WWII Project, Austria

[Graham Davies]

Dear Colleagues

I am forwarding the email below which I received from the Linguanet Forum.

The business high school "HAK Grazbachgasse" in Graz is looking for a British partner school for an international project initiated by the municipal authorities of Graz in order to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the World War II and the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Austrian State Treaty.

As a sign of friendship between Austria and the four signatary states of the Treaty - France, Russia, United States and Great Britain - four schools in Graz are supposed to work on a variety of topics with four partner schools in those countries. The topics can be set by the schools themselves and range from history, presentation of their cities, current affairs, job prospects to youth culture. The primary goal is simply to keep in touch with the students and teachers and exchange ideas, opinions, knowledge and experience in order to get to know each other better and to record the contributions.

The communication between the partner schools will be taking place on the WIKI internet platform, a server that allows users to freely create and edit Web pages and communicate with each other. (You have probably already heard of WIKI's brainchild - WikiPedia - an open source Internet encyclopedia.) Texts, photos, audio and video files can be uploaded and put at other users'disposal.

The official start of the project is on 26 October 2005, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Austrian State Treaty. The project will be presented in Graz in the official celebration of this important historical event and four participants from each of the countries taking part in the project will be welcomed as the guests of the city of Graz. They will be offered a week stay in Graz to get to know the city and to give them the oppportunity to meet all the students and teachers working on the project.

If that general information on the project has attracted your interest in it, please contact me for further details.

Dan Funk, BHAK Grazbachgasse 71, 8010 Graz, Austria

dan.funk@chello.at