The VISIONARY project (abstract)

Funded by: Socrates Minerva, European Commission

Eligibility period: November 2000 - March 2003

Partners (see also the section "our teams"):

Center for Educational Research, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Vordingborg Seminarium, Denmark
Centre for Ethnic Studies, University of Joensuu, Finland
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Learning Technology Research Institute, University of North London, UK

Abstract (excerpt from the project`s proposal):

"VISIONARY" aims at providing a transnational platform for teachers, parents, pupils as well as experts dealing with “violence in school” by means of a multi-level web site. In order to promote wide access as well as interactivity and communication between the users the project`s web site combines different forms of new information and communication technology.

The web site consists of a transnational web site as well as of interrelated national web sites of the participating countries Germany, Denmark, Finland, Portugal and England. Each web site provides a collection of links to web sites referring to violence in school, a discussion forum, a mailing list for teachers, pupils, parents and experts as well as an online-questionnaire.

The link collection is the core of the project`s web site and aims at compiling, structuring and commenting links to national and transnational web sites referring to “violence in school” (e.g. web sites with description of projects, advises for parents, teachers, victims etc., compilations of materials for school, addresses of experts and social welfare institutions etc. ). Thus it promotes access to educational resources as well as to examples of good practice in the field of violence in school.

The discussion forum and the mailing list promote interactivity and communication amongst the users of the web site. While the discussion forum allows direct communication among all users who visit the forum at a certain point of time, the mailing list reaches all users who are registered and hence promotes a wide dissemination of current information, questions and comments of other users etc.
The online-questionnaire which is part of each national web site aims at evaluating the structure and the content of the web site as well as the users behaviour and preferences while utilising different forms of new information and communication technologies.

Since a link collection is subject of permanent changes each web site which ever has been itemised on the project`s web site will be archieved. This will result in the establishment of a unique transnational collection of examples of good practice published on CD-ROM which does not depend on the current presence of the respective web site in the internet and allows offline access.
It is one major task of the project to elaborate and evaluate a general structure for a web site combining different forms of ICT. This structure does not depend on the main subject of the project´s web site “violence in school”. It rather is conceptualised to be of generic nature and transferable to other domains."