Production of Educational formats Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence - European Research Teams
European Community, Sixth Framework Programme,
Information Society Technologies,
IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage,
Project No 507838, 2004-2007

Identity:

• Title: Production of Educational formats.
• Funding: Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence - European Community, Sixth Framework Programme, Information Society Technologies, IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage, Project No 507838, 2004-2007 - European Research Teams
• Project Leader: Antonio Rizzo
• Steering Committee: Liam Bannon, Mario Barajas, Chronis Kynigos, Rossella Magli, Rosamund Sutherland.
• Consortium: University of Limerick (IE), University of Barcelona (ES), National Kapodistrian University of Athens/ETL (GR), CampoRosso (BE), Università degli Studi di Siena (IT), The University of Bristol (UK).

Aim:
The Production of Educational Formats team aimed at:

• investigating the concept of educational formats;
• building a digital library of educational formats;
• analyzing the way formats affect how educational activities and settings are designed; and
• promoting the development of new formats and the related enabling technologies.

The overall purpose of the Team was to build a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary network of researchers and Ph.D.

Educational Formats: The network investigated the concept of format as opposed to the more consolidated notion of lesson plan, which dates back to the first half of the 20th century and is still largely applied in educational contexts. It mostly implies the notion of knowledge as an explicit content that needs to be chunked and organized in a linear process.

• A format is instead conceived as an open structure. It works as a guideline to support the design of educational activities encompassing elements that go beyond this traditional view of knowledge, by including also those constituents that implicitly affect the way knowledge is appropriated and substantiated. 
• A format, for example, includes the description of the organizational and cultural context, as well as of the pedagogical stance. It also includes the definition of the spatial settings and the time duration in which the activities take place. In education, time and space settings are taken for granted and remain implicit in the design of the learning activity, as the result of a long sedimentation process of administrative decisions and of physical limitations imposed by the existing infrastructures devoted to institutionalised learning. However, these dimensions deeply affect the way knowledge is built, and consequently the very concept of knowledge itself. A format, works also as a heuristic instrument to prompt the design of specific tools to be used in the design of an educational activity.

Research Activity: The way in which the elements of educational formats (technology, spaces, etc.) mediate the teaching/learning activity and how those can be composed to enhance the learning experience is the research theme we are investigating. The research team was exploring the way in which educational activities with respect to the educational formats are at work in six European Countries, in different educational settings (school, university, leisure centre, etc.) and for different contents (math, history, law, medicine, sports, etc.).

Outputs:

The final output of the Team is a digital library of educational formats, in which we analyze their implicit and explicit rationale, the way they affect how educational activities and settings are designed, in order to promote new educational formats and the related enabling technologies. The multi-disciplinary and the multicultural approach of the ERT have produced so far documentation that is accessible on the Project website.