By Sally Reynolds

The first Media & Learning conference took place on 25-26 November 2010 in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training. Participants included policy makers, service providers, broadcasters and practitioners from all over Europe. They met to discuss and share their experiences in providing media-rich resources for learning, in building up the skills of teachers and trainers in media-based learning and in promoting and extending media literacy skills across the education and training sector. Over 230 people from 31 countries took part in this conference and a further 200 people followed the presentations which were streamed online. Several broadcasters took part including members of the EUscreen consortium and re-use of existing digital resources for educational purposes was one of the core discussion threads during the conference. You can read a full report about this conference here.  Media & Learning 2011 will be held in Brussels at the end of 2011, dates to be announced shortly.

Announcement

The edition of the BUFVC Handbook 2011 is now available and contains an overview of activities the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) is involved in and a description of resources that are useful for the academic community. In more detail, the handbook focusses on:

• University audio-visual centres
• UK film archives
• Important media festivals and awards
• Video distributors in the UK
• Film and media training courses
• Media legislation and reports issued during the last year
• TRILT and the BoB National service

EUscreen is featured in this handbook as one of the research projects which can be used as a resource by academics who have an interest in European television history. The BUFVC Handbook 2011 is primarily written for specialists, students, teachers and academic service providers and can be ordered here.

Press release from TAIK/ Aalto University School of Art and Design

Date: 19-21 November
Place: Harju Youth Centre, Helsinki

The Remix Helsinki initiative supports legal creative reuse of audiovisual materials. Our first event, License to remix! video remix workshop, will be organized between 19 and 21 November at the Harju Youth Centre. The workshop promotes creative re-use, remixing and sharing of open audiovisual content. In addition to hands-on remixing, their will also be a discussion about intellectual property rights issues.

Public events are organized on Friday and Sunday. The languages used in the workshop are Finnish and English, while the presentations in the public events are in Finnish (with English summaries). On Friday, there will be short presentations related to remix culture, and on Sunday the videos created in the workshop will be presented.

The workshop is organized by Sanna Marttila, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Kati Hyyppä and Anne Luotonen from Aalto University School of Art and Design. VJ PHOQ (XPLOITEC) also provides his creative support for the workshop. If you have any questions or are interested in participating in the workshop please email to remixhelsinki@gmail.com. You are of course welcome to the public events without prior registration.

The workshop is done in collaboration with EUscreen, the City of Helsinki Youth Department and Pixelversity (Pixelache).

For more information and a detailed programme see:

http://remixhelsinki.mlog.taik.fi/info-in-english-3/

By Sally Reynolds

This study day took place on 9 November and attracted about 250 teachers from all different levels of formal education in Dutch-speaking Belgium. The idea behind the day was to introduce teachers to the highly innovative platform, INgeBEELD 4, which is aimed at enhancing the media literacy skills of pupils and teachers alike throughout the country.  Philippe Van Meerbeeck from VRT was one of the speakers and organisers of this day and used the opportunity to highlight the ways in which the digital archive being made available by VRT through the large-scale Vlaanderen in Beeld (VLIB) initiative can and is being used to support learning. The brand-new VLIB portal was also shown to participating teachers who were invited to try-out the portal for themselves during this highly practice-oriented study day.

By Sally Reynolds

The Irish National FÍS (Film In Schools) Film Festival took place on 3 November at Dublin City University with over 800 children and their teachers attending from across the country. Over 25 awards were presented to schools and their students to celebrate their outstanding film achievements in moviemaking with particular acknowledgement in areas such as animation, acting, editing and direction. The FÍS project is an initiative designed to introduce the medium of film as a support to the Primary School Curriculum. You can view the 25 nominated films on the FÍS website. A Film Festival like this shows there is a need and a great interest in the use of audiovisual material in education.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

EUscreen’s annual report is now published online. The report describes the major developments during the first year of the project. With the first release of the EUscreen coming up soon, the report provides valuable insights in the choices that are made and the effort that is put into the creation of the first version of such a portal. Some highlights from the report:

• The milestones for the first year have been reached. These are milestone 1, project establishment and milestone 2, definition of the user requirements and the metadata schema.
• A detailed description of the user groups, their needs and user requirements.
• An overview of the architecture of the portal and a preview of the frontend and the backend.
• A definition of the content selection guidelines and the metadata schema.
• A summary of activities that have been undertaken.

Read the full report.

Press release

Amsterdam & Hilversum
November 11 – 13, 2010

Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’). The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as Wikipedia, Images of the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain. No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open content resources are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.

While protagonists of open content praise its low-cost accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim it undermines the established “gate keeping” functions of authors, the academy, and professional institutions while lacking a reliable business model of its own. Economies of the Commons 2 provides a timely and crucial analysis of sustainable economic models that can promote and safeguard the online public domain. We want to find out what the new hybrid solutions are for archiving, access and reuse of on-line content that can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy.

Economies of the Commons 2 consists of an international seminar on Open Video hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on November 11 in Hilversum, a two day international conference and two public evening programs on November 12 and 13 at De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam. The event builds upon the successful Economies of the Commons conference organised in April 2008.

Confirmed speakers include:
Charlotte Hess (Syracuse University – Keynote), Ben Moskowitz (Open Video Alliance), Simona Levi (Free Culture Forum), Bas Savenije (KB National library of the Netherlands), Yann Moulier Boutang (Multitudes), Peter B. Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Harry Verwayen (Europeana), James Boyle (Duke University), Jeff Ubois (DTN), Sandra Fauconnier (NIMK), Dymitri Kleiner (Telekommunisten), Nathaniel Tkacz (University of Melbourne), a.o.

Organisers:
Images for the Future Consortium / Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision / De Balie / Institute of Network Cultures University of Amsterdam, Department of New Media

By Johan Oomen

EUscreen representatives participated in the joint AMIA/IASA conference. The event, that attracted hundreds of delegates from around the globe, was organised in Philadelphia. Johan Oomen presented Europeana and EUscreen in a session that also included an insightful presentation by Georg Eckes of the European Film Gateway. The presentation is now available online.

From the conference programme: “This presentation will firstly discuss the goals of Europeana and benefits this unified access brings to both users and contributing organisations. Secondly, the presentation will outline the commonalities and differences between the two aggregations. More specifically regarding: Architecture, handling metadata, content Selection policy and handling IPR, functionality and multi-linguality. Both projects have invested ample time defining Use Models by engaging in focus groups and executing desk research. One of the common requirements that needed to be addressed was the issue of providing multilingual access. However, film institutions and broadcast archives often have a slightly different focus in terms of the way archival content is archived, accessed and explored.”