Yesterday we officially started a partnership between Educamp09 and the EVOLVE Community. This was the first of a series of open online conversations that will be happen on a monthly basis until the face to face Educamp09 meeting in Ilmenau, Germany, this following April.

Question: Why are we doing these online sessions when some of us are already going to meet face to face? Why a partnership between two communities? What do we hope to achieve with this?

Answer: One thing to start with: to create alternative opportunities to network, opportunities to gain access to people’s ideas and to establish learning bonds. Isn't the role of a Network to help people network? And isnt the objective of a community to bring people together so they can learn through conversations and interactive activities?

What we hope to achieve with this is simple: we want to bridge the connection between the people in our different networks. With these opportunities we also aim to provide those who might not be able to join our face to face events, an opportunity to be part of these discussions too. And looks like we have been quite successful with the launch of this initiative, which counted with the participation of multi networks and communities. There were Educampers. Evolve/JISC members, Webheads, EVO2009 - Digifolio participants, The earthcast09 team webcasters, WeDoTEL researchers and twitter followers in the house, as far as I could tell (am I missing someone?).

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the outstanding performance of out two guest speakers, Sieglinde Jakob-Kühn (aka Networking Lady) und Graham Attwell, which we thoroughly enjoyed talking to. But equally important was our great audience. There were more than 60 people in elluminate. This must mean something. Are we connecting?! I think so.  This is just true collaboration. This is pure fun too. Thank you all for coming.

This monthly topic is PLEs and E-Portfolios - is this the future of education?, as our guest speakers so well introduced us to from their personal and distinct points of view. There is nothing like being offered different perspectives. It just sets the mood for a great discussion, which can now continue here.

Your ideas, questions and thoughts you still want to explore can be shared in the discussion thread Thomas Bernardt has just created. Feel free to join and/or create new threads, not only with new related issues, but also in different languages! We do like diversity!

So here is our motto: Stay connected! We sure would like to hear more from you before we launch the next topic in February!

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