
The forum was hosted by the government of Andorra, sponsored by Visa, Andorra Telecom, Feda, the Andorra energy supplier and the media partner was CNN.

The motto of this event was “Building New Models for Tourism Growth, Competitiveness & Responsibility“ and I was curious to go there as I expected some inspiration for our places2b project which is focused on the development of sustainable structures for local based tourism.
I have to admit, I got some doubts after getting the invitation from the General Secretary

be a good tourist, spend your money here at this wonderful place.

Today, we had another meeting with some members of the places2b group, not to discover a place2b, but for getting a deeper insight into facebook. Half of the group already use facebook, the other half even had heard about it.

With the help of the summary Hagen prepared, we discovered fast the main points and some people learned something new.

But, very soon we were in a hot discussion about sense and nonsense of using something like Facebook and later on, what the hell the Internet enables.

Here are the main points listed:

• You can connect and access everything, there is no secret in the world,
• there is no privacy, you don't know who has and use your data
• social relations are more and more reduced to facebook friends-collections
• people send emails and messages instead talking to each other.
• There should not be everything in the web, not even the “secret” places we will discover. What will happen, when all the tourists visit these places? We should keep them secret!

I am not that good in using the French language, and that's why, I was not able to argue with precise words at the moment. Therefore some written words in English first.

We started another European project a few weeks ago, it's about old houses. Everyone who knows me probably smiles now, because I love old houses!

This is one reason why we, Isabell and me, wrote a project proposal and applied for funding. Another reason is, that old houses are witnesses of our culture, of our identity, but in our world they are outnumbered, often not respected, going to be destroyed to make place for modern houses.

In some countries, mostly in not so developed ones, a new house is also often a status symbol.

Also, in not so few countries you will rather receive a loan for building/buying a new house than buying/restoring an old one.