LEARNING IN THE

GARDEN OF INCLUSION
Situation:
- EFQUEL’s yearly Innovation Forum takes place in the venue of INA, Oeiras, Portugal.
Part of the venue is a very beautiful and big garden.

- EFQUEL has proved in two past events its ability to innovate the conferences of
European networks by showing benchmarks: Live-broadcast of the plenary in 2010 in
combination with a Twitter backchannel and first steps towards community building
on Adult Learning in combination with an event. Also here, ICT has been widely used
to facilitate discussion and enable participation.

- EFQUEL wants to show leadership in the field of quality in E-Learning. By this, the mission
of dialogue and inclusiveness plays a central role.

- The EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010 is an official event of the European Year for
Combating Poverty and Social Inclusion. That shall be outlined during the EFQUEL
Innovation Forum 2010.

- In recent high-potential projects such as OPAL and CONCEDE, Opening Education

plays an important role. The paradigms of the traditional roles between organization
(e.g. university), teacher (e.g. professors) and learners (e.g. students) might be
changed dramatically in the future.

- The way how learning takes place will move more and more towards informal
gathering, sharing and aggregating of content. Quality is here one of the major issues
that has to be solved – and the learning community will overtake here responsibility.

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (EFQUEL)

35, Rue des deux Eglises
B-1000 Brussels
Note on the recent program.
By paying attention to the outgoing situation, one can see that the recent program of the
EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010 in terms of the keynote speakers good comparable with the
EDEN conference because the same organizations (e.g. OUUK) and even the same speakers
(Marujah) are announced in the program. Further, there is nothing really new to the last
EFQUEL Forum 2010.

Provocative keynote speakers like Muneo or Nnenna in the last years are completely missing.
Beside the Twitter backchannel, it has been taken in consideration to use Cloudworks –
however, one can see at the recent public consultation, the targeted result could not be
reached for several reasons.

The different strands in the EFQUEL Innovation Forum are less attractive since they are not
allowing multiple participations. Experts have to decide either or, and can’t choose both
options.

It is on the time to overcome stiff and conservative ideas. A new approach is needed that
combines the way a conference of the future might look like and base it on EFQUEL’s brand:
Dialogue and Inclusiveness.

The garden metaphor

Metaphors with gardens and plants are already used in education, from the territories of
HEXTLEARN till the fertile soil for creativity and innovation that has been used in many press
releases of EFQUEL so far.

The success of the garden metaphor is probably based on the easy understanding of the
gardener’s role: He has the overview about the whole environment, enables sustainable
growing and is nurturing his plants on an individual basis.

One can say that the gardens of INA are providing an excellent example for successfully
taking care of plants – but how to use them for the conference? How to enable learning
processes in a free space?

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (EFQUEL)

35, Rue des deux Eglises
B-1000 Brussels
First of all, the idea of having different strands might be thought over. Why only 5 strands, if
there are probably at least 20 experts who could present their organization, their project or
their initiative? Why clustering the educational spheres in organizational boxes, when there
are common interest in a topic at itself (e.g. Serious Games and Opening Education in all
parts of organizational level)?

The answer on such questions can be found in the structure of INA’s garden. The topics are
distributed widely in the garden. Conference participants are walking around, may join a
discussion and also drop out. They can search the dialogue on their own or with the facilitator
of the topics. The rapporteurs are gathering the progress on pin-boards or another way of
documentation that has to be defined.

Topic Topic
1 4

Topic
3
Topic
4
Topic
2
Conf
TV

Topic
Sponso 4
r Area

Ambassadors are walking around as well, however, they are giving a special task in form of
questions to the facilitators. By this, the facilitators have to answer 4 questions of the
ambassadors (if there are 4 different ambassadors). In addition, they shall give
recommendations that are related to EFQUEL’s basic profile: Quality in E-Learning – in
particular under the focus on innovation.

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (EFQUEL)

35, Rue des deux Eglises
B-1000 Brussels
The eLearning community – the virtual
garden
Beside the innovative structure that has been proposed in the chapter above, the virtual
component is the key element in the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010. It provides access to the
EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2010 including the keynote speeches, discussion, contacts etc. –
and it is able after the event to become a sustainable online community. It might become
the central meeting point for E-Learning specialists and interested people: a high potential
platform for public consultations and dissemination.

The eLearning community will be built up together with around 24 organizations since it will be
a dissemination activity rolled-out in a common activity at the 8 th September within the pre-
conference workshop day. Then, at the 9th of September the eLearning community is
mirroring the garden of INA. Visitors can click on the areas that are interesting for them and
are directed to groups at the online community. In the groups, a skilled moderator is
overtaking the facilitation.

Online visitors have for sure also the possibility to create their own discussion groups. If there is
a visible interest in one of the visitor’s groups, the main administrator is sending out the direct
link through the EFQUEL channel using the conference hashtag. Twitter will be probably the
most suitable tool to attract attention to the other participants and to the community. Results
of the online discussions are also feed back to the real conference. A dynamic circle will be
established that motivates more participation, an upwards trend is given.

The CONCEDE project might have a special role in the community: In September, the first
quality guidelines shall be ready and tested with the pilots. As discussed in the last project
meeting, there are organizations among the partners that have an interest in developing a
tool to facilitate the quality of external links to which the discussion members might quote to.

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (EFQUEL)

35, Rue des deux Eglises
B-1000 Brussels