Opening words at Dean’s project meeting in Levadia (Greece)

Opening words

Good morning dear colleagues and learners,

I’m very pleased to be with all of you in Levadia at this particular place as the School library of good memories for some of us to make these opening words. I would like to thank the Union organization for hosting all the DEAN project members during these 4 days meeting. There’re almost 20 participants of three European countries here today. Particularly, I would like to welcome some young members, present today, apprentices of DEAN project, who are participating for their first time in an international meeting and in an European project as well. I’m sure their freshness and naivety will endorse the effectiveness of this meeting. DEAN, Digital Edition and Apprenticeship Network is an European Union LLP-LdV funded project which aims to create a cooperative learning network in order to build up a digital library with the help of ICT tools. In the project, a digital book database is developed for use as support to learn by doing and network training.

Cooperative learning network is the mainstream of modern Education in current emerging society. The rationale for cooperative educative network is a methodology based on the mathematical structure of nodes and networks applicable to teach and learn. Teaching and learning are thus reciprocal. Thus cooperative learning, is not just a mere methodology to apply in Education but an experimental methodology in a broaden sense applicable to all fields of society. I regard education as crucial. In the first place because education is the space where trainers, trainees, educators, parents, teachers, stakeholders, civil society converge, and in the second place to set education in the realm of novel human thinking, understanding and freedom for the knowledge society.

Cooperative learning is an apprenticeship structure, but our methodology of learning by doing needs, not only a structure, but also a goal to achieve and to learn how to do the necessary tasks to reach that goal. Learning by doing in Cooperative network seeks for implementation and completion. Digital library is our goal.

Digital Library is a representation of an universal access to human knowledge. As participants in active life and learning we should behave not as mere users of technology but as seekers for liberty, knowledge and culture. In this sense a digital library is far more than a simple goal or a computer tool for a cooperative learning network implementation basis.

Our work won’t worth if we don’t make our work accessible to others. So Dean attempts to build a private specific library providing the organization of the collection of books in some fields of education digitised by learners belonging to associate nodes, to the use of teachers and learners communities whose completion will likely be undertaken by others. In this way our endeavours will always worthwhile.

I very much hope that your participation in this meeting will be both beneficial and enjoyable. And particularly for those of you visiting Levadia and Greece for the first time, I trust your stay will be a pleasant one. It has been a great pleasure for me to be here again and I declare this meeting open. Many thanks.

By Pilar Cataño

Dean project’s coordinator

13th December 2009