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Isabelle Voegeli

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About Isabelle Voegeli

  • Birthday 11/02/1970

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    http://www.ena.lu
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    Château de Sanem L-4992 Sanem

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  1. What particularly interested me about your seminar was the idea of asking students to learn about a historical event, or even relive it, through the accounts of people who actually experienced that event. The CVCE produces filmed interviews of people who have witnessed important events in European history, and then enters them into the European NAvigator (ENA) knowledge base. In so doing, the CVCE has a similar objective: that of bringing a human dimension to the process of European integration. Alongside well-known people such as Otto von Habsburg, we also make a point of interviewing lesser known figures, such as Jean Monnet’s secretary, who provide us with a vivid account of their experiences. However, our interviewing process is always approached from the perspective of information professionals. This is my idea: I was wondering whether a teacher might find it interesting to study a European event with his or her students and, as part of the project, conduct an interview with an individual — whether well-known or not — who witnessed that event. The accession of the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community is to my mind a good example. I think that this topic would provide a good basis for a wide range of activities, such as role-playing games in which students have to argue for or against Europe, a theme which is extremely pertinent in view of current events. The teacher could also ask his or her students to find newspaper articles about it. I feel that this would be a good example to illustrate the importance of learning about history in order to understand and assess the issues currently at stake. The teacher could ask his or her students to choose one or two individuals whom they could interview and for whom they would then prepare questions. This interview could be conducted in cooperation with the CVCE. In the first instance, we would be prepared to provide the teacher with the technical equipment required, as well as a member of our team to film the interview. The film could then be used for educational purposes: for example, as a tool to compare what has been brought to light during the interview with the contents of official speeches which are available in ENA. In order to highlight the work carried out by the students, and providing the quality of the recording is good, we would then add some excerpts from the interview to the ENA knowledge base. If you so wish, this project could also be incorporated in some way into the E-Help project. I personally believe that such an experience would turn out to be very enriching for teachers, students and the CVCE alike.
  2. Do you have any experience and feed-backs from students outside Luxembourg where ENA had been used in everyday pedagogy at some school? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Indeed I believe that the use of a database such as ENA needs a very close support of the teacher. Most of the teachers that I met don’t unfortunately do it in a very interactive way. They print a document, especially cartoons or newspaper articles, and ask their pupils to comment the document or to answer questions about it. They told me that they appreciate such documents because in their schoolbooks, critical material is often lacking. There is another advantage of ENA over schoolbooks. You might use the same schoolbook over years and have to use the same cartoon printed in your book all that time. In a database such as ENA, you can find various cartoons on a same subject and use every year a different document. Another way some teachers used ENA, has seemed quite interesting to me. They prepared a series of questions about one aspect of the European integration, for instance the beginnings of the European construction in the fifties and their students, sitting in couples behind computers, had to look for the answers on ENA. Afterwards, the students had to write an article about the first steps of the European community and give references of documents that they considered as especially representative and interesting to illustrate that time. Finally they had to give a talk on it and argue their choices. In the future we will continue to develop the accesses and the ways of using ENA. As regards the language, most of the documents have an English translation and it is quite interesting for a student to discover for instance a soviet cartoon even if he has to make the effort to understand the English translation. In the context of the Luxemburg’s presidency of the European Union, I recently participated to a symposium on “The changing Classroom – The Potential of plurilingual Education”. A basic point on the symposium was a presentation and a discussion about the Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) which refers to “any dual-focused educational context in which additional language … is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of non-language context”. Thus the idea is to enhance the learning of an additional language through another subject, for instance history and vice versa. This approach should commonly be realised by teachers of foreign languages and by history teachers. As ENA offers many original documents in over ten languages, the database could be an interesting support to launch a project on the methodological integration of languages and history.
  3. I’m sure you are right about the pathways through the material and we will work on it. Terry, could you please give me the address of the “Shapes of Time” site which would interest me. Generally, if somebody of you is used to consult a site with interesting didactic material or knows about sites which are really interesting in this respect I would be grateful if you could give me the addresses so that I can see what kind of didactic sequences you might need.
  4. At present, you won’t find didactic sequences, learning packages, webquests … about ENA. But I agree that we should give priority to the development of such “pathways” to the material. After technological development and documentary research, that will surely be the next gorgeous challenge. The question is how to take up this challenge. Reading the different contributions, I’ve got a lot of ideas of activities but I’m convinced that the ideal way to proceed would be to work in concrete terms with teachers. I’m currently looking at the different options how to organise such cooperation on a national and international level. I would also certainly be delighted to find a way to work together.
  5. The initial idea of European NAvigator goes back to the debates around the treaty of Maastricht. The idea was to make the pupils and students familiar with the history of the European construction that means from the birth of the community of Europe with the creation of the ECSC to the current European Union. Knowing the history of united Europe would allow them to understand the stakes of present debates. So Marianne Backes, the initiator of the ENA project, submitted the idea to Gilbert Trausch, at that time Professor at the University of Liège, Director of the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Robert Schuman and historian of international repute who decided to support the project. From that moment on, Marianne Backes, Gilbert Trausch and a teacher, Jean-Marie Majerus, started to work out the structure. On the suggestion of Gilbert Trausch we didn’t limit ourselves on questions about the Common market but introduced content unities about events which have influenced its evolution even if the focus remains on the European integration. Afterwards we started to research documents. For practical and linguistic reasons, we started to research documents in the closest countries, especially in Belgium, France and Germany. Gradually we enlarged our researches mainly to the UK, to Italy and to the Netherlands. And even there we have still a lot of work. We are completely aware that we created a kind of distorted, occidental view of Europe and that the content unities, for the moment, are not of equal quality. That explains why you have only found a few documents under the unity about the Hungarian Uprising and I must admit that I’m surprised that you found further material spread on other places. But we had to start somewhere within the limits of our human and financial resources. We had to accept it or to abandon the project from the beginning. Our aim however is certainly to enlarge the content to create a real European view, including documents coming from every country and going back over the historical events and particularities of every country obviously including the states of central and oriental Europe. But we cannot do all these researches by ourselves. That is why we are looking for content collaborations and that is really essential for the future of the project. Concerning the structure, we could discuss about its relevance, but such a structure always has a part of subjectivity. As it has been initially conceived by historians, we use it as working basis and cannot change its general logic. If however some titles seem unclear or incomplete we can of course reword them. The access to the content by the structure presupposes a good knowledge of the history of the European integration and certainly also a sense of deduction. That is the reason why we decided to create different entries in the content. You can for instance use the search engine and automatically replace the document in the structure. As an example you can introduce Churchill. Among others you will get one document called Speech of Winston Churchill (Fulton, 5 March1946). Once you opened the document, you can click on the third icon, called Enter into documentary Resources. The database will automatically place itself in the unity of the structure where the speech of Churchill is stored. You can also access to the content by the media library and on every document you will again see this icon that permits you to access to the right place in structure. Another way to enter in the content is the thesaurus. Our thesaurus is based on Eurovoc, the multilingual thesaurus of the European Union. Eurovoc covers the fields in which European Communities are active and provides a means of indexing the documents in the documentation systems of the European institutions. It is currently used by the European Parliament, the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, national and regional parliaments in Europe, national government departments and certain European organisations. We adapted Eurovoc to our specific historical needs. Every document of ENA has been indexed using the keywords of the adapted Eurovoc thesaurus. And you can accede to the documents leafing through the thesaurus. So much about the background of ENA, its framework and its constraints. So, coming back to your suggestions. Indeed we could probably think about some more specific entries for teachers and you are completely right if you say that currently they might not realize the wealth of material available and, as we have seen in Toulouse, they may encounter difficulties in using that content further as a personal information source. But I believe that it is really a great ICT challenge to work out new methods and functionalities to help the use of ENA in a classroom in the future. As we already did for the content and for the technical development, we would like to develop partnerships to work out these methods and functionalities. Indeed we don’t see ENA as a site that we create and you use but we would like to build collaborations and let ENA evaluate towards an open project where the user could also, if he wants so, give his own input.
  6. The use of ICTs in the classroom: ENA, a case study Introduction The European NAvigator knowledge base, or ENA, is primarily aimed at use in secondary and higher education. ENA provides pupils, students and teachers with thousands of documents on the history of Europe from 1945 to the present day. From the outset, ENA has been developed together with teachers. In particular, they have been involved in content development, in interface and feature evaluation and, more recently, in assessing the various methods of using ENA. In this presentation, I would like to focus on this last point. I shall also be sharing with you the experience that we have aquired as a producer of multimedia content. In the late 1990s, a first version of ENA, which was at the time still ‘off-line’, was installed at several pilot sites, including the University of Luxembourg, the University of Cergy-Pontoise and the European University Institute in Florence. Tutors at these establishments intended to integrate ENA into their lectures in various ways. Accordingly, at the University of Luxembourg, ENA was the primary teaching aid used during a lecture course, whilst the University of Cergy-Pontoise and the European University Institute opted for the more selective use of ENA for practical work. Since 2003, ENA has been freely accessible on the Internet at www.ena.lu. Since this point in time, we have conducted a systematic information campaign to promote the use of ENA in secondary schools in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. This campaign, backed by the Luxembourg Ministry of National Education, has also been an opportunity to make teachers aware of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom in general and in particular for the teaching of history and civics. Key issues and problems Over the past two years, we have held meetings with a large number of history and civics teachers in Luxembourg. These points of contact have enabled us to give presentations of ENA in schools or as part of in-service teacher-training programmes. The initial reaction is generally very enthusiastic. The very idea of having so many documents, film recordings, maps, cartoons, etc. freely accessible on the Internet is seen as a valuable addition to the use of conventional textbooks. However, once the presentation is over, most teachers continue to use ENA on a personal basis, but very few actually bring ENA into the classroom. Why is this so? Firstly, it is a question of IT equipment. Several teachers blame the lack of suitable IT equipment in their schools. It is certainly true that disparities in the provision of IT equipment between schools are wide, but, as we will see, this is often a pretext for another underlying problem. IT skills. Among the teachers that I have met, most had no trouble using a mouse and keyboard. They are used to using word processing for preparing texts and the Internet for finding information. Only a small minority of teachers still seem to take refuge behind pen and paper. The teaching environment. Until now, the textbook has always been the most widely used teaching aid in schools. Teachers’ experience of multimedia is often still limited to the occasional showing of video films in order to illustrate a given topic. Very few teachers have tried using CD-ROMs; nor do they appear particularly keen to introduce the Internet into the classroom. Apart from the reasons given earlier, some teachers seem to feel uneasy about the different methods of using ICTs in the classroom. Unlike teaching from a book, generally done using a linear approach, when using information and communication technologies, the teacher must adopt a modular and thematic approach. It is no longer possible to define learning in terms of the number of pages to be learned and understood, but rather in terms of subjects to be studied. The ENA knowledge base gives less emphasis to the chronological and narrative character of the history of Europe in order to present it using a more cross-curricular and comparative approach. In order to help teachers adopt these new teaching methods, we felt that teaching assistance needed to be introduced. These training personnel could only be provided in cooperation with other institutions specialised in teacher training. Training the trainers In order to encourage teachers to take up the challenge posed by the use of ICTs — and in particular ENA — in the classroom, we have developed close cooperation with the University of Luxembourg and the Ministry of National Education. The ‘Teacher-Training’ Department at the University of Luxembourg, which is responsible for initial teacher training, is currently developing a new module on methods of using ICTs in secondary education. In Luxembourg, in-service teacher training is managed by the Service for the Coordination of Pedagogical and Technological Innovation and Research (SCRIPT). Cooperation with this Service of the Ministry of National Education has made it possible to organise several lectures aimed at assisting teachers with the use of ICTs in the classroom. During training, teachers are provided with a presentation of the ENA knowledge base, an introduction to features available on the site and a talk on methodological ICT guidelines given by a teacher trainer. Finally, participants were required to take on the role of pupil and complete the various tasks set by their ‘teacher’ and then comment on the experience as a ‘pupil’, in particular concerning the contribution of ICTs to conventional teaching tools. Through the strengthening of links with the national education portal, mySchool, it has been possible to establish an ENA community. On www.myschool.lu, pupils and teacher are kept regularly informed about new material introduced in ENA. They may also consult various documents and may exchange their experiences in an area of the site reserved specifically for this purpose. Close cooperation with the National Committee for Civics Programmes has led to the introduction of ENA in civics lessons alongside the textbook published by the Ministry of National Education. In order to assist civics teachers in finding material of particular interest to the national curriculum, we have put together a selection of approximately 200 document references. This list has been distributed in a paper version to all civics teachers and is accessible on the national education portal www.myschool.lu and on the site of the CVCE. Developing interdisciplinary cooperation and teamwork Most pupils are accustomed to using computers for personal use. We therefore decided that it would be interesting to encourage cooperation and foster team spirit between teacher and pupils in order to encourage the use of ICTs in the classroom. From this came the idea of a competition on Europe. This competition, called EuropaR@ce, which is currently in progress, has been organised jointly with the national education portal, mySchool, and the European Commission Representation in Luxembourg. Until April, several questionnaires on the history of, and recent developments in, Europe are in turn being made available online on the portal. Classes are required to reply collectively to the questions on the site with the help of their teacher. On 9 May, the winning classes will be awarded a prize. Details of the competition. This competition was not publicised by sending official circulars to schools but instead by designing posters and postcards aimed at capturing the pupils’ attention. This promotional material was distributed both in secondary schools and in trendy cafés, cinemas and discotheques. The aim was to ensure that participation was not based on the teacher’s initiative, but rather to encourage pupils to approach their teacher and ask if they might take part in the competition. In this way, the teacher cannot refrain from participating, even if the competition is based entirely on ICTs in so far as the questionnaire is to be found on the mySchool portal and the replies need to be researched on the Internet, particularly on the ENA and Europa sites. We were hoping that at least 20 or so classes would take part. In the end, more than 80 classes signed up. And what is even more surprising: not just history or civics classes have subscribed, but also other classes such as languages or science. This recreational approach that relies on a sense of class spirit is therefore an indirect way of inciting teachers to use ICTs. The balance between traditional training and ICT training Many of the teachers we have met are accustomed to conventional teaching and are reluctant to review their methods. They appear to believe that the introduction of ICTs in the classroom includes a recreational dimension that would be detrimental to real learning. Surprisingly enough, some pupils seem to be of the same opinion. Following a lesson conducted using ENA, we arranged for a debate to take place among pupils and their teacher on the integration of ICTs in the classroom. Several pupils confirmed that the lesson was entertaining and interesting, but failed to deliver in terms of what had been learned. In the space of two hours, the breadth of the subject studied did not correspond to that which could have been covered during a lecture of the same length using conventional teaching tools. The issue therefore arises of competitiveness between the two approaches. Personally, I believe that, far from being in competition, these two approaches can quite easily be complementary, provided a suitable methodology is developed. Conclusion The integration of ICTs in the classroom may take place in several stages. However, in order to do this, we need to convince teachers that ICTs really can provide scope for a wide range of versatile teaching activities. We therefore intend to develop the integration into ENA of new features and new means of accessing content. We will also be making activities prepared by teachers available online and we are keen to take part in other projects along the same lines. Isabelle Voegeli Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe isabelle.voegeli@cvce.lu
  7. www.ena.lu is an internet site, aimed at secondary and higher education, covering the history of a united Europe. On it, teachers and students can find a vast array of material that differs widely in both geographical origin and ideological approach. Where did the idea for this site come from? In the early nineteen-nineties, Europe was frequently in the news and a popular subject for politicians – notably as a result of the debates regarding the Treaty on European Union. Such debates often took the form of diatribes between experts, and the average citizen felt excluded by the institutional line of argument pursued by those taking part. This realisation led to a desire to familiarise the citizen with the history of Community Europe. The idea was that, by confronting the citizen with the events of his past, he would be in a better position to understand the Europe of today. In so far as today’s students will be the voters and professionals of tomorrow and thus will be given an introduction to the European institutions, this seemed to be the ideal target. The progress made in data processing would make diffusion easier, as well as permit features to be specially adapted for use in the classroom. Towards the end of the nineteen-nineties, ENA first saw the light in Cd-Rom form before finding its definitive place on the internet. When we first suggested to teachers that ENA might be used in the classroom, the reaction was mixed: marked personal interest in the subject-matter, but great scepticism regarding its use in the classroom. The reason most frequently given was to do with equipment. For a large number of teachers the term ICT is still associated with the ‘computer room’ that needs to be reserved in the secretary’s office several weeks beforehand, and where most of the time at least one of the terminals does not work – thus requiring the services of the technician. Well, it is not necessary to have a computer room in order to use ENA. A computer connected to a printer enables users to exploit much of the documentary resources by printing them either onto paper, or onto transparencies for an overhead projector to be used later on in the classroom. The teacher can also connect his laptop to a projector in order to show documents to the students, or ask them to prepare, either at home or in the library, a report or a commentary on the document. Having considered the various options, most of the teachers that we met decided to go ahead and integrate ENA in their courses whilst adapting its use to their own teaching methods.
  8. The use of ENA in a classroom: a case study European NAvigator (www.ena.lu), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (www.cvce.lu). The objective of ENA is to offer high quality multimedia documents to the students and the teachers by means of ICT. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see concretely how such a database can be used in class. That is essential for us especially as the CVCE is a content producer and we want to adapt our database as closely as possible to the needs of the effective users. The question we were however confronted with is: do the users really know what they need? Indeed many teachers are not used to introduce ICT in their courses because of an insufficient equipment of their school or because of pedagogical uneasiness. My actual challenge is to encourage the use of ICT, and especially of ENA, help the users to get rid of their anxiousness and encourage them to get innovative in their way of teaching. By reporting some of my experiences, I would like to broach the question of the complementarity or concurrence between traditional education and ICT based teaching.
  9. The use of ENA in a classroom: a case study European NAvigator (ENA), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE). The objective of ENA is to offer high quality multimedia documents to the students and the teachers by means of ICT. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see concretely how such a database can be used in class. That is essential for us especially as the CVCE is a content producer and we want to adapt our database as closely as possible to the needs of the effective users. The question we were however confronted with is: do the users really know what they need? Indeed many teachers are not used to introduce ICT in their courses because of an insufficient equipment of their school or because of pedagogical uneasiness. My actual challenge is to encourage the use of ICT, and especially of ENA, help the users to get rid of their anxiousness and encourage them to get innovative in their way of teaching. By reporting some of my experiences, I would like to broach the question of the complementarity or concurrence between traditional education and ICT based teaching.
  10. European NAvigator (ENA), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE). Accessible on www.ena.lu., the database provides students, researchers and anyone who is interested with all that is necessary to form their own opinions about the process of European integration. ENA brings together more than 7000 rigorously selected documents. The material is structured chronologically and by subject, each section featuring original historical documents – photos, sound clips, film recordings, treaties, press articles, cartoons and so on – alongside documents created by the CVCE, such as interviews, and interactive maps and diagrams. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see how such a database can be used in class. Among our pilot sites at university level are the European University Institute in Florence and the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Luxemburg. Concerning the secondary schools we’ve worked mainly in Luxembourg until now where we have direct contacts with the schools and also work within the framework of teacher’s life-long learning.
  11. From 1994 to 1996, I worked as teacher and at the same time as independent journalist. I have joined to the European Navigator project since its foundation in 1996. In 2000, I have contributed to establish the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe and have joined the board of coordinators and since 2003, I’m mainly in charge of the relations with the teachers. European NAvigator (ENA), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE). Accessible on www.ena.lu., the database provides students, researchers and anyone who is interested with all that is necessary to form their own opinions about the process of European integration. ENA brings together more than 7000 rigorously selected documents. The material is structured chronologically and by subject, each section featuring original historical documents – photos, sound clips, film recordings, treaties, press articles, cartoons and so on – alongside documents created by the CVCE, such as interviews, and interactive maps and diagrams. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see how such a database can be used in class. Among our pilote sites at university level are the European University Institute in Florence and the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Luxemburg. Concerning the secondary schools we’ve worked mainly in Luxembourg until now where we have direct contacts with the schools and also work within the framework of teacher’s life-long learning.
  12. From 1994 to 1996, I worked as teacher and at the same time as independent journalist. I have joined to the European Navigator project since its foundation in 1996. In 2000, I have contributed to establish the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe and have joined the board of coordinators and since 2003, I’m mainly in charge of the relations with the teachers. European NAvigator (ENA), a multimedia database on the history and institutions of post-war Europe, is the flagship service of the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe (CVCE). Accessible on www.ena.lu., the database provides students, researchers and anyone who is interested with all that is necessary to form their own opinions about the process of European integration. ENA brings together more than 7000 rigorously selected documents. The material is structured chronologically and by subject, each section featuring original historical documents – photos, sound clips, film recordings, treaties, press articles, cartoons and so on – alongside documents created by the CVCE, such as interviews, and interactive maps and diagrams. For two years we have worked with some pilote sites to see how such a database can be used in class. Among our pilote sites at university level are the European University Institute in Florence and the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Luxemburg. Concerning the secondary schools we’ve worked mainly in Luxembourg until now where we have direct contacts with the schools and also work within the framework of teacher’s life-long learning.
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