Jan Figel' said that the Finnish EU presidency (which started on 1 July 2006) is timely as "Finland is well placed in time to address innovation". This was highlighted also by Mauri Pekkarinen who reminded the audience of the vigour and foresights of Finnish innovation. Innovation policy was also at the core of the informal Competitiveness Council which took place on 10-11 July in Jyväskylä with the aim to make innovation policy an integral part of the EU’ s competitiveness agenda, as Mr Pekkarinen pointed out.

Another key issue is lifelong learning, Commissioner Figel’ mentioned that digital skills have now been included as one of the eight skills for lifelong learning. Digital skills include the ability to use computers to retrieve, access, store, produce, present and exchange information over the internet.

These skills, he added, “[are] the drivers which will help EU citizens to live and work in the knowledge society” reminding also the audience of the Lisbon objectives, the political drive for this work.

Another effort to achieve the Lisbon goals by fostering innovation is the planned European Institute of Technology (EIT) announced earlier this year by the European Commission. It is seen as a catalyst to allow EU research efforts to compete on the world. Commissioner Figel’ said it would allow the EU to “operate on a bigger scale and create synergies between different areas disciplines”.

Placing innovation in the centre stage was also the focus of the second day’s plenary session when Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz, Head of Unit in the European Commission’s DG Education and Culture mentioned that innovation is the most important motor for growth. Within this context, the conference will contribute to the forthcoming Commission communication on the use of ICT to support innovation and lifelong learning for all she said.

The new EU’s lifelong learning programme (2007-2013) which was agreed by the European Council in June 2006 was also referred to at the conference. The goal of the programme will be a contribution to the Lisbon goals to make the EU and advanced knowledge economy and society through lifelong learning.

“I believe that not only schools and universities will be encouraged to use ICT-enabled learning, but also other learning environments, including informal learning,” said Odile Quintin, Director-General of Education and Culture at the European Commission, when she presented the new initiative.

At the closing session of the conference, Odile Quintin explained that the drive to introduce ICT in education has reached a turning point: “[this drive] has at least for the moment slowed down, some think it is due to dissatisfaction with ICT-enabled learning, others argue that ICT has reached maturity within the education world,” she said.

This new order was felt throughout the conference; eLearning is now a reality and now is the time to assess what to do next. Now the challenge, Ms Quintin explained, is to explore a second objective which is the capacity of ICT to change the way we learn as currently the learning process itself hardly shows any sign of change, she explained.

To address the issue of change and innovation and how to reach the next step and give a new shape to learning processes, the European Commission is preparing a communication on ‘the use of ICT to support innovation and lifelong learning for all’. The communication Ms Quintin explained will strive to address how ICT can enhanced people learning: “while in the past the debate was about spreading awareness […]; today it’s about keeping the momentum and turning the technology to value,” she said.

The 2006 conference follows two earlier editions held in Brussels. In 2005, the main topic was ‘Towards a learning society’. This year’s theme was ‘Catalyst for change and Innovation’ which covers three sub themes: ‘digital literacy for all’, ‘research, foresight and innovation for learning’ and ‘partnerships for lifelong learning’. A series of presentations and three ‘elearning cafés’ - where participants could have small group discussions - allowed participants to take a look at these issues.

The location of the conference was in this sense meaningful as it was hosted at the Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli, Helsinki University of Technology which co-organised the event together with European Commission’s DG Education and Culture and DG Information Society.

At the conference a number of sessions personified how the change in the way we learn can happen: the use of peer learning which is a way to connect learning communities and learn from each other’s practice ‘without re-inventing the wheel’; and social software which are innovative methods to take learning to a next level by stimulating collaborative learning are some of them.

Peer learning [download presentation]

Roger Blamire from European Schoolnet presented the P2P project on 5 July. P2P is a project which aimed at setting at organising peer learning exchanges between peers from ministries, inspectorates and schools in four different EU countries.

Roger Blamire stressed that despite the difficulties to implement changes in schools, peer learning does make a difference and it should be further developed, indeed built into formal structures, using the structured methodologies and toolkits freely available as a result of the project.

One of the dynamics of the project lies in the role inversion element between policy-makers, practitioners and inspectors where visitors get visited in turn. He characterised the policy-maker peer reviewing as success-chasing, the school peer learning as curiosity and the inspectors work as working together on a task - the development of a common framework for assessing ICT in classrooms. Challenges for the future were developing peer learning between schools and making use of online tools to keep travel costs down.

Social software [download presentation]
Undeniably wikis, blogs, folksonomies, sharing of images, bookmarks, furls and others have taken the world of the internet by storm in the recent two years. The conference itself made extensive use of social networking tools such as a blog aggregator which allowed bloggers in the conference to share their blog entries. The conference site also included a wiki where presentations could be downloaded/uploaded by participants as well as live/recorded webcasts of the plenary sessions.

There is a great potential in the use of the social software in education as was highlighted by Euan Semple’s presentation of social computing at the BBC who stresses that blogs gave power to the individual voice.

In his presentation about Social web in support for informal learning, Teemu Arina, CEO of Dicole Oy also suggested that wikis, blogs and other collaborative software are an answer to the mutation of learning from an individual process to collaborative learning: “in the past we may have emphasised learning as an individual but in the future problem solving requires a network approach where a lot of people collaborate together. It is now possible to distribute your knowledge to a network of people through the internet,” he said.

The conference also highlighted the opportunities offered by the advent of Web 2.0, a term coined in 2004 by American media company O'Reilly Media, which is an attempt to give to the web its original function: a rich, collaborative read/write environment, a concept which may include blogs, wikis and other social software.

For additional Information see:

• EU eLearning Conference 2006 [link]
• Juan Figel, Opening speech for the eLearning Conference (pdf)
• Odile Quintin, Closing Speech for the eLearning Conference (pdf) 
• A new EU Action programme in the field of lifelong learning 2007-2013 [link]
• The European Institute of Technology [link]
• The Peer to Peer (P2P) project [link]