Mobiblog- The European Weblog platform for Mobile Students

LLP programme 2007-2013 - Erasmus Virtual Campus

According to the main aim of the Bologna-Process mobile studies within the European Union shall be enabled free of organisational and administrative obstacles until 2010. By 2012 a number of at least 3 million individual participants in student mobility shall be reached.

The ECTS-System, the European assimilation process of studies (Bachelor, Master system), mobility portals to find places of studies or practicals and several other supporting projects are important steps to bring the idea of a mobile European student on the road. The readiness of students to use the opportunity of Europe-wide studies clearly depends on these organisational and certification issues. But, the number of mobile students in reality will also depend on decisions of single students to study abroad, which are strongly influenced by personal, motivational and self-related considerations.

This psychological factor of decision-making is related to the individual belief to feel prepared for studies abroad, in means of personal cultural knowledge of a respective country or city to live in, as well as psychological aspects of mobility like dealing with social environment (friends, family) at home, communication or language issues. Social support by positive models thereby can be a strong helping factor to overcome motivational barriers of mobility.

The main preparatory work for bringing together the idea of learning, storytelling and the technique of weblogs has been done by the TALE project, funded by the SOCRATES programme. TALE built up a web-platform using the weblog technique for storytelling about learning experiences. Within a broad approach the demands on a webspace for publishing stories about learning and the related organisational, motivational and legal aspects have been examined and tested. Especially the difficult question of how to deal with reports in different languages has been solved on content-based and technical level. Mobiblog can use the results of TALE as a basis.

The proposed project is based on psychological theories of motivation and learning by models. Differing from other theories of learning, the approach of learning with models explains how complex and difficult tasks, for example driving a car, can be learned. For learning with a model it is important that the learner feels the model as realistic and as similar to him/herself. During the learning process of the model some problems should occur before the aim is achieved.

For more info: Esta dirección de correo electrónico está protegida contra los robots de spam, necesita tener Javascript activado para poder verla

Objetivos:

(1) To provide a multi-institutional, web-based, bottom-up but well-structured and multi-lingual service on European level for peer-to-peer exchange of experiences of individual mobile students containing all not-organisational aspects of mobile studies like motivation, social issues, communication and cultural issues.

(2) To develop a structured and comprehensive online guide for the target topic.

(3) To encourage a network of universities in Europe to adopt the service developed into their portfolio of services for mobile students, to replace existing conventional services and to integrate Mobiblog to existing virtual campuses.

(4) To test the innovative e-learning concept of an approach to combine (and link) the relatively unstructured concept of blogging with the structuring offer of an online guide for learning purposes.

Actividades:

The main activities to reach these objectives will be:

(a) to develop a detailed methodology for setting up the planned web-service

(b) to develop the environment for the Mobiblog web service on a technical level

(c) to identify a group of students for piloting and process a piloting phase

(d) to build up a network of participating universities

(e) to review reports of experiences and develop a content-based categorization system

(f) to produce an structured online guide for mobile students.

The two main target groups addressed by the project are: 1. Students already taking part in the ERASMUS programme plus participants in vocational internships, and, students all over Europe, planning to take or already taking part in studies or internships in more than one country (mobile studies) and 2. Actors in higher education (universities, providers of exchange programmes, international studies and all organisations for higher education in Europe).

Resultados:

The proposed project plans to solve the needs and constraints by producing following three main outcomes:

(1) a self-sustaining weblog area for European mobile students with an increasing number of reports about experiences of studying abroad and positive examples of overcoming motivational, social and cultural barriers of mobility

(2) an online guide for mobile students which summarizes in a deductive way the collected real life experiences by describing a system of barriers of mobility and possible solutions, with the single sections of the report being linked to real life examples from the weblog area and vice versa, and

(3) a community/network of universities in Europe using the product developed within their mobile studies information services.  

Promotores:
Universidad de Granada. CEVUG.