MoDAL

In december 2006 Tine was at the Online Educa in Berlin. The machm-it.org project group MoDAL made a presentation about their work.
Beside other things they have shown two videos.
My task was now to bring these videos on the project website ...
But how?
Both videos were on a DVD, very big .VOB files (>300 Mb).
After a bit searching I found the following possibility.

1. With AutoGordianKnot2.40 you can make a much smaller AVI file (40 MB)
2. With RivaEncoder you can make from the .AVI file a smaller .FLV file (7 MB)
3. With the free FLV Player you can insert the videos at the website.
(-> All downloads are attached in the german version of this article).

Thats it.
But I had the problem that Joomla! and the other CMSs are filtering javascript commands from the content. So I created the content item in the Joomla! admin interface and changed the text with the necessary javascript code in phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately it is not possible to edit the content item in Joomla!, but the videos are there
modal-eu.net

My colleagues are tired and overwhelmed with all the impressions and ideas they have got at the conference. Most of them were never before at such a big conference and they really appreciate the workshops, sessions and the exhibition.

Just now we had our presentation. Hence the audience was not so large as expected (because the session takes place not at the main conference hotel) we had a very lively discussion afterwards. Regarding our project topic we talked about what we have find out about motivating disadvantaged adults learners.

It was a bit an unusual presentation because we persuated Laura, a girl from Cornwall who droped out of school as she was ten, to talk about whats motivated her to turn back to a college ten years later. It was very emotional and the audience really appreciate her video and her speach.

For the last 4 days I had a stay at Riga and I returned very tired (but happy), with many new impressions and a lot of contacts. It was my first stay with a project groupe of an european Grundvig project. So I had to learn a lot about projects, about europe, about languages and how to become "one" europe. Yes we were working hard. We communicated 4 days mainly in english, a good exercise but at the end I had a node of languages in my head, so I spoke italian to the turkish and german to the latvian.
Beside the work, the latvian partner organized sightsseing trips. Because of the good food we had, I think I will surely need a diet in the next weeks.

Some of my impressions I collected during our sightseeing trips.

movie made by momo

Today I have updated the machm-it.org project website MoDAL. It was made with Mambo 4.5.2.3 with a lot of security patches and it was based on our association server.
Now it is a shiny, brandnew Joomla 1.0.11 and it is based on the machm-it.org server.

After finishing the pilot questionnaire, at late saturday afternoon, we visited Castle Howard.
It's an 300 years old house and estate, one of the most magnificent place in the York area.
Castle Howard covers 10.000 acres within the Howardian Hills, a designed area of outstanding natural beauty.
As well as being a visitor attraction the castle is also an working place, including farming, forestry, property, retail and holiday park.
More than 100 permanent and 150 seasonal members of staff employed there.
After visiting Castle Howard we drove to Witby for dinner in the most famous fish & chips restaurant.

Today we start our work at the projects tasks for the first year.
The aim of this project is to give some recommendations for methods to retain disadvantaged learners into education.
To find out what are the barriers and motivation for learners could be we start creating a questionnaire for asking them.
It seems to be simple but it isn't. We all have different backrounds, different learners and we live in different educational systems.
For me it was especially interesting to hear and see the way britains go in adult education. The british government decided to give the support only to one central union in a region. Going this way they avoid competition on learners costs and force local administrations, private companies, schools, colleges and universities to going together and coordinate their activities. Therefore they have founded an private association with governmental shareholders in Yorkshire. This system works in whole britain.